Doog,

Cultivated the land ? Where ? What sort of plants ? And did what with the crops ? Harvested them with what ? Stored them where ? Built fences around them, to protect them from kangaroos and emus, and neighbouring groups ? Patrolled those fences ? Organised teams of harvesters, usually women ? Do you have a shred of evidence for any of that ?

Cared for the environment - how ? By dancing, and singing secret songs ? Fair enough, but have you tried that lately ? While women were out there with their digging sticks, ripping up entire bushes for grubs ? Fair enough, people have to do that to survive, but don't call it 'environmental care'.

One of my Conservation management students reported about a field trip down the Coorong - one of the Aboriginal rangers finished his cigarette packet and threw it on the ground, but luckily a student picked it up. Etc. etc. Tell me about environmental care.

Joe

Making Room for Circles.

Australian's need to start reading Aboriginal books written by Aboriginal authors. It is not the responsiblity of Aboriginal People to fill-in the large-gaps of knowledge we have carried in our nations historical narratives.

There are things about our history that we need to urgently discuss. Historical documents which reflect the original instructions given to Cook that have NOT been properly disclosed. ie: He was instructed 'not to interfer with local inhabitants'. (See Denise Walkers and Michael Andersons research material at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy.)

Then we ought to address the fact that there IS a 'bullet hole' found in the Gweagal Shield. It is evidence of hostility rather then our nations version of peaceful settlement.

Frankly creating Treaty is a process. We as a whole nation have homework to do IF we want to catch-up with our First Nations people on Why or What ought to be inside a Treaty.

https://www.telethonkids.org.au/our-research/early-environment/developmental-origins-of-child-health/aboriginal-maternal-health-and-child-development/working-together-second-edition/

Rather then Consitutional Reform, I wonder WHY we need to rush the authenticc process of Treaty since our nations Constitution will need to be re-written surely once we become a Republic. The fact that we need a process helps to develop steps that address the necessary conditions from a level-headed constitution based on a number of agreements.

For me I want a Treaty first. I want a process that gives space to the steps required to learn the full truth. We as Australians ALL need to de-colonise.

https://www.miacat.com

Hi Joe,

Something you might comment on is; I have found with my own indigenous connection, the cuzzy bro's, some over compensation in some people when it comes to identifying with who they are. They seem to be overly concerned that the culture is being negated by some, particularly young people, as they embrace the modern world. For my better half she sees it as of the utmost importance that language, protocols and practices be maintained within the younger generation.
To give you an example, a couple of the younger ones have started, and I can't spell it, a 'whanka whanau nga tanga' (family gathering group) for get together's once a month, at the beach, at someones home etc, a social gathering more or less. She moans they are more for the social aspect than following the protocols associated with such gatherings. I said "No it's the way they want things to be and you should accept that they are trying to do a cultural thing but in their way, which includes Facebook and Iphone's" I believe culture is forever changing.

To give you an example of protocol, If you stand up and say something, at the end of your speech you are expected to sing a traditional song. Aunty said several spoke and didn't do the song. "I said so what, be thankful some cam speak the language even if the can't sing!.

When explorer and surveyor Major Thomas Mitchell ventured into Australia’s inland in the early 1800s, he recorded in his journals his impressions of the landscape. Around him he noted expanses of bright yellow herbs, nine miles of grain-like grass, cut and stooped, and earthen clods that had been turned up, resembling ‘ground broken by the hoe’.
Mitchell, like other early explorers, noted what many white Australians would later overlook: there was evidence everywhere on this vast continent that Aboriginal Australians managed the land.
As I read these early journals, I came across repeated references to people building dams and wells, planting, irrigating and harvesting seed, preserving the surplus and storing it in houses, sheds or secure vessels ... and manipulating the landscape.
BRUCE PASCOE, WRITER
Historians, writers and academics are now rethinking Australia's perception of Indigenous land management. They argue that the first Australians had complex systems of agriculture that went far beyond the hunter-gatherer tag. They were, in fact, our first farmers, whose intimate knowledge of managing native plants and animals sustained them for thousands of years.
Indigenous writer Bruce Pascoe has recently published a book called Dark Emu: Black seeds, agriculture or accident? that challenges the popular perception of our Indigenous past.
He argues that the economy and culture of Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander people has been 'grossly undervalued' for the past 200 hundred years. The early writings of white explorers and settlers are central to his argument; they described the cultivated way Indigenous people managed the land.

