Neo-colonialism in Australia
A non-Aboriginal perspective on neo-colonial illusion
and reconciliation with Aboriginal Australia
By John Tracey
Some Basic Information
Wherever we live in Australia we are on the ancestral homeland of a particular Aboriginal family, we are either on or in the vicinity of their ancient birthing centres, cemeteries, ceremonial areas and agricultural areas.
**1770 Aboriginal people have occupied this continent for many thousands of years, evolving a highly sophisticated system of law, language and economy. Trade routes ran throughout the country and north into Asia.
**1788 The fist fleet estimated that there were three million Aborigines in Australia based on the population in the vicinity of the new colony. This estimate was based on the assumption that Aborigines only inhabited coastal areas and were incapable of surviving inland.
** The first one hundred years of Australia was marked by a vicious war between Aborigines and settlers. In some areas guerilla resistance continued into the twentieth century. The gun, water and food poisoning and smallpox were the weapons that subdued the guerilla armies that rose all around the country,
**In the late eighteen hundreds bands of Native Police under the command of white officers tracked and murdered Aboriginal people still posing a threat to the expansion
of white farms
** The beginning of last century saw the birth of Australian federation. Also the Aboriginal protection laws and reserves were instituted around the country. Most of the surviving aboriginal population were rounded up onto reserves and their lives were regulated, including travel, marriages and employment by white protectors, often police.
Under the protection laws Aboriginal people were paid under award wages, most of which was held by various state governments and never paid to workers or their families. Many Aboriginal Children, especially fair skinned children and those still living a traditional lifestyle, were forcibly removed from their families and raised in orphanages or adopted to white families.
** Today an Aboriginal person is more than 27 times as likely to be imprisoned than a white person, On Average, Aboriginal people die twenty years younger than white people.
Australians all let us rejoice for we are young and free.......Aboriginal culture is the oldest living culture on the planet and Aboriginal people are the most imprisoned people on the planet.
What is exploitation and liberation? Who defines it, the exploited or exploiter, Aboriginal culture or English/Australian culture? Australia's racial discrimination laws gives people of all races and cultures the right to be white. All have legal equality within the frameworks of white industrial democracy and culture. Indigenous rights, or rights generated from migrant cultures other than English are ignored. For example, an aboriginal worker has a legal right to award conditions the same as anyone else. However if they miss work for attending to essential cultural business they may be sacked, they have no indigenous legal rights.
Similarly native title law gives to Aboriginal people certain rights to land within a white framework of land law. White courts and judges adjudicate land disputes and define the territories and legal rights of native titleholders. Aboriginal people have no right within native title to exercise rights and obligations within Aboriginal law except those that conform to white land use notions. For example native title holders will go to gaol if they hunt a protected species of animal on their own country.
Recent movements for justice and social change have included indigenous issues amongst their political demands. I remember the chants echoing around the city skyscrapers "One struggle One fight, women workers blacks unite" as Joh Bjelke Petersens storm troopers were confronted in the streets of Brisbane. This notion of a united front of progressive social movements was itself an alternative dismissal of black perspective. Aboriginal oppression was defined from a Marxist, feminist, anarchist, ecological or social democratic framework. Likewise the strategy for Aboriginal liberation was perceived along white ideological lines.
Today most social activists admit to an ignorance of indigenous issues . This ignorance allows for no constructive collaboration with Aboriginal people. White social movements have objectified Aboriginal people, creating their own concept of what Aboriginal oppression is and how that can be used to further their own white ideologies. In this sense the mode of operation of the alternative movement apes the grotesque failures of mainstream bureaucracy.
I am suggesting that many of the philosophies and ideologies that we espouse as an alternative to the oppression of the mainstream are just as ethnocentric, culturally specific, illusory and oppressive as the status quo. Our movements are charachterised by the three strands of environmentalism, socialism and feminism . It is easy to point the finger at Christianity and see how it was and is used as a tool of invasion and genocide. We should be just as critical of our own sacred cows. Alternative philosophies are just a part of the rich fabric of the invader society imposed on this Aboriginal country.
