Banjo Paterson,

Oops, you did mention that Aboriginal people were thirty two times more likely to be hospitalised - but that figure relates only to women experiencing domestic violence, often of the most repeated, sustained and horrific nature. Getting smashed in the face with a rock a few times tends to put the notion of hospitalisation in women's minds.

So why do you think that happens, Banjo ? Because the men can. That's why. Nothing unique about that as a cultural practice. And why do you keep repeating the garbage that, somehow, Aboriginal culture is the oldest in the world ? What do you think other societies were dong for 65,000 years 'without culture' ? Of course, they had culture, but it was evolving slowly rather than ossifying. Cut off from the rest of the world, Aboriginal culture had to ossify, no animals to domesticate (somebody suggested that emus could be herded like Inuit and Sami herd caribou and reindeer) or high-nutrition plants which could be cultivated. So I don't see the slightest positive about an unchanging, primitive and reactionary culture, but you'll have to excuse the old Marxist in me :)

Yes, you're probably right (but less and less with each generation) that some of the older people know about hunting and gathering. But they don't do it. Nobody does, except with Toyotas and rifles - except perhaps some of the older women might go out occasionally to relieve the boredom and violence (it takes some genius to combine those two) of 'communities'.

After settlement, restrictions on access to traditional foods ?! In SA, the Protector gave out copious fishing lines and netting twine, so if anything, sitting on a river bank wrapped in a blanket, just chucking in a line rather than wading through the shallows with a spear, people would had had MORE access to traditional foods. And fifteen-foot boats too, perhaps more than a hundred of them, provided and repaired free. Get real, Banjo.

Joe

"That is why I consider that Aboriginal culture is magnificent."

I'd agree but for the tense, BP.

Cowlishaw proposes the existence of an "economy" non-immersed in respect for private ownership, it appears. This doesn't sound magnificent but more like hunting and gathering other peoples possessions for survival, presumably to supplement welfare payments.

Hi Luciferase,

Yeah, I remember forty-odd years ago on the 'community', blokes who had gone down to Adelaide might pinch a car in order to get back, often a really flash one, a Merc or a BMW, rip it around all the back roads, do a few wheelies on the high bank of the Murray, get out and push it over. Watching the frogmen hooking it up and getting it dragged out again was a bit of a spectator-sport. Ah, great times !

Many observers have commented on a sort of adapted, 'oppositionalist' Aboriginal culture, from Marie Reay's (ed.) "Aborigines Now" of 1964. The Berndts of course remarked on something similar in their 1950 book. In the US, the late John Ogbu focussed much of his attention on that oppositional culture even in his last books, a wonderful man. Eugene Genovese, Herbert Aptheker, Harold Cruse and Oscar Lewis studied these issues from slightly different angles, all being Marxists.

It's doubly ironic that Paul Willis' book was titled "Learning to Labour": he meant it to be, given hat working-class kids rebelled against any decent education an ended up doing much as their fathers had (that book was put together back in the seventies); and that Aboriginal kids out in Cowlishaw's study area, around Wilcannia and Menindee, usually were never going to "labour" at all. Last time I went through Wilcannia, it still had heavy grills over the shop-front windows. I wonder if it even has a shop at all these days, or just the servo across the road.

That might be the fate of many country towns - and of many young Aboriginal people, waiting like the last dung beetles at the arse-end of the last Diprotodon for one more freebie.

Of course, the problem with that oppositionalism is that people cut themselves out of opportunity, and condemn themselves to irrelevance, often in the name of 'resistance'. Then discover, far too late, what a dumb-arse course of action that was.

Joe

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Dear Loudmouth, Dear Luciferase,

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Thank you, once again, Loudmouth, for sharing your knowledge and personal experience of both traditional and contemporary Aboriginal lifestyles with me.

I understand your frustration at some of my comments which obviously do not correspond to your own vision and interpretation of the underlying causes (and responsibilities) of the deplorable lifestyle you describe of that 25% of our Aboriginal population who live in remote areas of the country and have not assimilated Western culture.

What is also very clear to me is your opinion that the only solution to the problem is to educate that 25% of the population in our modern Western culture and “civilise” them so that they adopt our lifestyle. Successive Australian governments, including the present one obviously shares that view and continues to pursue that objective.

Whereas my impression is that much of that 25% of the population aspires to a solution that not only educates them, but also allows them to continue to cultivate their Aboriginality with a maximum of security and independence. So far as I can judge, I don’t think that necessarily excludes, in their minds, the possibility of close cooperation with our modern Western society.

Suffice it to recall that a good number of them volunteered to fight alongside us during the Second World War and also during the Boer War.

I think we need to approach the problem with a much broader outlook than we have up until now and try to find a solution that takes into account the profound aspirations of many of our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who continue to suffer from the shock waves of British colonisation and our exploitation of their life source, their land.

I am sorry if you find that suggestion offensive, but, rightly or wrongly, it is my carefully considered opinion – and I stand by it.

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Hi Banjo paterson,

Yes, and in the First World War, Korea and Vietnam too - but I'll bet that the vast majority of those volunteers came from the 'south', from communities of people who had assimilated themselves, if you want to use that word, to a thoroughly Western way of life, even a hundred years ago and more.

25 % ? More like 10 %, in remote settlements, living lives which are very different from that of their hunting and gathering ancestors. How many people might go out, on foot, hunting and gathering these days ? Apart from some of the older women, probably none. Thankfully, they now have Toyotas and rifles, and homes to come back to after a hard day's 'foraging'.

Aboriginal-controlled land now covers a quarter of Australia, about two Frances. People have chosen how to live there and, as a friend described it, they are 'living the dream' from a foragers' point of view: money which drops out of the sky into their ATM accounts, fast food, accommodation, seemingly endless Toyotas, government people to look after their kids. What's not to like, especially from the blokes' point of view ? Remote populations here (i.e. the men) must love 'colonisation'.

On the other hand, for women and kids, it may be a different story: as a friend put it, if he was ever reincarnated, the last thing he would want to come back as would as a desert girl.

Joe

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Dear Loudmouth,

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Thanks for those details.

I see that in the prime minister’s 2018 report on the seven objectives the State and federal governments have been pursuing for the past ten years in order to “Close the Gap” between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians, he admitted that very little progress had been made towards attaining their objectives. Only two of the seven objectives had seen any progress at all :

• Early childhood education

• Year 12 or equivalent attainment

No progress whatsoever has been made on any of the other five objectives :

• Child mortality

• School attendance

• Reading and numeracy

• Employment

• Life expectancy (proxy: mortality)

It is evident that despite the $33.4 billion a year the federal government spends, directly or indirectly, on Aboriginal affairs, these results are extremely poor and totally unacceptable, to say the least.

Not only has no “progress” been made on 70% of the governments’ objectives for the past ten years, but, in many other important areas, the situation has markedly degenerated : overflowing jails, high suicide rates, more and more kids taken away from their parents and placed under State care and protection, nutritional health problems becoming pandemic, …

In addition, Loudmouth, as you have amply related, yourself, right throughout these discussions, the recurrent manifestations of anti-social behaviour, nonchalant attitudes, blatant disrespect of people and property, and despicable profiteering of numerous individuals, in both urban and non-urban environments, have reached endemic proportions.

We are now even observing, as the anthropologist, Gillian Cowlishaw, noted, the emergence of an Aboriginal sub-culture, a "culture of the oppressed", in opposition to the whites’ culture, in a number of urban districts.

We have obviously got something wrong, somewhere along the line. Unilateral – ideologically motivated – political solutions, of our successive leftist and rightist State and Federal governments, have proven grossly inefficient.

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(Continued …)

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