Yuyutsu,

"They made a choice to become westerners because that's the easy choice .... "

Bloody oath they did, that is their right. Yes, indeed: choice. Like you've done. You make your choices, other people make their. No doubt they could all slag yours, no trouble, as you do theirs so airily.

Of course, like Italian-Australians or Tongan-Australians or any other hyphenated-Australians, they will inevitably retain what they like of other cultural or relational knowledge AND remain Australians.

I was talking to an Australian woman friend yesterday who was quite proud of her Scottish heritage. That what we are: a hell of a mixture AND Australians. All here together, forever. We can all walk and chew at the same time.

Joe

Yuyutsu, I hate to burst your bubble but I spent years living in a remote community with tribal people, in a place where no technology existed apart from one short band radio for the Flying Doctor Service. Mail came on a truck once a week if the road was open. No radio, tv or newspapers.
The local people still spoke langauge, still practised their ceremonies and did a little bit of hunting for fun, not survival, because they bought their food at the store.
So, did these people, undistracted by technology or the need to work to survive, spend time in contemplation of the wonders of the universe ?
Unfortunately no, they actually spent every available moment playing cards! Games would run round the clock, whilst kids looked after themselves and the babies. Even when there was no money left, people would play for matchsticks, or pebbles or bush berries.
The only breaks in this routine was pay day, and the game started later those days, and if there was a major fight going on, in which case people either went to observe or participate, depending on their relationship to the people involved in the fight.
And of course, law season saw an end of everything for three weeks a year. No cards,
no fights, no grog.
I loved law season, best three weeks of the year

I have to point out that I most certainly think that invasion/settlement was devastating for Indigenous societies. But the inconvenient implication of the inevitability of that invasion or settlement is that devastation was going to occur. Indigenous society, economy and cosmology were (and are) so fundamentally different from those of the invaders/settlers that, if that initial event was inevitable, so was the devastation that it was going to inflict on Indigenous societies.

I suspect that people like Philip and Macquarie (yes, yes, Appin) tried in their rudimentary ways to alleviate that inevitable clash of paradigms. But, going by the later history of South Australia, even an effective ration system on its own - and the recognition that Indigenous people had the rights to use the land as they always had done - would have split Indigenous societies. It would have immediately liberated women in particular from the all-day drudgery of food-collecting, replacing the hard-won grass seeds with a daily issue of already-ground flour: almost instant damper.

That liberation probably had massive effects on the role of men as well. Setting up the first school anywhere in South Australia specifically for Kaurna kids, in their own language, with meals and, if they wished, accommodation, would have also loosened the glue which bound their society together. Not to mention the sudden - relatively massive and all-encompassing - influences of the 'new world' ways, particularly grog.

But so many Indigenous people

[TBC]

[continued]

seemed, even in the earlier days, to come through all that. At least in SA, they tended to be people who were less tightly bound to traditional society, foundlings raised by the outsiders, or who worked around a homestead or farm or station from an early age - in other words, who grew up as familiar with that outside world as they were with traditional society, if not more so, people who could walk in both types of society. My wife's gr-grandfather worked as a kid for a local farmer (and adopted his surname) and later took out a lease of land, around 1870, barely thirty years after the invasion/settlement of SA, and always worked at what we would call standard jobs until he died. Come to think of it, so did at least three of her other gr-grandfathers.

What is significant is that those four men would now have hundreds of descendants who are university graduates: people who have inherited a work ethic in a strikingly direct line, hard workers all the way down to the present.

So the next inconvenient question is: are many Indigenous people (including the 55,000 university graduates around the country) whose ancestors and parents have come through the past 230 years of history living g comfortable, hard-working lives - and will most likely raise their own kids to do at least as well ? Are there rays of sunshine coming through the gloom of invasion ?

You know, when you marry into the Indigenous scene, you're in it for life. Hence the unnatural obsession :)

Joe

Did anyone watch the program - "Who Do You Think You Are?"
at 7.30pm on SBS last night (29/05/2018)?

Actor and entertainer Ernie Dingo, who's estranged from
his father, wanted to investigate his paternal ancestors.

It was quite a revelation. Especially the differences
between documented histories and word-of-mouth. And the
reasons behind them.

Dearest Foxy,

Yes, how could anybody NOT like Ernie Dingo ? One thing I learn from WDYTYA is how truth is certainly stranger than fiction, more convoluted, with more surprises. Fascinating ! Oral histories sometimes inherit and transmit fairly accurately, but so often they are very wide of the mark. How they change over time reflects the attitudes and beliefs of their time, of course.

I wonder what Foxy's WDYTYA could tell us :)

Love,

Joe