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Them and us and NAIDOC : Comments
By Ian Nance, published 19/7/2018However, holding NAIDOC Week perhaps could serve to remind many folk that they share the land with its original residents who founded it some forty to sixty thousand years ago.
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Posted by Alan B., Thursday, 19 July 2018 11:01:49 AM
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Hi Alan,
Do you have the slightest evidence of a wave of invaders 14,000 years ago ? Dogs/dingoes were introduced around four thousand years ago, probably by visiting sailors, fishermen and traders from what is now Indonesia. People probably had fire when they arrived here sixty thousand years ago. They certainly would have needed it during the Ice Age of 12,000-25,000 years ago, when the existing population might have been cut down by as much as 90 %, and the landscape across Australia would have dried out significantly. Not to mention ice sheets over Tasmania and parts of Victoria and the Alps. Oral history goes back a long way, sometimes decades. Forgetting and memory 'recovery' are significant features in Aboriginal culture. As for the founding of Australia, perhaps 'finding' is a more appropriate word. Certainly sixty thousand years would give the finders some legitimacy, at least in terms of customary land use, which was recognised implicitly by Philip, and explicitly in law by about 1850: all pastoral leases issued after then had to have a clause recognising those rights, which were thought to co-exist with pastoral use. eases still have that clause in SA. Whether land use translates into land ownership is a bit moot, now that Mabo and the Native Title Act have legitimised it. As for one group wiping out another, i.e. invaders concertedly exterminating Tasmanians, once the Tasmanian genome can be established from remains (mostly in museums), I suspect that it will be very similar to mainlanders'. Yes, the wiping out of one group by another was pretty common across Australia - one group here in SA was wiped out in about 1872, near Mt Eba south of Coober Pedy, for 'marrying wrong' - just as it was in all traditional groups across the world. Nothing unique there. Joe Posted by Loudmouth, Thursday, 19 July 2018 11:36:32 AM
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Great that life expectancy and quality of life has improved since settlement. Certainly worth celebrating. The 50 or 60000 years is a lie constantly repeated. Does not make it true. Aboriginal women have been big winners however domestic violence is at horrific levels especially where little western values have been embraced.
Posted by runner, Thursday, 19 July 2018 11:54:16 AM
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Contest your assumptions, Joe, given that period I referred to also neatly dovetails with the mini ice age that would have allowed such a wave.
But no, no written documentation or evidence per se, as all my Tasmanian forebears had no written language. All I know was learned as oral history at my grandmother's knee when I stayed with her for around a year aged around 12. My oral history and the paleontological record, against your oral history. Anyhow, no matter whose oral history is believed as the unvarnished unembellished truth, It's largely irrelevant history that can never be changed once accurately recorded. Even so, artifacts only tell there were stone age people there. Not which ethnic grouping or their customs. Or the manner or timing of their arrival! Alan B. Posted by Alan B., Thursday, 19 July 2018 1:24:40 PM
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I suggest the author has a look at the definition of civilisation. It is quite clear that it refers to complex societies with centralised government, high culture, written language, specialisation of labour, taxation, domestication of animals and plants, monumental building and various other trappings. The Aboriginal people had none of these. This does not make them any better or worse than any other group of people in the world, but to refer to them as the "longest existing civilisation in history" makes as much sense as referring to the British of recent centuries as hunters and gatherers.
Posted by Rhys Jones, Thursday, 19 July 2018 1:27:44 PM
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"We live alongside the world's oldest continuous culture, yet too many of us expect our indigenes to assimilate into our particular way of life, without realising that they have a connection to their own unique style.
