Banjo

I can never understand the definition of 'Indigenous' if it excludes Africans who, surely, are Indigenous to Africa ? In fact, of course, we all are. So there are closer to two billion Indigenous people. The unconscious distinction between African and other Indigenous people is that a high proportion of Africans were and are cultivators, and have been for many thousands of years. Perhaps your definition is more or less confined to hunter/gatherers ?

As for cultural retention or revival, as far as I am concerned, everybody, including Indigenous people, should be able to access the cultural practices that they perceive as most relevant and valued. If people wish to spend their lives hunting and gathering, there should be no restraints. If not, then also, there should be no restraints on their choices.

But as W.E.H. Stanner noted, at the end of a very long anthropological career, he did not know of a single person who had 'come in' and then, after experiencing the rations and housing, etc., had decided to 'go out' again. So much for the retention and revival of traditional culture.

Of course, if anybody wants to learn about traditional Indigenous cultural practices, there should be nothing to stop them. Except perhaps the major barrier, that by definition, much of traditional culture is kept secret, given that the magic perceived to bolster it is kept secret on pain of death.

If you mean material culture, the political economy of hunting and gathering, then that has been abandoned long ago, as well as the knowledge, language and skills that went with it. As Albert Namatjira said, when asked back in the thirties what he liked to do when he wasn't painting, he liked going out hunting - on the back of a truck with a .303.

Culture changes -

[TBC]

[continued]

- some practices and knowledge become irrelevant and eventually forgotten (along with the accompanying language). And quite quickly - even within a couple of generations. Down this way, the last person to speak the full Ngarrindjeri language (and I have doubts about that, since he wasn't Ngarrindjeri) was born around 1881, within two generations of colonisation and died in 1963.

There's a bit of double-talk about cultural retention: I recall one Aboriginal student, very staunch on traditional culture, who complained about her air-conditioning not working properly. A major complaint in remote communities is over housing, but nobody wants to go back to wurlies. I'm not sure how selective people want to be about what they retain, or revive, and what they leave to history. But the trend certainly doesn't seem to be a return to traditional life by anybody.

BTT: as for the incarceration of Indigenous people, I suggest those people involved simply ('simply' ? ) don't commit the crimes. But you put your finger on a syndrome of lifelong welfare, lifelong unemployment, lack of education, total boredom, etc., meshing with access to grog and drugs, AND with the traditional notion of complete male dominance and a ready resort to violence - traditional practices than men in remote communities and elsewhere find hard to give up.

No, I don't have much sympathy for those who commit such crimes. But I have desperate sympathy for their poor kids, who, in turn, will grow up to be drop-kicks. That's the cycle I'd love to see extinguished, somehow.

Joe

Banjo,

As I've tried to point out many times, the colonial authorities here were instructed from London to recognise - and protect - the rights of Indigenous people to carry on their relationships to the land, to hunt, gather, camp on, etc., and this was specifically written into pastoral lease documents - at least down here in South Australia. Those rights still apply.

The problem was, of course, that, since the hunting/gathering lifestyle is utterly predicated on survival, getting food, and ritual and ceremony revolving round that imperative, the lot starts to collapse once food supplies are assured - as they were with the ration systems.

Supposedly, able-bodied people were not to be given rations, they were expected to go out and exercise their rights to hunt and fish and gather. But of course, what was much more likely was that some went out like that, but others stayed behind and botted off the old people and women. Plus ca change .....

In SA, Aboriginal people were provided with 15-ft boats in addition to fishing gear, lines, hooks and netting twine. Boat repairs for those who were not fully able-bodied were done free. Similarly, with guns, which Aboriginal people took to very early, at least down this way.

But of course, the impact of all that was to render traditional economy - and much of its culture - irrelevant. If we adhere to the notion of consequentialism, we could say that authorities provided rations, etc., with the clear-eyed intention of destroying Aboriginal culture - knowing that rations. etc., would do that. But surely that would be attributing far too much foresight to them ? Policy-makers rarely ever get it that right.

Joe

Loudmouth,

as usual, top shelf stuff you further educate and illuminate on the truths of the matter, objectively and with knowledge and conviction.
I hope my submissions are somewhere close to being relevant, as I am only speaking from what I see, what I hear, and where I've been.
If I am ever factually incorrect, I would appreciate a word of advice in correcting me.
From what I have read, I trust your judgement and truths/facts, so I prefer to be corrected or led by yourself on these matters, than any other.
Always look forward to your submissions.
Keep it up, and thank you.

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Dear ALTRAV,

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The High Court judges carried out a very thorough analysis of the legal aspects of British colonisation of Australia in the Mabo case decision. They found that the British Crown and government had acted on the legal fiction (so far as the colonisation of Australia is concerned) of "the enlarged notion of terra nullius" :

« 36. When British colonists went out to other inhabited parts of the world, including New South Wales, and settled there under the protection of the forces of the Crown, so that the Crown acquired sovereignty recognized by the European family of nations under the enlarged notion of terra nullius, it was necessary for the common law to prescribe a doctrine relating to the law to be applied in such colonies, for sovereignty imports supreme internal legal authority. The view was taken that, when sovereignty of a territory could be acquired under the enlarged notion of terra nullius, for the purposes of the municipal law that territory (though inhabited) could be treated as a "desert uninhabited" country. The hypothesis being that there was no local law already in existence in the territory, the law of England became the law of the territory (and not merely the personal law of the colonists). Colonies of this kind were called "settled colonies". Ex hypothesi, the indigenous inhabitants of a settled colony had no recognized sovereign, else the territory could have been acquired only by conquest or cession. The indigenous people of a settled colony were thus taken to be without laws, without a sovereign and primitive in their social organization. Lord Kingsdown used the term "barbarous" to describe the native state of a settled colony »

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(Continued ...)

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(Continued ...)

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And to conclude :

« 63 …The common law of this country would perpetuate injustice if it were to continue to embrace the enlarged notion of terra nullius and to persist in characterizing the indigenous inhabitants of the Australian colonies as people too low in the scale of social organization to be acknowledged as possessing rights and interests in land. Moreover, to reject the theory that the Crown acquired absolute beneficial ownership of land is to bring the law into conformity with Australian history. The dispossession of the indigenous inhabitants of Australia was not worked by a transfer of beneficial ownership when sovereignty was acquired by the Crown, but by the recurrent exercise of a paramount power to exclude the indigenous inhabitants from their traditional lands as colonial settlement expanded and land was granted to the colonists. Dispossession is attributable not to a failure of native title to survive the acquisition of sovereignty, but to its subsequent extinction by a paramount power »

Here is the link :

http://www8.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/cases/cth/HCA/1992/23.html

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