Indigenous Australians

Aboriginal man attacking with a boomerang.

WARNING: This blog may contain the images of Aboriginal people either living or dead. (It is a warning that must be given before programs making use of Aboriginal video or pictures, as the Aboriginal people hold a belief that seeing their own reflection or the unnatural image of another Aboriginal is considered to be... for lack of a better term... bad bad juju.)

This has been a subject I have put off writing about for sometime now. Talking about Aboriginals in Australia can sometimes be a touchy subject, and I suppose I may have acquired some of that reluctance from the people of my adopted country. However, the indigenous Australians are certainly a fascinating and worthy subject to talk about and I have gone to great lengths to learn and meet them. Their ways are strange, especially from the viewpoint of Western people of white European descent, and for the most part much of their culture still remains a mystery even to this day.

Before I begin I should make something clear. I am using the term Aboriginal as a blanket word for the indigenous population of Australia, when in truth Australia's indigenous people are in fact made up of both Aboriginals and the later arrivals of the Torres Strait Islanders. Even among the people one typically classifies as Aboriginals they can be furhter divided into numerous local communities, each with their own dialects and interpretations of their larger spiritual and social beliefs. In short, among the Aboriginal people there are over 200 spoken forms of language (which was believed to have been upwards of 300 with over 600 dialectal inflections at the time of the arrival of white settlers, but has since dwindled.) Regardless, it is best to understand that much like Native American tribes, the Aboriginal people are often split into different and diverse communities.

Yet, the most interesting thing I have come to discover about the Aboriginal people is that we have no really idea how or when they managed to migrate to the continent of Australia. There is a lot of debate among scholars. Most estimates put the Aboriginal arrival between 40,000 and 45,000 years ago. Scholars also postulate that they migrated through Asia when Australia was still part of a larger landmass known as Sahul, however there are kinks in this theory.

The biggest being that Aboriginal appearance, genetics, culture, religion, etc, do not match any that is found in Asia or the surrounding areas. So how could a entire race of people migrate through an entire area but not pick-up or influence the cultures of the indigenous people around them. The real truth of the matter is that Aboriginal artifacts more closely resemble ancient artifacts uncovered in sites in Africa than anywhere in Asia, which only raises more questions. To further complicate the issue archaeological sites have been found around Australia, such as the Junmium site in the Northern Territory, where Aboriginal tools have been found and dated to as far back 125,000 years ago... which puts it well into what is currently believed to be man's primative past. Even more puzzling is the fact that, even when Australia was part of the Sahul continent, it was still separated from all other land masses by a vast ocean, which would have required a sophisticated culture of boat making and sailing in order to migrate a substantial number of people to the continent to begin population efforts. This is even more true, if the ancestors of the Aboriginal people did not in fact come from Asia as some suggest. Even if we assume all of this, how did they even know that land existed to the south? It took Eruopeans hundreds of years to make it to Australia. So these ancient people either had advanced knowledge of an existing land mass or they were just hopelessly sailing out into nothingness. Further more they would have needed something better than bamboo rafts and leaves (which according to modern understanding was the height of technology at the time the voyage would have been made.) Lastly, this is all much further complicated by the fact that the Aboriginal people are not a culture of fisherman and boat builders...

The Aboriginal Flag

So basically all we know is that at some point some people built a sophisticated series of boats that was beyond the understood level of technology, (possibly so far back in time that modern understanding believes that homo erectus was still burning himself trying to make fire) to make a sea voyage to a continent which they could not have known was there in the first place. Then, to top it all off, they completely abandoned their boats and their knowledge on how to build them to beginning living a completely landlocked existence. As you can see, there are many problems trying to pin down the origins of the Aboriginal people. However, I like this mystery, as I think it illustrates a much larger point about the Australian Aboriginal. We always tend to underestimate them.