Hi Paul,

Whakawhanaungatanga: http://maoridictionary.co.nz/word/12711

(noun) process of establishing relationships, relating well to others.
"Kei te whakapapa ngā tātai, ngā kōrero rānei mō te ao katoa, nā reira ko ngā whakapapa he whakawhanaungatanga ki te ao, ki te iwi, ki te taiao anō hoki" (Te Ara 2011). / Whakapapa is the recitation of genealogies or stories about the world, so whakapapa are ways by which people come into relationship with the world, with people, and with life.

Where would we be without Google ?

I think this is a brilliant idea and Maori people are extraordinarily lucky that they have more or less the one language, and close genealogical ties. I wish it could work here, especially in the 'south'. Perhaps the difference with NZ is due paradoxically to the length of time Aboriginal groups have been evolving in Australia, while Maori have been in NZ for less than a thousand years (AND, perhaps because they were/are cultivators, not solely foragers). So language here is a divisive factor, not a unifying one.

So a process like this might work for specific groups, e.g. the Ngarrindjeri, Adnyamathana, Barkindji, Bunganditj, etc., but something else, some other unifying process, would have to be used to pull people together from different groups.

Yes, I agree that culture is always changing: I've never understood the boast that "Aboriginal culture is the oldest in the world" - what did people mean, that distinct from other contemporaneous societies sixty or a hundred thousand years ago, the ancestors of today's Aboriginal people were the only society with culture ? That's such bullsh!t, not to mention that it's quite racist. What do they think, that the ancestors of everybody else were sitting around with the gorillas ?

OK, they may mean "the most unchanging culture in the world". But what on earth is so laudable about that ? If anything, it is the catchcry of extreme conservatism, hidebound, reactionary conservatism. And of course, it wouldn't even be true: Aboriginal culture has changed - it had to change during the last Ice Age, from thirty down to ten thousand years

[TBC]

[continued]

ago, if only because the entire landscape changed, from very lush to very rugged and half-way back again.

Anyway, the bottom line is that, from the earliest days, 'Southern' people became bilingual - original languages for discussing aspects of traditional/foraging life, English for discussing aspects of 'modern' life. 'Modern' life discussion gradually displaced 'traditional life' discussions. The Protector here reported in 1845 (seven years after 'settlement') that people from different groups, exploiting the massively increased means of mobility, spoke in English to each other. That's how it was: English became the common language, while for Maori, te reo remained the common language.

Sociolinguistics is fascinating !

One factor in Aboriginal society that has hindered the transmission of protocol, etc. is the degree of secrecy, of the power over cultural knowledge wielded by the old men: when they either passed on, or if younger people discounted the value of their secrets in a modern society, then that knowledge vanished. Gone. Kaput. Forever (god, I hate that word).

Even initiation ceremonies were drastically abridged, perhaps removing their perceived function, and reducing them to something like a 21st party: my wife's gr-grandfather participated in the last known initiation ceremony in about 1882, an overnight affair of burning off all body hair. Previously, this had to be done three times, at six-month intervals, not by burning it off but by pulling it out.

And in that group, the last speaker of the full language, born at about that time, died in the early sixties. Full language gone. It's now reduced to a dictionary on a bookshelf, and the odd couple of hundred 'kitchen' words.

So the dilemma is: culture and language may not be the unifying factors that they may be for Maori, not in Australia's 'South'. So of curse, the Narrative has to invent events and processes as a means of unifying Indigenous people now. This seems to be certainly working, but of course is only as valid as the Narrative itself :)

Cheers,

Joe