ABORIGINAL CULTURE & HISTORY: ON THE WAY TO RECONCILIATION
One of the surprising facts we found in Australia was how difficult it is to find historical and cultural information about Aboriginals, who are. after all. the original inhabitants of the country. One of our employers has recently started organising Aboriginal awareness sessions to educate its staff about this (since Australians frequently don’t know much more than we do), so hopefully we will gradually pick up some more knowledge from this source. These sessions and some of our own research and museum-trips form the backbone of these stories.
Aboriginal hunter in the outback and the Aboriginal flag
(Grant Faint on history.com)
Aboriginal History
Around 50,000 years ago, the wave of migration form Africa,reached the prehistoric supercontinent composed of present-day Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea prior to their separation by rising sea levels 10,000 years ago. At that time, according to a recent study, Aboriginal Australians became genetically isolated, making it the world’s oldest continuous civilization. Over time, due to the vast size of the continent, Aboriginals developed around 250 unique languages (out of which only 20 or so still exist today).
Aboriginals
(telegraph.co.uk/Pete Turner on history.com)
Since Aboriginal society was based on oral tradition (they didn't write), we only have documented history of the continent from the European arrival. While Captain Cook is considered to have ‘discovered’ Australia on 20 August 1770, in reality this was far from the case. Partly, this is because the Dutch had charted the Northern part of Australia in 1606 (but had thought it was part of New Guinea). Indeed, dozens of recorded visits happened in the 17th century alone, mostly to Western Australia, but also to Tasmania much further East; however the land didn’t seem very promising and no one realised the separate bits were actually connected to a single continent. The bigger reason for the quotation marks is that Australia had already been in fact inhabited for 50,000 years already by Aboriginals when it was discovered by Europeans, who underwent a huge amount of suffering as colonisation progressed.
James Cook discovering Australia and its Aboriginals
Lots of people know the story of how the Dutchman Peter Minuit purchased the island of Manhattan in New York for 60 guilders worth of beads and trinkets ($1,050 dollars in today’s terms) from the Native Americans at the time, leading to it being termed the best real estate investment in history; and we are also familiar with how Native Americans were pushed into smaller and smaller territories through successive treaties as the United States expanded. The story of Australian colonisation was possibly even harsher, since the whole continent was proclaimed to be Terra Nullius, or uninhabited (by ‘civilised’ people), which meant the Aboriginals had no right to the land they were living on, and anyone could move in and start cultivating it without even requiring the pretence of an agreement with the original inhabitants.
Their numbers declined by 90% in the period leading to 1900, to ~50-90,000 due to a lack of access to healthcare and sensitivity to newly imported diseases Europeans had immunity to. Aboriginals were expected to obey the laws, so if they retaliated when their land and livelihoods was taken or their scarce water holes drained by newly introduced livestock the full force of the law came down on them. Land is a critical element of identity, with Aboriginals considering themselves to be merely guardians of the land their community lives on. The land is also the link between themselves and their ancestors and all the generations that have existed since the beginning of time (the Dreamtime).
Aboriginals weren’t recognised in the Constitution until a 1967 referendum nor counted as part of the census until 1971. As a consequence of the new order imposed on them, they were forced to abandon their traditional ways of life of hunting and gathering and became marginalised elements of society with very few rights. All the way up to this period, a system similar to apartheid was in place, with people requiring permits to leave their segregated settlements or enter ‘white’ areas, get a job or handle money. For all intents and purposes they didn’t have birth or marriage certificates, drivers’ licenses and couldn’t own property. Of course there were always exceptions to this rule, and some aboriginals of mixed descent were given exemptions literally giving them ‘the chance to live like a white man’.
the pictures of permits from the 1950’s would be funny to read if they weren’t so tragic.
Between 1905-1969 generations of primarily mixed-race children (called the ‘Stolen Generations’) were forcibly removed from their Aboriginal parents and put into orphanages to supposedly give them a chance of assimilation into ‘semi-civilised’ society. Besides the massive human trauma, a side-effect of this was yet more loss of cultural self-identity and no actual benefits in terms integration; actually, ‘removed’ children were found to have even lower educational attainment, 3 times more likely to have police records and twice as likely to use illegal drugs. Today, there are 600,000 people (3% of a population of 24 million) who consider themselves Aboriginal, with the Northern Territory the only area where they are present in a significant concentration (30%).