The white Australian, (or the white man in general) underestimates the Aboriginal for many reasons. Some of these reasons have to do with our own prejudices of course. We mistakenly believe that just because we come across a people that does not talk like us, walks, tweet like us, and stand in line to see Sex and the City 2 they must be of an inferior make. However, what really sets the Aboriginal apart is the fact that their cultural beliefs are so vastly different that many of the original European arrivals questioned even if the Aboriginal people were actually human. Clothing was a foreign thing to Aboriginals and most Aboriginals often acted as if the white settlers didn't exist. It was almost as if the Aboriginal people lived in their own world and were just content to simply ignore the new arrivals as if they were clouds in the sky. On other occasions Aboriginal people were friendly and even traded with the European settlers, and on yet other occasions they attacked them for what was perceived as no reason. Their motivations were sometimes perceived as erratic and without reason. However, one of the things that may turn off the most white people about the Aboriginals is how they look. Aboriginals often have an appearance of being broken, battered, and bruised.

This has to do with their rituals of initiation. You see the Aboriginal religion revolves around a series of (what we have dubbed dreamtime) stories that tells about the creation of the world. It is believed to hold secret knowledge and only those who have passed the proper levels of initiation are allowed to know certain secrets. There are many many many different levels of knowledge to Aboriginals, with usually only one or two elders or chiefs of different tribes knowing everything of their culture and religious beliefs. However, every time a member of the tribe reaches a new level of initiation they are taught the new piece of knowledge and then they are injured severely. This could range from having a tooth knocked out to having a bone forcibly broken. The belief is that pain heightens awareness... which in a scary way make sense. (Think back to the last time you broke an arm or even a finger. You can remember every little detail surrounding it, if only because it hurt so much.) Giving different injuries for different levels of wisdom, also means that when one Aboriginal looks at another Aboriginal they immediately know how high ranking they are among their society. (Thus, if Joe see that Bob has a crooked nose and is missing three teeth he understands that Joe is at Knowledge Level 6.)

I offer this particular cultural idea as an example of why white Europeans often thought of Aboriginal people as inhuman. On the surface this may seem like a barbaric idea, but we must also understand another custom that the settlers thought was barbaric was the fact that wives had complete control of their husbands. It is true that Aboriginal people are still ruled by a male chief, but in the end all men are subject to the rulings of women, as the woman is giver of life. Seeing a culture where women was so dominant was also considered a backward and wrong idea by our European ancestors. We cannot judge a people because they follow rules and ideas we do not truly understand.

The signing of the Batman Treaty (which basically robbed
the indigenous people of all their lands.) Who would have
known that Bruce Wayne could be such a jerk?

Yet unfortunately, that last line is probably the most naive thing I have ever written in this blog. I mean after all, we are human beings and we do it all the time. Heck, part of the reason why I write this blog is to make baseless and vast assumptions about the population of Australia. So I am no less guilty of it than anyone else. However, with the arrival of the white settlers, life understandably got much worse for the Aboriginal people. Sufficed to say, the settlers brought with them all their set of Old World problems and a whole set of new ones. Disease, land rights, and even wholesale slaughter drastically reduced the Aboriginal population along the east coast of Australia and Tasmania. In many cases white settlers would actively go hunting for Aboriginal people for no other reason than that they were bored and had guns. Literally entire villages and tribes were wiped out for no FREAKIN reason whatsoever.

The real tragedy of this sort of killing (I mean besides the usual tragedy of mass genocide) is that since the initiation rites of the Aboriginal people were so strict, and the fullest cultural knowledge was only known to a select few elders, many of their rich heritage, stories, and religious mythologies were lost. Basically, if only two people in a whole tribe know all the great stories and spiritual ways, and they are walking along one day and shot by an English convict (who in hindsight probably shouldn't have been armed in the first place), than your culture has just lost the major part of its history and spirituality... forever. That would have been like if Homer wrote the Illiad and moments after completing it, he took an arrow in the head and the only copy was burned... Well... there goes the culture.

But all that is in the past right? I mean that's just what happens in the "little incidents" of colonization? It is true that these are the extreme examples and as an American I should be the last one throwing any kind of stones. God knows we have enough to answer for with things like that old Trail of Tears hanging over our heads, (...Thanks a lot Andrew Jackson...) And for the most part the killings certainly are a thing of the past... Even though in the Northern Territories they still continued well into the 20th century... However, it was not all peaches and cream for the Aboriginal people from that point on.