"Over the last four hundred years, Europeans made the transition from an agrarian to industrial/technological way of life, but our original people retain over forty thousand years of intensive cultural knowledge about their land - its ability to provide food, medicine, shelter, and deep spiritual connection. Their history has not been modified by modernity; "After colonisation, some of us made close contact with our first people to make use of their highly-developed skills such as foraging, hunting, and tracking, but many have regarded these folk as an unequal component of the society which we know and in which we function." Quite a few dubious claims and inferences in that lot. The Aboriginal skill sets the author lists are, at best, very marginal in 2018. "Foraging, hunting and tracking..." are not skills that will be highly regarded in most job seekers, especially in the big cities where most jobs are. The "forty thousand years of intensive cultural knowledge about their land", ditto. Like it or not, that knowledge is not the equivalent of knowledge flowing from intensive education and peer reviewed, legally controlled science. That's why people now turn up at a hospital or doctor's clinic rather than gather plants in the bush. In the circumstances, assimilation can happen in only one direction. And before we all become misty-eyed about the romance of living off the land, here's another perspective on that: https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/bennelong-papers/2013/05/the-long-bloody-history-of-aboriginal-violence Of course, the British were relatively benign in their colonial endeavours. Alexander the Great, by contrast, thought nothing of killing every man in a captured outpost and selling the women and children into slavery. Posted by calwest, Thursday, 19 July 2018 1:32:26 PM
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Hi Alan,
No, with the greatest respect to your grandmother, I don't put much store by oral accounts, including my own, without some back-up evidence, what President Obama calls 'objective truth'. I would respectfully suggest that oral history loses about 50-100 % of its validity with each passing decade. I'm not sure how you're connecting it to some past event in which one group exterminated another, more or less at the tail-end of the last Ice Age when there wouldn't have been anybody in frozen-over Tasmania, and nobody wanting to go there either, except penguins. DNA or genome testing would clear that furphy up. Rhys, All human societies are equally old, since we parted from our primate cousins, but some have changed while others have stagnated. If we are supposed to value stagnation, then one could say something about Aboriginal society being relatively unchanging (except perhaps during the last Ice Age when changes in the landscape would have forced drastic changes in hunting and gathering techniques). This half-witted notion of a uniquely-unchanging or continuous culture really does need to be debunked: all societies have equally old cultures, and if 'continuous' means evolving from one form to another, even violently, then they have all been continuous as well. And that includes, alongside a multitude of other societies, Australian Aboriginal societies. Nothing unique about that. Joe Posted by Loudmouth, Thursday, 19 July 2018 1:46:53 PM
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Since when has Quadrant become the Bible of anyone apart from Right wing thugs,is this bloke Tony Thomas applying for Windschuttles position as racist in chief
Along with glowing tributes from Abbott,David Flint being another, think it & its opinion can be safely ignored Posted by John Ryan, Thursday, 19 July 2018 1:50:25 PM
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It only takes two short sentences for the “shame” to come out. Naidoc means nothing to any but a very few avid virtue signallers. And there is no reason why a tiny group of the population should be “a normal aspect of our daily pattern”, particularly as “first-dwellers” died out a couple of centuries ago and their descendants are not much different from the descendants of first-fleeters who died around the same time. In fact, the majority of people of aboriginal descent are not any different from anybody else at all. I’m sick of cranky white people and their shame, blubbering about differences between people born in Australia.
