August 3.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Important statement on Indigenous inter-relation with country in a current debate.
What is wrong with a stable economic system that maintains the integrity of the environment and people’s relationship with it, using minimal interference with natural cycles? [1] Had people in fact achieved states of ‘equilibrium’ or settled relationships with the environment that enabled their stable continuation for extensive periods? [2]...Was it in fact accomplished, bedded down for long eras, and adjusted to climatic and sea-level changes over centuries? Was not a minimal footprint in fact the key accomplishment?
Archaeologist Heather Builth prefers the latter understanding of the Lake Condah fish traps of Victoria’s Western District: ‘Indigenous people occupying the landscape of the Mount Eccles lava flow at the time of European contact had already achieved sustainable development by adapting appropriate extractive technology to an enhanced local ecological system’. [1]
[Quoting Professor] Tom Griffiths:
I think it’s a mistake to treat the concept of agriculture as a timeless, stable, universal and preordained template, to apply a European hierarchical metaphor, an imperial measure of civilisation, to societies that defy imported classifications. One of the great insights delivered by that half-century of scholarship is that Aboriginal societies produced a civilisation quite unlike any other, one uniquely adapted to Australian elements and ecosystems. [2]
[Bruce] Pascoe’s approach appears to resemble the old Eurocentric view held by the British conquerors of Aboriginal society. Those were the people who organised mass theft of Aboriginal country and many of whom justified the killing of people who resisted them, really out of greed and indifference, but often under an ideological flag of social evolutionism. They assumed they had a right to profit from the ‘survival of the fittest’ and were the ‘superior race’. The ‘less advanced’ had to make way for the ‘more advanced’….
Australian governments at several different levels (local, state, federal) have apologised formally for the wrongs of the past, but the government that remains missing in action, and that should have been the very first to say something in apology, is that of Great Britain. Whitehall has not yet moved. The British Government, under the Crown, was the key engine on whose watch a mob of prisoners, accompanied by civilians, armed redcoats and bureaucrats, marched uninvited into New South Wales in the low thousands in 1788 and kick-started the land theft, conquest, physical attrition and emotional trauma of the original Australians generally, and the widespread degradation of the environment – all of which is now our indelible legacy, together.
The settling of land claims over large sections of the Australian map has been a partial but positive turning-back of some of the crimes of history...
Ken Maddock notably wrote a chapter called ‘The defensibility of Aboriginal society’ in his The Australian Aborigines: A Portrait of Their Society (Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 1972, pp. 177-94), in which he compared the freedoms of the old society with the lack of it in modern states. The argument might have been extended to economics.
Layton, Foley and Williams wrote of ‘the usefulness of treating hunting and gathering, herding, and [plant] cultivation as alternative strategies which are singly, or in combination, appropriate to social or natural environments’. (Robert Layton, Robert Foley & Elizabeth Williams, ‘The transition between hunting and gathering and specialized husbandry of resources’, Current Anthropology 32, 1991, p. 255).
Heather Builth, Ancient Aboriginal Aquaculture Rediscovered (Lambert Academic Publishing, 2014), p. 514.
Tom Griffiths, ‘Reading Bruce Pascoe’, Inside Story, 26 November 2019, https://insidestory.org.au/reading-bruce-pascoe/ (accessed 20 January 2020).
Acknowledgment: Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe, Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? - The ‘Dark Emu’ Debate, Melbourne University Press, 2021, pp.69-70, 198-199, 228, n.6, n.7, n.8, 229 n.9