Australia has never had a lack of problems between the Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal populations. Though there have been many injustices done, I will try to stick to the larger ones. Such as how Aboriginals weren't given federal rights to vote till 1967, even though they were still counted for reasons of population and were drafted to serve in both World War I and World War II. Even to this day many full-blooded Aboriginals are still not issued birth documents. That means they do not get a birth certificate or a TFN (the Aussie version of a social security number). This means they often have problems when it comes to applying for things like home-loans, passports, or even college. The Australian government put most tribes on reservations (sounds familiar), and pretty much forgot about them. Yet, the worst epidemic that the white settler introduced to the Aboriginal people is alcohol. It turns out that Aboriginal people lack an enzyme to properly break down alcohol and it can literally stay in their system for weeks. Imagine having a bottle of beer and then being smashed for almost two weeks. I can't even imagine how long the hang-over must last.

1867 Aboriginal Cricket Team (Perhaps one of the worst
things that the English ever forced upon the indigenous
Australian... the game of cricket.) 

However, none of this compares with the coup-de-grace of this whole thing, which is effectively known as the Stolen Generations. For 100 years from 1869 up until even the 1970's the Australian government would take Aboriginal children away from their parents and tribe. They would tell the child that their loved ones were dead and gone, and then they would put those children in education centers where they would be taught how to be Australian. The government justified this move as they were protecting the children from the abuse and destitution they would have suffered under their parents. In most cases this was all done without trials or legal proceedings. It just happened. Literally, tens of thousands of children were forcibly taken from their families and were raised to never know their own language, their own beliefs, their own mothers, fathers, and even sisters and brothers. They were not even taught their own names, but the Westernized names they were given. It was a move meant to effectively eradicate Aboriginal culture and heritage... and it almost worked.

Eventually the sixties and seventies came, and the new public outcry put a stop to all of it, (which proves that maybe hippies are good for at least one thing... two if you count all the money they must have made selling those peace sign necklaces.) But that's the end of it right? Racism solved... No... though som Aussies think so.

Australia is a weird mix sometimes and its hard to know what to truly make of it. In many ways Aussies are very PC (Politically Correct). They will never speak out of turn about anyone of any race, creed, religion, ethnicity, etc, but on the other hand the more time you spend here the more you realize that is more for appearances. Yet, I have been involved in several conversations with white Australians where I have been amazed by some of the assumptions people have about the indigenous population. Furthermore, this translates into a larger problem. The Aboriginals are a people that most Aussies would rather not think too much about. They like the idea of them (as anything we think of as Australian: Boomerangs, Didgeridoos, those cool dotted paintings, are actually Aboriginal in origin). It is often to the point where many politicians just tend to ignore bigger issues, becaue if theym mention  these problems tends they tend to be labeled as racist or troublemakers.

What some people do not realize is that most Aboriginals which people see, are those that live homelessly in places like Alice Springs and Darwin. They spend all their days sitting on street corners drinking alcohol, and they cause a lot problems. (Think of how much trouble you can get up to in a drunken night and now extend that over a timespan of weeks and throw in some major issues about self perception and invading white hordes. Its a recipe for trouble.) However, these Aboriginals are the exception in a lot of cases. Those that are living on the streets of Aussie cities are the Aboriginals that have been cast out of their tribes and communities because they are drunks and trouble-makers. So when you see an Aboriginal living on the streets, nine times out of ten, he or she is probably not the most upstanding citizen even by their own society's terms. So it goes without saying these shouldn't be the people by which we judge an entire culture. After all, you wouldn't want all white people to be judged by that crazy guy who stands in central park and tells everyone his family has been abducted by space aliens?

The Aboriginal people have a ruch culture full of interesting and amazing stories. They have sacred sites all over the country, well before the UN ever proclaimed anything as World Heritage sites. To them their religion and their spirtuality is still very much real. They take their stories and their beliefs very seriously. We have minimized it by calling them mythology but to them the sorts of lessons and ideas which these amazing tales each are very real and very powerful. They have the oldest and longest enduring continual culture in the world and they have suffered a great deal for it. Their relationship with their white brethren is a complicated one, but we must remember Australia is not the only country that suffers under strained relations with its indigenous population.

It is certainly something as an American that is worth remembering. Every country has its own problems and its own sources of contention. Yet, there is hope. Because whether you are a American, Aussie, Native or otherwise, sometimes all anyone needs is a little understanding. In my experience it is amazing how even a gesture as small as a friendly nod, can go a long way.