The Green movement has built a concept of wilderness, without consultation with Aboriginal people, we have generalised that concept, politicised it and it is now a significant issue on the Australian political landscape. Yet the way we have described the natural environment bears no resemblance to its ancient reality.
Modern Australia began with the legal principle of Terra Nullius, meaning a land with no law or government, no sovereign population. The British declared this continent to be Terra Nullius after Captain Cook "discovered" it, which allowed the British Crown to claim possession of the land in accordance with international law. Terra Nullius of course is a lie and was found to be such by the Australian High Court when Eddie Mabo proved that his family had owned their block of land since before Captain Cook.. Anthropologists and Aboriginal people assert that there was, prior to Cook and up until today, a complex and sophisticated system of law, government, economy and language, all the defining points of a sovereign nation.
Despite the high courts findings, Terra Nullius remains as the legal foundation for the sovereignty of the crown in Australia which in turn is the foundation authority for the parliament, courts, police, military and every other migrant legal institution.
Modern Australian conservationism dovetails with the legal fiction of Terra Nullius. Both deny the reality that this country was and still is occupied by a large complex Aboriginal society.
The conservation values of the Australian Bush are usually articulated in terms of species of plants and animals, geological considerations and often last and least, cultural heritage; usually a description of the history of the European colony and, occasionally, a reference to native title holders or Aboriginal place names (with little understanding of the meaning of either).
The principles of ecology and biodiversity have made us aware of the devastating consequences to an eco system if a particular species of plant or animal is removed. For example if a particular bird becomes extinct, the seeds it used to carry do not propagate and the insects it used to eat swell in numbers. Insect plague and reduced propagation in turn affects an infinite number of other organisms, radically degrading the systems of the ecosystem. The balance of bio-diversity has become an accepted principle in green ideology, yet how much have we considered the devastating consequences of removing the human species from wilderness eco-systems? For thousands of years humans interacted with the bush which provided them with all of the resources of daily life.. Human society and the natural eco systems evolved as one. Today we protect places in national parks and nature reserves and pretend that we are preserving their ancient integrity. Yet the form of bush that is protected in the national parks of today, places without the human species, are a phenomenon of the last hundred years, younger than many Australian urban centres. The removal of human beings from the bush in the last two hundred years has turned our wilderness areas into overgrown untended gardens.
Bushfire management is one example that highlights our misunderstandings of the bush. Conservationists have often argued that preventative burning strategies threaten eco systems; and they are right. Many farmers and fire authorities say the only way to avoid super-fires is to burn forest litter, and they are right also. In the old days the landscape was scattered with sacred campfires burning twenty-four hours a day providing a wide range of functional and spiritual purposes. These fires, along with hunting and cleansing fires, were fuelled solely by forest litter, gently and gradually cleaning the bush in a way that does not disrupt the sacred ecosystems that sustained the fire makers.
It has been a long time between sacred fires in many of our protected areas and as such they have degenerated into dormant infernos awaiting ignition.
Environmentalism tends to subscribe to the notion that the natural habitat of the human species is towns and cities, this is our territory and we should stay out of the territories of the other species. Centuries old notions of the evolution of humanity identify a progression from living in the bush in a savage and unsophisticated consciousness, through the epoch of barbarism into civilised society. This Darwinian notion conforms to the idea that the habitat of the modern human is urbanity. The inherent contradiction of this is it is the city structure that is doing most damage to the habitats of all species, including human. As a product of feudalism, industrialisation and capitalism, cities have grown as ever extending cancers, totally destroying the ecosystems of Europe and almost completing that process in Australia. By the simple evolutionary imperative of survival of the species, industrial civilisation represents a failure, it is our greatest threat as a species. the development of urban civilisation has been a process of ignorantly shitting in our own nests for millennia. Compared to the hundreds of thousands of years or more of sustainable human society in the bush, urban society is a dysfunctional devolution and disintegration.
