cont

In my wife's culture a ceremonial family cloak is kept for use on special occasions. The cloak is generally kept by one of the female members of the clan, my younger step daughter has ours. We used our family cloak when we got married. Recently my wife spent about 200 hours making a cloak for presentation to a grand niece on the occasion of her 18th birthday and school graduation. Then that cloak will become her families for use on special occasions. To buy a cloak these days can cost up to $1500 or more, and not every Maori woman has the skill to make them, only a very few. The traditional cloak was made using woven flax and Kiwi feathers, today its cloth and poultry feathers.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern wore a traditional Maori cloak to meet the Queen,. It was a stunner, and some Maori were up in arms about a pakaha wearing a cloak in that fashion. The wife said; "That's rubbish, a cloak can be worn by non Maori if the cloak has been given or loaned for special recognition".

Hi Joe,

The Australia flax is tough and hard to work, my wife has tried it and she didn't like it, She found palm frons in the island easier to work, but they are tough as well. Te learned flax weaving from her grandmother mostly, starting from the age of about 4 or 5. First learning to gather, and then sit on the veranda for hours watching gran do her work with it. Eventually the "student" starts to have a go, under instruction, that's how she learned. I think she was the only one in her family who learned the art, her sisters were not that interested.

Hi again Joe,

Some years back an Aboriginal elder from the La Perouse mob related a story to us, about a strange people on a raft being washed up after a storm, around the area of Coogee (Sydney) in recent times, in the past few hundred years. The story has it, the men were very tall, there were also women and children with them. These people spoke a strange language, and were different in appearance to any people the inhabitants knew. The castaways were in poor condition, some dyeing, but the others recovered and joined the local tribe, never leaving.

Paul1405,

They were Australia's first boat people.

Probably refugees from the industrial Revolution. Was the raft steam powered?

SR: "I was deliberately unspecific with my original post."

But very specific in the next..."Rupert Murdoch received a life time achievement award in the Australia Day gong distributions, the first time it has been handed out in 14 years."

Utterly, monumentally, hilariously wrong...but specific.

"But the conversation has turned elsewhere."

Translation: let's never mention my error again....one of SR's regular non-admission admissions.

SR wrote:"And here you are once again trapped in an ideology so far that there is not a single gracious bone in your body."

Well I wasn't comparing Aboriginal standards-of-living with that of other societies at the time. I was just pointing out that the stone age people who inhabited the continent in 1788 were just ordinary run-of-the-mill primitives. No better or worse than other stone age peoples over the aeons. Just a people who over 10's of 1000's of years made no real progress and eked a short brutish life with no prospects of improvement.

But I have, in these pages, previous pointed out that the aboriginals in S-E Australia had a standard of living equal to that of the lowest classes in Britain at the time....at least in the good years. But your comparing the most fortunate Aboriginal groups with the least fortunate British classes as a way to praise the natives reveals all that needs to be revealed.

There is a whole industry in Australia which is trying to create a myth that the aboriginals of 1788 were somehow exceptional, outstandingly innovative and uniquely content. That type of thinking can only be maintained if people remain pig ignorant of the truth here and the truth about other stone age groups.

That truth being that the aboriginals here were very average stone age folk. Better in some aspects than their equivalents elsewhere, worse in other aspects. But not a society to be admired, praised or emulated. The only way people can get excited about fur coats is if they are unaware of that.

"The Australia flax is tough and hard to work, "

One of the excuse often raised as to why the Australian natives failed to domesticate ANYTHING was that there were no flora or fauna suited to domestication.

But the very basis of domestication is to take unsuitable forms and make them usable. If you look at the wild varieties of the plants that were to become wheat, its difficult to see how they could be domesticated. They are stringy, low yield and bitter. The wild husks are designed to spread as soon as ripe, not stay on the stalk awaiting harvest. Yet they were domesticated and through selection, became to basis of Levantine and (later) European civilisation. Similarly rice in east Asia and maize in south America.

In regards to fauna, who could look at wild oxen and think they could be controlled and domesticated? Or wild horses, pigs, sheep? Chickens in the wild lay perhaps a dozen eggs a year.

There are abundant plants in Australia that, while superficially unappealing as domestication candidates, are no less so than those of Mesopotamia. Think Lomandra. Those who swoon over the aboriginal society are always telling us about how ingenious they were with bush food. No one asks why they didn't domesticate those same bush foods.

Of course, its possible that some aboriginal groups in the past did domesticate flora/fauna. Despite the 'always was/always will be' moronosity, we know that there were other aboriginal societies that were wiped out eg the so-called Bradshaw peoples.

One of the things about the domestic life is that it is terribly susceptible to raiding and theft by hunter gathers. So one group settles and crops but then is overwhelmed by others who crave their food and stock. We know that aboriginal society was incredibly war-like. It may be that domestication never took off because the domesticators never got a clear shot at it.