@Joe,

I do not think in 2019 and a modern democracy we can talk about Aboriginal women being trapped and prevented from returning to what you call is their country.

Many women, and men for that matter, cannot return to where they grow up even if they wish to do so because they cannot afford it. There is nothing otherwise to prevent anyone, with or without Aboriginal ancestry going to live wherever they choose.

I also do not believe Aboriginal ancestry gives one a concept of 'country' anymore than does any other ancestry found in any other Australian.

Hi Rhross,

Big Nana would know far more than I do about the restrictive lives that many women may still live, that it's still the custom - maybe not in the Kimberley but further south in more patriarchal groups - for women to leave their birth-country, the areas they've grown up in, to live in their husband's country, where customarily they may have relatively low status, and even rights. Or access to vehicles. Even now.

Which is why they may have to carry out their obligations to refreshing their home-country at a distance, as individual women, with very little likelihood that anybody is going to take the time to drive them back 'home'. They may never see their home-country again. Hence 'secret women's business', individual women with obligations to perform individual ceremonies.

Joe

@Joe,

What you describe for some women with Aboriginal ancestry is no different a reality than it was for women in general in Australia in generations past. Aboriginal cultures are simply still mired in old-fashioned or backward attitudes and traditions.

However, having said that, such primitive attitudes are not particular to Aboriginal cultures for one will find them in many migrant groups who are sourced in backward, patriarchal and old-fashioned cultures.

My grandmothers and even my mother to a large degree, and certainly my great-grandmothers would immediately relate to such a situation. We humans evolve slowly but we do evolve and some cultures are slower than others.

Paul,

Just to get back to your original post:

1. That there is only one, and there ever was, only one Aboriginal culture. Not true.

Spot-on. Do you mean, by 'culture', social groups, i.e. clans, dialect groups, language groups, or some other form of collectivity ?

As I understand it, land-holding, stories, etc., tended to be at the clan level, within a dialect-group, which in turn are nested within language-groups (with a lot of flexibility around all these terms). There were maybe 500 language-groups, so perhaps some thousands of dialect-groups; therefore, some many thousands of clans. Clans on land near the boundaries of their dialect-group, or language-group, seemed to have a certain degree of bi-allegiance to their respective dialect or language, even a sort of double-membership in both groups.

Amongst the Ngarrindjeri on the Lower Lakes of the Murray, there were maybe forty clans within my wife's dialect group, and maybe ten dialect groups, not of equal size, so there could have been around eighty or ninety clans within that language-group or 'tribe'. Many 'tribes' or language-groups may have had far fewer clans in total. But still, there could have been many thousands of clans, families, as the land-holding groups.

And the cultural practices and store of knowledge would have been unique to each clan - of course, with a lot of overlap with clans by marriage. So 'culture' would have been enormously varied, as you suggest. Even language and dialect and word-usage would have varied between clans.

Joe

@Joe,

When you say culture would be varied - in what ways? It seems to me perhaps to be akin to stone-age peoples elsewhere, and dialect differences between villages. Although I am not sure culture would have been so radically different.

I would think that where there was no common language and no common language source, indicated the groups had descended from totally different peoples and migrations, that there could be distinct cultural differences. Otherwise, I would not have thought much given the universal nature of human beings.

Hi Rhross,

No, not necessarily. I suppose I'm talking about 'culture' at the micro-level: clans and families in specific locations, what stories and rituals they may have had, their particular dialect and choice of words. I think some of these changes at this level could occur very quickly, in historical terms.

There's certainly no need to suppose any 'waves of invaders'. Among many groups, if someone died, any words in their dialect/language that sounded like that person's name or reminded people of her/him, they had to be changed. Within a generation, this would have meant that very many words would have been changed, BUT only in that clan and maybe others associated with the dead person. Within fifty years, so much of a language might have changed that it could become unintelligible, or certainly unfamiliar, to more distant clans.

There may have been mechanisms whereby, after a certain time, such as a couple of generations, 'older' words could be re-used. Otherwise dialects - and mutual incomprehensibility - would have multiplied exponentially.

Even so, it was remarkable how totally different languages might be in neighbouring but un-related group: there seems not to be a single word in the mid-Murray language (Ngangaruku) which is similar to any Ngarrindjeri word from the Lower Lakes.

Similarity of vocabulary would have been a good marker of how closely groups were related: so what might appear to be different 'tribes' could well be different clans within the same language-group - for example, it appears that words amongst the Kaurna, Narangga and Ngadjuri groups around and north of Adelaide, were similar, so perhaps they were a single group, or 'tribe'.

Joe