If we are serious about preserving the Australian environment and indeed the human species we must take direction from Aboriginal people, their traditions of are the only record of the true history and nature of the bush, including how humans manage it. Aboriginal culture itself is a working example of a social ecology, including law and the individual and collective consciousness' that have been created by the interrelationship between human society and the wilderness.
Socialism is an ideology born of the emerging working class of the industrial revolution in Europe. The process of environmental degradation, hierarchical social structures, militarisation and the development of the nation state was the social context of socialism. Marx and Lenin both advocated industrialisation as historically inevitable and in the interests if the emancipation of the working class. The push towards centralised industry fuelled by the great wealth and greater greed of the ruling class was a wave on which socialism surfed, failing in any environmental foresight or radical analysis of the means and process of production beyond economic parameters.
Marx's fellow ideologue,Engels speaks of his understanding of Australian Aboriginal society as savagery, the bottom of social evolution yet to transcend into barbarism and then civilisation. (The origin of Family, Private property and the state) Marx and Lenin's prescriptions for European industrialisation were both racist and ignorant of the land rights of peasants sacrificing their land and land based cultures, for the benefit of the developing urban working class.
In Australia the working class has developed as a necessary component of the imposed industrial capitalist economy. There was no working class here until there was capitalism and the both grew together in a symbiotic, yet unfair, history.
Around the beginning of the twentieth century, the highpoint of European socialism, two significant historical events occurred in Australia. One was the development of trade unions and the other was the rounding up of the remnant Aboriginal population from rural areas and incarcerating them on Aboriginal reserves and missions. Up until then there had been over a hundred years of armed resistance to the expansion of white agriculture. The last decades of the nineteenth century saw the native police and their paramilitary commanders systematically massacre aborigines providing any resistance to the new farmlands.
The reserve system and Aboriginal protection laws mopped up the survivors of the war. Only now was it safe for pastoralists to propagate their sheep, cows, pigs, wheat, sugar etc. These developments lead to the necessity of a growing working class.
Today the struggle for control of the means of production is fought over between capital and labour over an economy that was stolen in the first place from Aboriginal people who are poor and unhealthy today as a direct consequence of the original theft. Imperialism and colonisation has always involved the transmigration of a working class as the primary occupation force in securing land from indigenous people. British and Scottish workers in Ireland, Indian workers in Fiji and south Africa, Australia's white Australia policy etc.
The working class did not develop in Australia as in Europe. It was imposed here. The indigenous Australian economy provided a prosperous lifestyle for millions of Aborigines. Trade routes through Indonesia to Asia and the rest of the world meant Australia was a modern dynamic trader in this part of the world also. Yet socialist intellectualism, while welcoming aborigines as fellow workers, has never acknowledged the integrity of the indigenous modes of production in particular the core principle that the earth, not labor, is the basis of the economy. John Howard took full advantage of this situation with his masterful manipulation of unionist forestry workers in Tasmania during the 2004 election campaign. Left wing unions appeared to abandon the labour party and its environmental policies and publicly endorse Howard and his policy that jobs (meaning bosses profit) was more important than the environment. The task of reorganising industry so that it is sustainable into the future has not yet been tackled by the agencies of the working class.
Feminism shares many cultural underpinnings with patriarchy and the nuclear family. Historically feminism is a reaction to patriarchal structures, European notions of freedom, the self and society have not been dismissed by feminism, indeed it is because these notions were not fulfilled for women that feminism been embraced. While feminism has caused superstructural change, more women are achieving more power in white society, the social infrastructure, consciousness itself, remains unchanged.
White consciousness, including feminism sees relationships as isolated units, and men and women as isolated units within that isolated relationship. White consciousness is ego based, the supremacy of the concept of an individual self. Here the nuclear patriarchy and feminism mirror each other, that identity is based on individual ego relationships, . Feminism however goes further in identifying relationship with men as being inherently oppressive. Men therefore need to be disconnected and transcended as a prerequisite to ego satisfaction or "liberation".
