Issy, I'm glad you're back from the Bunyip hunt. Have you still got that cook book you were plugging a few years back 'Road Kill Recipes for the Failed Hunter' was that it? How is good buddy and number one NSW gunnie and part time used car salesman and leading wombat killer Tony Assi?

Just on cruelty to animals, how many greyhounds competed in races last night that had been baited with a live rabbit or possum during the week? Seems to have become an accepted part of Australian culture.

Hi Joe, Indy falls into the same category as many of the hard right forum faction do, claiming intimate knowledge of all things Aboriginal, especially isolated communities, which incidentally represent only a small fraction of Aboriginal people. Then only use of that so called "intimate knowledge" is to denigrate a people.

Indy made a claim that he "actually saw a real Aboriginal man a few days ago". When challenged to a please explain, he snuck out the back door in typical Indy fashion. You're claim "I think Individual is having a lend of you, he's got long experience of 'real Aboriginal people'." Indy has no such experience, as Aboriginal people are as diverse as the rest of society.

I challenge anyone to put up an explanation of a 'real Aboriginal person' as defined by culture, not the tourist image, but the real person of today. While you're at it how about an explanation of what is culturally a 'real Australian person'. Me thinks we live with a lot of sub culture, with a few traits that are fairly universally accepted, like candles on a birthday cake.

Hi Paul,

Good point, but I expect that Individual qualifies as someone who has known many Indigenous people, up the Cape and across at east north Queensland, including Cairns, over perhaps forty years. Plenty of different sorts of Blackfella up there. No, not all Blackfellas are the same, and there isn't just one Indigenous culture. And never has been.

But if you mean that there is a sort of spectrum, or continuum, or even a polarity, amongst Indigenous Australians, you might enjoy this one:

https://quillette.com/2019/09/28/the-case-for-black-optimism/

Around twelve years ago, my late wife Maria wrote an article that Noel Pearson was much taken with (in 'Radical Hope'), on the development of (at least) two Indigenous populations, one work-oriented and the other welfare-oriented. Necessarily, the more 'traditionally-oriented' population tends towards the welfare model, but the work-oriented population, overwhelmingly urban, is uncannily like the African-American urban population that Hughes describes in the article cited above.

Strangely, the 'left' avoids any reference to that (possibly) majority population with its conventional measures of success - with, in Australia, maybe three thousand new Indigenous graduates each year, two-thirds women. Well over fifty thousand graduates, all up, one in every eight or nine Indigenous adults. One in every six Indigenous women.

And similar to African-Americans, Indigenous women here are participating in tertiary education at higher rates than for non-Indigenous Australian men. But you might read about that in The Graundain.

No ? I wonder why that is .....

Joe

Joe,

Being blessed with a hunters eye I see things on/near the road well before I reach them, thus I avoid all but the most suicidal 'roos and deer; sheep are not much problem as they seem to know what motor vehicles are as do goats I often slow down to let lizards have right of way, or to straddle them when they shew fight and want to have a go at the vehicle.
Some years ago a friend's daughter swerved to avoid hitting a 'roo and ended up in the roadside drain, got charged with negligent driving!!

Paul,

Haven't been after anything except ferals, been a few bushfires locally, so a lot of fleeing foxes, wild dogs and a few cats, on which we have effected a reasonable toll.

But you are right, culture is not static, it is dynamic
Loudmouth,
Correct so, why does the Guilt industry not subscribe to that evolvement ? Sort of like, the European invaders have done wrong but their descendants have seen the wrong & have fallen ar$e over backwards to compensate yet that is as yet not enough for the Guilt industry !

Aboriginal spirituality is meant to be animistic in many ways.

So what is the term referring to?

Definition of animism

1: a doctrine that the vital principle of organic development is immaterial spirit

2: attribution of conscious life to objects in and phenomena of nature or to inanimate objects

3: belief in the existence of spirits separable from bodies

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/animism

In an animistic world every thing is meant to be interconnected in some form including humans, plant life and all animal species, land forms and celestial bodies, which are meant to be part a much larger reality.

On earth, nothing is inanimate, everything is alive with all elements all energised by a spirit.

As such, humans are meant on an equal footing with nature; are part of nature and are morally obligated to treat animals, plants and landforms with respect as a result. Presently that is not happening and has not happened for a very long time.

One cannot exist without the other.

This type of hunting, in fact any hunting is cruel. It is time to recognise all elements are part of a picture of which humans are one part of. Humans are therefore not superior in that context and should not think so either.

For anyone interested - I've just managed to get
hold of a book that Banjo Paterson recommended -
"The Last of the Nomads," by W.J. Peasley. I've
started to read it and it's extraordinary -
the story of how two Aboriginal people survived alone
for thirty years in
the western Gibson Desert region of Australia.
It looks like being absorbing reading.