Hi Joe,

The Maori certainly were farmers, I was surprised when my wife took me to the location where her family homestead once stood. The main vegetable garden, the bottom garden, covered an area of I would say 7 to 10 acres, all cultivated/harvested/stored by hand. Then there was the house garden probably another acre or two, near the house for everyday use.
I cannot believe how much work as a child my wife had to do, helping not only her mother, but her grandmother as well, grandmother also taught her many things, from flax weaving to bush medicine and more. She tells me her life as a child was extremely happy, but hard.

Hi Banjo,

Yes, a necessarily brief definition of something may indeed gloss over, or leave out, some essential factors.

Generally, at least in Australia and perhaps in France too, there is a distinction made between agricultural and pastoral activities. The people who engage in productive activities on agricultural land are generally called farmers, cultivating and weeding and planting the best seed, andc when the crop ripens, reaping it, with specific reaping tools, from sickles and scythes to modern machinery.

Pastoralists don't usually think of themselves as farmers, but as pastoralists: they raise animals for market - and are expressly prohibited, under the terms of their leases, from cultivating the soil, except for a hectare block around the home.

So your chosen definition may need some elaboration. But it does raise the question for proponents of the notion of Aboriginal farming in Australia: if people didn't cultivate the soil, as you seem to concede, were they instead pastoralists ? Did they herd animals for the purpose of culling the herd for food whenever they needed ? Did they provide watering-points, or attempt to keep herds together somehow ? Or did they just let the animals go free ?

I've never tried to herd kangaroos or emus or cassowaries, or even bettongs, but I imagine that one needs some way to keep the herd together. When kangaroos or emus (I don't know about cassowaries) are startled, they go off in every direction. So herding such animals may have been problematic.

Ah, I get it: they were free-ranging pastoralists ! They carefully monitored animal movements and, like herders in Siberia, followed the herds around, taking what they needed and 'managing' the rest, perhaps without the animals themselves realising it.

I see ! So 'farming' can now include following animals around and 'managing' them ? Wow, it sounds so different from 'mere' hunting and gathering, doesn't it ?

Thanks, Banjo.

Cheers,

Joe

Hi Paul,

I forget what the traditional one-sided spade is called in Maori - 'ho', says Prof. Google. I'm sure your wife and her family used much more modern tools, perhaps a walk-behind cultivator. And the size of their farm was 7-10 acres ? And it was hard work, sun-up to sun-down ? I wonder how many Maori families it would take to work a nine-mile-long paddock ? Say, one mile wide: around 5,500 acres ? Probably, with modern equipment, between 500 and 700 families ? Perhaps twice as many with traditional tools ?

And of course, you would know what the farm produced - a wide range of products, about which there are probably traditional stories. I wonder what Aboriginal farmers planted and reaped here ? Who organised the thousand families on Mitchell's nine-mile paddock to dig, weed and reap the crop, and transport it (say 500-2000 tonnes ?) to the well-built storage sheds in the first cities in the world ?

Three lefty academics in Britain have been exposed as publishing spoof stories about dog-rape-culture, using fat to build up bodies, etc., to expose the idiocies of Grievance Studies there. I wonder if Bruce Pascoe is actually in on all that and has produced spoofs of his own ?

Worth a thought ?

Brilliant !

Cheers,

Joe

Foxy, Paul,

Prior to British settlement there were several thousand tribes / groups with a wide variety of customs and languages, most of whom relied largely on hunting, fishing and food gathering from the local bush and there was no agriculture except in the most minimal sense.
There was no written language or culture as culture is by definition not possible without a written language. Neither is it possible to verify that customs perpetuated more than few generations, so any claim of a 60 000 yr old continuous culture is pure conjecture based on wishful thinking rather than evidence.

Compared to the American Indian tribes/nations, the African Nations, even the Maori, the Australian indigenous were primitive. While Terra Nullis did not apply, neither did the term invasion.

SM,

You are entitled to your opinion, as are we all.
However, with all due respect - I will suggest
that you do more research and not swallow
the arguments put forward by Institutions
like - the Institute of Public Affairs, and people
like Andrew Bolt, Rowan Dean, Keith Windschuttle.

Their arguments all share common threads - But as
Banjo Paterson has been valiantly trying to point out
ever so patiently in this discussion (obviously falling
on deaf ears) there's more to be said and argued.

I have no further wish to continue this discussion with
you. There's no point.

Foxy,

As a deaf ear, I suppose I have to ask you:

* . were/are Aboriginal people no-drill farmers ? But farmers ?

* . were/are Aboriginal people free-range pastoralists ? But pastoralists ?

i.e. farmers AND pastoralists, without the slightest sign of either, in the conventional sense ?

* . what if Bruce Pascoe is having us on, and is really a (perhaps lefty) academic attempting to throw such phony research - and Identity Studies etc. especially - into disrepute ?

I disagree with you but, unlike you, I don't consider that thereby you are some sort of enemy, someone deliberately pig-ignorant. I've knocked around Indigenous affairs (for want of a better word) for sixty-odd years, my wife was Indigenous, and my kids are Indigenous, we've lived in communities, my wife and i both worked in Indigenous education (student support) for a combined forty years, and built up quite a library of works (two book-cases) on Indigenous subjects. Name it, we've probably got it, if it's worth getting.

So when you come along with your schoolgirl admonitions, to read this and that, it does seem somewhat presumptuous of you (are there two of you, (1) a mature, sensible woman and (2) a school student ?). However, I forgive you, in the hope and spirit that even you may one day learn something (especially (2)). All the best in your long journey.

Joe