The materialistic and individualistic consciousness of capitalism and its consequent mobile workforces dovetail perfectly with feminism and nuclear families alike. The individual is more attracted to upward mobility and individual satisfaction than connection with family and country.
Historically, Aboriginal society has not suffered from notions of patriarchy and the nuclear family until the invasion.. The frameworks of extended family, men's and women's law and men's and women's country has created notions of freedom , self and society based on relationship and connectedness. Exploitation has not been the dynamic between men and women but between white society and and black society. Domestic violence is not a product of a testosterone induced patriarchy inherent in all men but' as with all social dysfunction is a direct consequence of invasion, genocide and colonisation. Similarly notions of healing are based on reconnection with family and country, resolving issues one way or the other.This stands in contrast to feminism's imperative to break free of connection, especially with men.
I assert that feminism, like socialism, Christianity and environmentalism are social constructs of European consciousness that along with capitalism, the nuclear family and everything else make up the colonial matrix that occupies this country. .
The extended family is not just more relatives, it is social processes and law to deal with everything including crisis. These are the very processes that have been smashed in the war of invasion. The fragile system of customary law today, including consciousness based on men's and women's business, family and country need to be respected, resourced and reinforced. It is a different way of life and doing things to the European nuclear family, the state and feminism.
I do not believe that reconciliation can occur by Aboriginal and non Aboriginal Australia meeting in the middle. English/Australian consciousness and culture is at essence hierarchical, literary, individualistic and material/property based. Indigenous culture is at essence lateral and egalitarian, oral (as different from literary), communal and spiritual. Where is the middle ground? So much of traditional Aboriginal society has been smashed during the past two hundred years, including language, the halfway mark of today is well within the cultural "turf" of European society. How far does Aboriginal society have to suffer and move away from its essence before white culture will start to move to the middle? Why would a comfortably numb white society change?
I don't think there is a middle ground, it is an either/or situation : I believe that after thousands of years of war and dislocation there is little left in mainstream culture that is worth preserving. We have created a social monster that is in the process of devouring itself unto extinction. This stands as an antithesis to Aboriginal culture, not as an equal standard by which to design the future.
Reconciliation can only occur when non-indigenous people cross the line. We do not become Aboriginal, we remain the descendants of Irish, English, Japanese etc. We are that same person in the context of Aboriginal reality, rather than colonial reality. As such our own aboriginality of Ireland, England, Japan or wherever comes into focus as does the necessity to contribute to the aboriginal law of where we live now. This is a spiritual transcendence (or paradigm shift if you prefer) that , I claim, is an essential prerequisite to demolish imposed colonial illusions such as Terra Nullius, the "untouched" wilderness and white supremacy in Australia.
Social change in post Nazi Germany involved coming to terms with the reality of history in order to prevent its repeat. Similarly in post apartheid South Africa, the truth and reconciliation process has been central to creating a new nation. In this country I believe the starting point is to come to terms with the history of Invasion, genocide and colonisation of this country. Doing this not only provides political support for Aboriginal Australia, it also demolishes the dominant Australian world view and consciousness that justifies not only genocide but also ecocide.. This allows us, psychologically, to overcome, or at least be aware of the power of hegemonic force to control perspective and opens the door for us to embrace new concepts and perspectives. Like the realisation that Santa is not true, the demolition of the Australian myth is a key part of our maturing as a people. Such an enlightenment calls to question every aspect of modern society and our own place in it, not just Aboriginal issues.
