Don't undersell Aboriginal invention/discovery.

Some of our early settlers owe their survival to their indigenous neighbors, with bush tucker when they starved and bush medicine when they were sick!

And if you ever tried to start a fire, just by rubbing two boy scouts, opps sticks together?

Just surviving at all in a harsh and forbidding wilderness, with nothing more than a few stone implements and the occasional wikiup, commands considerable respect!

Bet your bottom dollar few if any of our current posters nor pompous postulating politicians one and all, could last much more than a week? If left to their own devices/ingenuity, alone in the Australian bush?

Be it our southern alpine regions or the burning desert sands of the centre!

Got any real ticker Gary?

Talk's cheap!

Want to show us how it's done mate, for forty days and nights? As you raise a few, doubled by the day, dedicated dollars for say, more dialysis for remote settlements?

Starting with a day's pay from contributing concerned caring politicians!? Ha, ha, ha, ha!

A man of your quite massive intelligence and undoubted survival ability, would walk it and come back for seconds? Ha, ha, ha! Oh my aching ribs!

Imagine, one of our most talented and internationally famous, blind Aboriginal Singer, died alone on a beach, because of treatable kidney failure!

It really says a lot about well heeled Aussies and really well heeled pompous pontificating pollies? Doesn't it!?
Alan B.

Alan/Mikk,

We all were hunter/gatherers until barely ten thousand years ago, nothing unique about that. But Aboriginal people were in the tragic situation whereby they were isolated, more or less, from interaction with other societies over the last ten thousand years of innovation, of the development of agriculture and everything that followed from that.

Gary touched on something which tends to be neglected in analysis of hunter-gatherer societies in general, that their guiding principles are not Enlightenment-scientific but ritualistic, based on a perception that the magic of the old men brings about nature's bounty: so, thanks to that magic, they perceived that they harvested the products of the earth, but didn't contribute to their development. So, although of course people put effort into finding food every day, especially the women, they did not necessarily PERCEIVE that labour had anything to do with it.

Even Marx would have understood that glaring absence: Gary's emphasis on bourgeois innovation fits in largely with Marx's emphasis on the utilisation by capitalism of human labour, and the creation of value by the combination of capital and labour: each needing the other.

But to Aboriginal society, that equation would have been meaningless: they didn't 'see' their labour, and many haven't even up until today, believing that land alone produces value. Well, of course, it may well do if a group happens to be sitting on mineral deposits and intends to live off its royalties, putting only token effort into keeping the money flowing.

Hence, the communities that I have been associated with, tens of thousands of potentially good land, and during the Mission/government days providing work for all who wanted it, now lie more or less unused. 'Self-determination', it seems, means very different things to people without the remotest work ethic.

Of course, this raises all sorts of issues about the distinction between land use and land ownership that have yet to be played out.

Joe

Oops ! That should have read, " .... tens of thousands of acres of potentially good land .... "

In SA at least, since Aboriginal land can't be sold, and therefore doesn't have a rateable value, and since it is effectively 'owned' by the communities, Indigenous projects don't face the same financial pressures as their neighbours might. As well, in the communities I've lived in, they enjoyed unlimited water licence. As well, with CDEP, labour was effectively subsidised. As well, in those communities, major equipment was provided by government agencies.

But, in the name of self-determination, the community councils ran those projects into the ground. I wish it wasn't so, but it was. Frankly stupid decisions were made, usually in the direction of winding down economic activity rather than initiating anything new.

I suspect now that many of those weren't 'stupid', but calculated to move towards a workless life for one and all. As well, I also suspect that many Aboriginal people believe that the mere 'owning' of land means that the government gives you money, as a sort of reward. Do they see themselves as a sort of feudal class, or caste, the lords of the land, with work the sorry lot of those 'others' ?

That ain't me, babe !

No, you have all got it wrong !
It is all about energy. It is all about the struggle for greater
amounts of cheaper energy.
The agricultural revolution freed up time for further expansion made
possible by more man power from more food.
Mankind, don't get upset ladies, struggled through eons by use
of slaves (cheap energy) and waterwheels (tapping sun energy) to
increase the energy available.
Slavery was an energy phase we had to pass through to get to the end result.
Slow but steady progress was made over the last two millennia until
the the advent of the British Industrial revolution which as you
all know morphed into the coal/oil/gas worldwide amplification of everything.
Economics had nothing to do with it, economics and finance just went along for the ride.