On Australia Day, which progressives want to rename as “Invasion Day”, a look at the aboriginal culture(s) who had inhabited the continent for thousands of years before contact with Europeans:
Colour lithograph of the First Fleet entering Port Jackson on January 26 1788, drawn in 1888.
Original by E. Le Bihan via Wikimedia Commons.
Liam Hemsworth and others are spruiking nonsense which is also being taught to school children as they protest against “invasion day”:
We are spiritually and culturally connected to this country.
This country was criss-crossed by generations of brilliant Nations.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were Australia’s first explorers, first navigators, first engineers, first farmers, first botanists, first scientists, first diplomats, first astronomers and first artists.
Australia has the world’s oldest oral stories. The First Peoples engraved the world’s first maps, made the earliest paintings of ceremony and invented unique technologies. We built and engineered structures – structures on Earth – predating well-known sites such as the Egyptian Pyramids and Stonehenge.
Our adaptation and intimate knowledge of Country enabled us to endure climate change, catastrophic droughts and rising sea levels.
Always Was, Always Will Be. acknowledges that hundreds of Nations and our cultures covered this continent. All were managing the land – the biggest estate on earth – to sustainably provide for their future.This statement is a work of poorly written fiction. All humans are descended from ancestors that roamed Africa. At some stage – perhaps 50,000 to 60,000 years ago according to archaeological records – some Homo Sapiens (so far as we know, Homo Erectus do not appear to have migrated to the land mass now know as Australia) moved to this continent during the Pleistocene (ice age) when sea levels were much lower allowing transit without seafaring. Later the ice age abated, ice melted and the Australian continent became separate and its inhabitants isolated.
In Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel – the Fates of Human Societies, he argues that circumstances (pressure on resources etc) lead to innovations and changes to society. On Australia he wrote:
Australia is the sole continent where, in modern times, all native peoples still lived without any of the hallmarks of so-called civilization – without farming, herding, metal, bows and arrows, substantial buildings, settled villages, writing, chiefdoms or states. Instead Australian Aborigines were nomadic or semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers, organised into bands, living in temporary shelters or huts and still dependent on stone-tools. – (p. 297).
Compared with Native Australians, New Guineans rate as culturally “advanced” … most New Guineans … were farmers and swineherds. They lived in settled villages and were organised politically into tribes rather than as bands. All New Guineans had bows and arrows, and many used pottery. – (p. 297-8).
While New Guinea … developed both animal husbandry and agriculture, … Australia … developed neither. – (p. 308).
Isolated from other populations, and lacking little in the way of resources, Australia’s first inhabitants were not pressured into changing their ways of life and remained essentially hunter gatherers and nomadic societies. I make no judgement on whether this is good or bad, merely that despite the lack of competition over resources, life wasn’t always rosy and violence and skirmishes, murder and rape occurred as much among those humans as it did elsewhere.
It was inevitable that this isolation would not persist – it is perhaps surprising that it persisted as long as it did. But contact with other humans was inevitable and the outcome of that contact would be widely varying depending on whether the contact was made by the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Chinese, British or others. The fact that Australia became a British colony is probably the best of the many alternatives that could have sprung from colonialisation. And we are all affected, mostly positively, by that contact – there would be few Aboriginal Australians (perhaps none) who today could say that they have no ancestry at all from settlers who arrived after 1787. We are all of mixed blood and we all descend from those original Homo Sapiens who evolved in Africa. It is time to talk about unity rather than division.