Despite the shocking fact that this rampant discrimination continued until recently, Australia has made quite a bit of progress in overcoming their prejudices and reconciling with their past. 50 years ago Australians voted in a referendum to include Aboriginals in the census and 25 years ago the Australian High Court ruled to recognise native land titles and that the concept of ‘Terra Nullius’ was invalid. However, Aboriginals would say there is still much further to go, and the centuries of marginalisation have left their mark with Aboriginals being much more likely to suffer from alcoholism, under-education, unemployment, domestic violence, drug use and poverty than other elements of Australian society.
Unemployment rate in the Aboriginal communities was above 20% in 2015, four times larger than the national average of about 5-6%. Aboriginal families are generally also larger than other households (3.3 people per household vs. 2.6) strongly driven by the higher number of dependent children due to the highest unemployment rate among the younger generation. This shows a gap that the country has to work on closing the soonest possible.
The process of coming to terms with the past and working together for a better future is called 'Reconciliation' in Australia. A few examples of activities that are in place today under this theme are:
Most large gatherings start with a “Welcome to country or acknowledgement of country” statement, preferably delivered by an aboriginal speaker welcoming the participants to his ancestor’s traditional lands of whichever tribe’s land the gathering is on.
There are scholarship programs to help disadvantaged aboriginal children and at job applications one can state if they are of an Aboriginal origin so that any sign of discrimination can be tracked back post selection process
Aboriginal art can be found everywhere – it is a big tourist business after all – although probably not much of it is actually made by aboriginals.
Companies have also started developing Reconciliation Action Plans to describe how they will engage with the indigenous communities (e.g. through favouring indigenous suppliers in procurement, or trying to recruit indigenous candidates), and if a company isn't making progress it is slowly becoming a competitive disadvantage, so it will be interesting to see what long term results will arise.
Reconciliation is a timely topic
Aboriginal Food
Szilveszter was lucky enough to have an indigenous lunch-and-learn session organised at his office recently, where a lady introduced the various aspects of aboriginal spices and foods, while they were treated to a delicious meal to demonstrate.
Aboriginals were nomadic and moved around the land on a seasonal basis (e.g. eating fish and oysters by the sea during the summer and moving inland in the winter to eat wombats and kangaroos). Everything edible was eaten or used in some other manner, and the remnants were left in a central location (a ‘midden’) to show the next tribes what they had eaten (e.g. if the previous tribe ate lots of shellfish, then you should eat oysters or fish instead). Every tribe also had a food type, the tribe’s totem animal, which they weren’t allowed to eat to make sure the animals weren’t over-hunted.
Did you expect emu eggs to be bright green?! Its size is also rather unexpectedly large - pictured for comparison to a rather large hand -, blowing the white and yolk out of the egg makes a massive portion of scrambled eggs equivalent to 2 dozen (chicken) eggs! It tastes great, but it’s definitely not something you would have every morning, since they are actually quite expensive, especially from a wild emu (none of that farmed domesticated stuff, apparently it just doesn’t taste the same)!
Other delicacies at the session included kangaroo curry and emu meatballs, as well as a chocolate tart with wild berries.
The chef was explaining that one of the first survival skills she taught her toddlers was to find a certain type of tree if they were to get lost in the bush: by licking its sap, they wouldn’t starve or die of thirst until the search parties found them. We are still far away from this level of knowledge, but with a couple more courses maybe we will get there eventually!
Aboriginal art
Not many people know that the Australian Indigenous art is the oldest unbroken traditional art in the world! One of the oldest known pieces of rock art on Earth with a confirmed date from 28.000 years ago is a rock art painting in Australia.
The Aboriginal art, or Papunya art, uses symbols related to the direct environment of the indigenous people, for instance images and stories of animals, lakes and the Dreamtime, the Aboriginal mythology, representing the artists' religion and beliefs. Aboriginals did not preserve their history in written form, so they used art to explain their past, and also to talk about their present and expected future. Their paintings represent their relationship to the land which is part of their identity and connects them to their ancestors The art consists of various paint colours connected to the land as well, like yellow (representing the sun), brown (the soil), red (desert sand) and white (the clouds and the sky). Traditionally art formations were pained on rocks and in caves., while in modern artwork these traditional colours are used to paint dots on canvas, generally applied with bamboo satay sticks.
It is fascinating seeing these culinary and artistic traditions being kept alive and we consider ourselves very fortunate to be able to learn about such a different way of life and culture.
