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The Forum > Article Comments > When jail looks like a lifestyle option > Comments

When jail looks like a lifestyle option : Comments

By Jennifer Clarke, published 19/7/2006

The 'abolition' of 'customary law' will do little to reduce violent Aboriginal crime.

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Realist and Scotty,

Your opinions on this contribution were different from mine. All you need do is state your opinions. You don't have to agree or disagree with mine.

Like you, I am not a contributor; I am a poster with an opinion. My opinions are not put up for discussion. The contributors provide the material for that.

If I can manage to lay off other posters, no matter how silly I think their opinions are, so can you.

You two at least were not rude, and expressed your own opinions, unlike many others. I have to say that I am so sick of silly sniping from people who seem to prefer criticising others to using their brains to express an opinion.
Posted by Leigh, Thursday, 20 July 2006 12:18:37 PM
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EnerGee.

Describing a thousand or so generations of accrued wisdom into a couple of lines of ‘non-existence’, as FACT, reveals the obstruction to your understanding.

Do you not dream? I know I do; although I admit that I pay far less attention to their instruction than I should.

I once rode an XR600 from Lajamanu in the NT’s Tanami Desert to the Daintree rainforest in TNQ. I slept soundly on the Queensland side of Wollogorang, just across the border, and dreamt, without specific recollection, but for the prominence of dingoes. Such was their insistence that I willed myself from my dream and opened my eyes to find two dingoes standing over my supine form. My undignified explosion into full consciousness sent the dingoes running, but I have never forgotten the significance of that subconscious forewarning.

Traditional education occurs in the dreaming. Disrupting an aboriginal education to purportedly educate them by a non-Aboriginal person in a language not of the vernacular about matters of little relevance to their homeland existence, is racially offensive.

I suspect that with your ‘Scots Gaelic’ reference that you have missed my point, but let me emphasise that my advocacy neither regards indigenous wisdom as archaic nor incapable of helping non-Aboriginal Australians in the 21st Century and beyond.
Posted by Neil Hewett, Thursday, 20 July 2006 2:03:54 PM
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Jennifer Clarke, you write, "If girls are unwilling to marry this way any more, it is difficult for their communities to make them."

I would say that if girls are unwilling to marry this way any more, then their communities should not try to make them!

A few hundred years ago you were the property of your father to be married off at his will and then you would become the property of your husband - I bet it would be pretty difficult for your community to make this happen now - and I suggest that is a good thing
Posted by Pedant, Thursday, 20 July 2006 4:01:49 PM
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Neil Hewett

I do not have an “obstruction to my understanding”. However just because some Aboriginal people are the descendants of people who were living in Australia 40,000 years ago does not necessarily mean that they are the heirs of “a thousand or so generations of accrued wisdom”. The traditional Aboriginal interpretation of the Australian landscape is unscientific tosh – one could better argue that what we have here is “a thousand or so generations of accrued baloney”.

I will repeat it again. There are no spirits inhabiting this country who somehow willed the landforms into existence. The Tjukurpa stories of the Anangu, for instance, are not historical descriptors but MYTH which has no more validity than tales by ancient Greeks about their gods inhabiting Mount Olympus. Or do you believe in Zeus as well?

As for your statement that: “Disrupting an aboriginal education to purportedly educate them by a non-Aboriginal person in a language not of the vernacular about matters of little relevance to their homeland existence, is racially offensive.” I can only conclude from this that you are quite happy to condemn Aboriginal children to levels of education that are so low that they can never participate in a modern economy. Now I would call that racially offensive buddy.
Posted by EnerGee, Friday, 21 July 2006 9:46:14 AM
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EnerGee,

A thousand or so generations of accrued wisdom forms the foundation of traditional education, via dreaming.

Would you define the accrued knowledge of western culture as unscientific tosh? How about if you were lost in Aussie wilderness and an indigenous person kept you alive with spinafex, beetle larvae and insect viscera; would you condemn them for their cognitive incompetence?

For all your fervour, I would have thought that it was obvious that I do not condemn Aboriginal children, at all.

As for modern economies, this is the key issue and I applaud you for identifying it.

How do we reconcile capitalism with aboriginality?

If we could somehow stimulate the economic importance of aboriginal relations with natural and cultural landscapes, then traditional education might be revitalised.

Don’t give up the search.
Posted by Neil Hewett, Friday, 21 July 2006 6:18:44 PM
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Neil,

Saved by beetle larvae, viscera ? Honestly mate there would be a handful of blackfellas in a few scattered communities around Australia who might have that kind of nohow even then quite doubtful.

Most of that kind of nohow is kept by the non indigeneous because they just coundnt give an iota. And even if they did it is near impossible to teach them what should come naturally.

Fairdinkum you city blokes (or probably a pom) ride a trail bike thru the outback on some romantic holiday with your belstaf flapping majestically in the desert wind and throw a few lollies to some kids in the communities like your some kind of Lawrence of Arabia and hey presto your a bloody expert on aboriginals.

Get real your a concieted jumped up tourist.
Thier culture was only ever as good as thier next feed, they breed only because of our tax dollars.
Try reading the accounts of Dr Logan Jack, Ludwig Von Leichardt and any other explorer in this country. They had more in common with dingoes than humans. Any notion of the noble savage doesnt wash here buddy. Still if the largest aboriginal community in Australia at Port Keats or Wadeye as it is called now is a shining example of what they have become then well...........
Posted by SCOTTY, Friday, 21 July 2006 8:29:45 PM
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