And we do not “... live alongside the world's oldest continuous culture”. Even remote-living aborigines wouldn’t last ten minutes if they lived according to Stone Age culture. Anyone is entitled to appreciate any “innate cultural aspects” of their culture and ancestors, but they are not entitled to government (taxpayer) help to dwell on it. With all the blah about multiculturalism in this country, how bloody dare anyone single out one group! It’s all about what the whims of the chatterati and where their brainstorms take them at any given moment. “Yet we expect them to adopt our culture and become a black white-fella..”? What absolute nonsense. Most Australians of aboriginal background accept “our” culture because they are Australian, most of them being part European, even part Asian. With the rubbish talked by people like Ian Nance, you would think we were talking about Martians, not Australians. Three pages of absolute tosh. Posted by ttbn, Thursday, 19 July 2018 1:57:18 PM
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John Ryan,
Tony Thomas is a respected journalist and commentator. Has been for years. In the linked article, he quotes Watkin Tench (and others qualified to comment). Tench, unlike you, was an eye witness. But hell, your posturing is as good as Tench's facts, right? Compared with the gentlemen cited by Thomas, you are...well, just a posturer and a troll, apparently. Why is it "racist" to point out the history of Aboriginal violence and sexual aggression, still with us in many cases? Even your ABC puts it on the record: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-22/indigenous-groups-urge-government-to-address-tennant-creek-abuse/9473002 Is it also racist to point out that Aboriginal "civilisation" did not have a written form of language, historical records, pottery, iron tools and weapons, wheels, walls, constructions higher than one storey? For a long time now we have seen Aboriginal graduates in many professions, thanks to their hard work and the opportunities afforded them by a good education. That is assimilation. Posted by calwest, Thursday, 19 July 2018 2:54:27 PM
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Hi John,
Tony was, like me, a communist as a child, but we've both given it up long ago. I was at a World Peace Conference/Festival just south-west of Bankstown (Milperra?) with him, as it turned out much later, in about 1951 or 1952. Or maybe 1953. Windschuttle was also close to that crack-pot section of the Left as a uni student but saw the light. There's a lot of us around :) Do you have anything material to contribute, or will name-calling suffice ? Cheers, Joe Posted by Loudmouth, Thursday, 19 July 2018 3:36:40 PM
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To my mind it is a very long bow to draw describing a bunch of people wandering around the bush naked, throwing rocks & sticks at things, to try to catch something to eat a civilisation.
Any group that has not advanced in tens of thousands of years is a bit hard to call a civilisation either. Giving grand titles to a primitive mob is surely only for political gain, & not worthy of consideration. Posted by Hasbeen, Thursday, 19 July 2018 4:07:56 PM
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ttbn. Hear what you are saying mate and mostly agree. And can only add, there's not a black way or a white way. Just a right way!
Those that followed the very first of the first, are the very first to deny the oral history of those who may well have proceeded them, given it essentially destroys many of their ambit land claims etc? Otherwise, truth be told, to the victor goes the spoils, and if good enough then? Why not the late 1700's early 1800's? And or, if one isn't a native born by the third generation when? I think the sooner we decide the past is a country nobody can return to, and just set about understanding, it is what it is and just making the best of the new reality, the better. After all, there is just one constant in the universe and that constant is constant change. Nobody really owns the land we were born on. Only someday the land will claim each and everyone, regardless of the place of birth, race, colour, culture or creed! And own us. Alan B. Posted by Alan B., Thursday, 19 July 2018 5:27:41 PM
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ttbn,
"Most Australians of aboriginal background accept 'our' culture because they are Australian, most of them being part European, even part Asian. With the rubbish talked by people like Ian Nance, you would think we were talking about Martians, not Australians." Spot on! Alan B., Great comment. Now at 230 years and counting, we're still being conned into obsessing about "colonisation" as the catch all excuse for bad and criminal behaviour. Really, why would the white feminists want to explain away the violence of some indigenous men? Oh yeah, and by their silence, Islamism, too: wife beating, genital mutilation, subjugation of women, terrorism, racism. Yet the white feminists are nowhere in sight and nowhere to be heard. Gentlemen, your comments also remind me strongly of the point the federal Member for Hughes, Craig Kelly, MP, was trying to make about the murder of the passengers aboard MH17 over the Ukraine. It's over, move on; we're not looking to go to war with Russia. And yes, that won't help the families and friends of those killed: they'll still suffer enormously, and the rest of us can only sympathise and empathise. But dwelling on the past won't change anything for fear of something worse. As you said, Alan, the past is a country nobody can return to. You and Craig Kelly have stated an obvious truth. Posted by calwest, Friday, 20 July 2018 2:35:06 PM
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The aboriginals have no right to claim “first nation” status.
