I have now read 'Dark Emu' and consequently wonder what the 30 Judges were thinking, or taking/smoking.

60,000 years (or whatever) of virtual stagnation.

Issy, the 30 judges were not judging the factual content of the book, but rather its literary merit. You speak of "virtual stagnation", based on your belief in a superior Western culture, then stagnation it is. I get the same thing from well meaning (European) people when I speak about my Fijian friends, "those poor Fijians" they will say, as if they are people to be pitied for not having what we have. The fact is in many ways they have a lot more than us, true not the material things in life, but the spiritual things, love, happiness etc, maybe Aboriginal people had the same things, and they could afford to stagnate for 60,000, we will find out for ourselves if we can afford to stagnate in about 59,900 years.

Paul (& Is Mise),

I'm puzzled by your use of the term 'stagnation' to describe the foraging lifestyle which ALL of our ancestors had to employ until barely ten or twelve thousand years ago, given the type of economy and society then and their limiting technologies. Certainly, there may not have been much change possible for Aboriginal people for most of the last eighty thousand years since leaving Africa and moving imperceptibly along the south Asian coast and down through Malaya and PNG to Australia, thus being almost the last people to colonise lands - and thereby one of the newest foraging cultural systems of all humanity.

But to claim that their cultural practices were 'stagnant' misses the point that nature and the only available technologies constrained their opportunities here as it did elsewhere.

The shift in a handful of places around the world to farming was, in hindsight, a huge leap - a multitude of leaps - in technology, social structure, trade, the development of villages and towns and eventually cities, and - as Marx's colleague Engels wrote, the development of private property and the state.

But for tens of thousands of years - perhaps put in retreat by the crippling Ice Age - humanity was trapped in the daily uncertainties of the foraging life. Yes, rivers and seas were teeming with fish, many of our plains were teeming with animal and bird life, but foraging technology (as everywhere else, except where people developed the bow-and-arrow, and the blow-pipe) markedly restricted how and how much wildlife could be caught - and in any case, people here didn't develop much in the way of preserving food, thereby having a means to maintain and even increase populations, especially in hard seasons and droughts.

Certainly culture usually conserves established ways, another factor ruling out almost any dramatic leap to agriculture anywhere. But if that constituted 'stagnation' rather than innovation in highly constricting circumstances, then the difficult question arises: are people eventually better off moving on from foraging to agriculture and/or more developed economic and social systems ?

Cheers,

Joe

Hi Joe,

It was Issy who used the term "stagnation" in the first inst, believing Aboriginal man of 60,000BC and that of recent times had made little material progress in comparison to his European counterpart (I assume). Not that we are greatly familiar with any man from the distant past, until recently we thought of Neanderthal Man as some kind of dim witted ape in comparison to Homo Sapiens , when it now appears that was not the case.
What was farming like 12,000 years ago, and earlier? I would think rather rudimentary, but never the less there was some form of agriculture, at least at a very basic level taking place. I don't believe there was a rapid quantum leap from the gatherer to the grower of seed, and the hunter to the husbandry of animals. The change from a dominant hunter/gather existence to a dominant farming existence was gradual. Its hard to quantify as to what level of agricultural development Aboriginal people were when the European arrived, if the scale is zero to 100 then they were not a zero, nor were they 100 (no one is a 100, not even modern European man, Issy still hunts).

What Pascoe wanted is a closer look at the fundamental development of Aboriginal people. The first Europeans took very much a; "nothing to see here attitude", and that continues in some peoples minds still today.

Hi Paul,

Actually, I do "believe there was a rapid quantum leap [in historical terms] from the gatherer to the grower of seed ...." in those few parts of the world where Agriculture was originated (most likely by the women).

But still, it would have been in many small steps from gathering (women) to penning animals for food (and having to feed them)(women's work) to penning them for their wool or hair (women), (and having to feed them on a permanent basis), to choosing the best heads of grain (women), to realising that big heads produced big heads (women) and so - in opposition to the hunter/gatherer practice of eating precisely the best heads, a radical shift to saving and planting the best heads.

In other words, a shift from a focus on consumption to one on planning and saving the best - both seeds and young animals. It seems that in Australia, the foraging practice was precisely the opposite - to gather and eat the biggest and ripest fruit and grains; and to catch and eat the youngest and tastiest and leave the older fish and animals alone.

In Australia, the obvious question arises: if grass-seed is growing everywhere, why plant it ? And who in their right mind would even consider doing so ? Pascoe, perhaps.

Could I suggest that, crudely, pre-Contact Australia had three sorts of environments:

* . very harsh or drought-prone, where growing anything would have been out of the question; hence the vital need for 'increase-ceremonies' there;

* . riverine, where food is so plentiful that the only major limit was the type of technology to hunt and gather it, so no need to grow anything;

* . and the intermediate zones, such as west of the GDR, the SW of WA, the SE of SA, etc., where grass-seed grew in marvellous abundance, as Mitchell observed. And if it's growing in abundance, miles and miles of it, why cultivate it ? Why would people even think of doing so ? Except Pascoe, of course, with his metre-long stone digging-tools.

I rest my case.

Joe

Hi Joe,

So be it, you don't have a case against Pascoe's book, as you said yourself you haven't read it. Most critics usually view the film before giving it the razz. I think the Pascoe detractors are more concerned about the modern day issue of Aboriginal sovereignty, than they are about grass seed growing in a row 5,000 years ago.