Alan Thorne, who excavated Mungo man said the skeleton was undoubtedly Chinese, as it issimilar to skeletons which he had excavated in China. No genetic link to Mungo man could be established, so he is not an ancestor of present -day aboriginals. The claim is baseless. “, Mungo Man's gene is extinct. According to the out-of-Africa model he should have had a gene like everybody else. But there he was, a physically modern man living in Australia 60,000 years ago with a defunct gene that probably appeared well before the most recent common ancestor of all of us.” http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2001/01/01/2813404.htm Posted by Leo Lane, Sunday, 22 July 2018 1:41:57 AM
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The most fundamental criteria of civilisation are the written word. Thus civilisation only started with the first fleet.
The "first peoples can claim the oldest "culture" but without any written history the claim that it in any way resembles that of 1000yrs ago let alone 60000yrs is pure fantasy. Posted by Shadow Minister, Sunday, 22 July 2018 7:13:19 PM
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Hi SM,
I can never understand this idiotic and smug assertion that Indigenous culture is the oldest in the world. All cultures are equally old: other people weren't sitting around for tens of thousands of years with their thumbs up their arses. Some 'cultures' evolve, develop, innovate, improve if you like; some stay more or less stagnant; but they are all equally old if only because they all come from the same cultural origins in Africa. And given the drastic changes across Australia during the Ice Age - twenty-odd thousand years of very different 'culture' before and after - anybody with the slightest grasp of the impacts of that period of dryness (drier than currently) and bitter cold over most of the continent, it's inevitable that that Ice Age would have forced major changes in people's responses. And intermittent droughts since then - one lasting 32 years, about eight hundred years ago - would have also forced drastic changes in human responses, not least drastic reductions in populations, not just through deaths by starvation and thirst but simply because births don't occur, babies can't be sustained, during droughts. Of course, Indigenous societies have undergone a multitude of changes over sixty thousand years. Probably no group is in exactly the same place as it was a thousand years ago, let alone sixty thousand years. Som clans grow and split, other clans fade away and are absorbed by related groups. Like anywhere else, the constant factor in Indigenous history over sixty thousand years has been change. Cheers, Joe Posted by Loudmouth, Sunday, 22 July 2018 7:51:29 PM
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Joe, what you say is quite reasonable. However, what Ian Nance says is:
“its original residents who founded it some forty to sixty thousand years ago.”, and “Theirs is the longest-existing civilisation in history. Yet many modern Australian residents have no concept of the incredible cultural depth of our first nationals.” This is baseless The aboriginals have no civilisation, apart from the one set up by the British, which they appear to have joined, they have no nation, or political structure of any kind. Those who claim leadership have no basis for the claim, and talk of a treaty is nonsense. The aborigines founded nothing. The first nation, if represented by Mungo man, was chinese, and they do not exist, having left no descendants. They were probably eaten, if the aborigines had the same predilection for chinese flesh as they showed during our gold rushes. Posted by Leo Lane, Tuesday, 24 July 2018 1:39:31 AM
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Without question, there were folk here as long ago as 60,000 years. Oral history confirms the first of these were the indigenous Tasmanian. And followed by successive waves of new settlers. the last of which would seem to have been 12-14,000 years ago?
Who brought with them hunting dogs, fire sticks and hitherto unknown brute force savagery.
Before then oral history and the paleontological record, witness to the fact that Australia was once covered from coast to coast with verdant forest.
Fire sticks and imported prehistoric hunting practise where fire flushed out or cooked game. Change the delicately balanced landscape forever.
With the last arrivals taking what and who they pleased, as they drove the earlier arrivals before them ever further south.
Simply put, very few first Australian can lay bona fide legitimate claim to a contestable 60,000-year-old, heritage.
But perhaps the 14,000 of years or so that their mob have indisputably been here as wave after wave of hostile migration laid claim to land already in other hands!
Celebrate that if you must
. Alan B.