Personally, I do not identify as an Australian. I am an Aborigine of Ireland and England, born in the country of the Yarra people and living on Jaggerra/Turrable country at the time of writing. Aboriginal perspective is a universal consciousness equally as relevant to migrants and indigenous people. Our sacred places including ancestral burial and birthing places are not in this country but they do exist. Our law and traditions have been smashed and in many cases we have been forced off our own land centuries ago. What happened to our families in other parts of the world is happening to Australian Aborigines today. Much of the old culture is left in Australia today and these are signposts, or metaphors even, suggesting to us different parameters of our own reality. What belongs to the people of this country can never belong to us, we have our own places. By learning from people who still have connection to ecological consciousness opens doors to our own humanity that have been closed by mainstream western society. We have a working model of a different way to relate to each other and the environment. This is the twenty-first century and an ecological consciousness will manifest differently today, for both aboriginal and non aboriginal people, than it does in anthropological museums. I must emphasise that I believe that any attempt to reconstruct models of centuries ago, whether traditional Aboriginal culture or Marxism, they will remain as hollow anachronisms. The essence of the ancient cultures around the world is consciousness itself, how consciousness manifests in the material world has always adapted and developed to the conditions of the time, culture is alive and always relevant.
I have noticed that many non-Aboriginal people are seeking insight into Aboriginal spirituality. It appears to me that each person has their own ideological or philosophical matrix that is like a jigsaw puzzle. Over time we build up understandings of ourselves, society and our environment, filling in pieces of the jigsaw. The older we get the more pieces of the jigsaw are put together, beginning to develop a coherent form that can be understood. Yet their is a gap, missing pieces in the area of Aboriginality and the ancient spirituality of the land we are on. We search for missing pieces, usually asking premeditated questions of aboriginal people, based on the logic and form of the rest of the jigsaw. We never get the answers we are looking for, we are given responses to our questions but they do not seem to fit the shape of the missing pieces in our jigsaw, so we continue hunting for more pieces. Whatever the size of our jigsaw, the aboriginal jigsaw will be at least the same size and cannot be crammed into the area of missing pieces in our own jigsaw. To remove a single piece of the Aboriginal jigsaw, which would of itself betray the Aboriginal principle of holism, and then see if it can fit the gaps in the western jigsaw will create a discordant absurdity.
Many of the spiritual questions that non-Aboriginal people ask Aboriginal people can only be answered by people of higher understandings. These understandings were acquired through pain and suffering, both in day to day life and through sacred ceremony and cannot br explained in a one dimensional communication such as writing or speaking. It is unfair to expect these answers, that aboriginal people must labour and suffer for over time, to be handed out cheaply to curious non-Aboriginal people.
So, because the core of the spiritual essence of country resides in a very specific group of people, the issue of Aboriginal authority arises. While we may learn from and participate in dreaming processes, we are visitors, passengers. This is not a black and white issue for the same understandings exist for aboriginal people from other dreamings and areas who must similarly abide by the aboriginal authority of that particular place. Non Aboriginal peoples education of and participation in Aboriginal dreaming and culture will be through relationship and connection with Aboriginal people. Again this is not a black and white thing as all Aboriginal people learn and practice culture by way of relationship and connection.
The genocidal war smashed many of the systems of education into the dreaming and the political structures of governance within Aboriginal sociology. Aboriginal people are denied the proper education of country and dreaming, and that is their birth right, so our capacity as non aboriginal people to learn of the dreaming is severely restricted.
Obviously for non-Aboriginal peopleto learn, Aboriginal culture needs to be healed and reestablished in Aboriginal society. Cultural revival. Cultural revival is an enterprise in itself requiring budgets and resources, while there is a desperate need for it and an eagerness for it to occur it will not simply occur on its own. This is a key role for non indigenous supporters, to provide resources and budgets to develop cultural processes amongst traditional owners and other local aboriginal people. Apart from beginning to rectify the injustices of history, this creates a working entity from whom to learn ( a by-product of involvement in the process).
Reconciliation must be action and outcome based otherwise nothing changes .....If we are not part of the solution we are part of the problem. If we are not directly supporting Aboriginal people and their assertion of sovereignty, no matter what our ideology or personality. we are simply adding to the bulk of the imposed invader society.
Apparently two percent of the Australian population are indigenous. It is too much to ask every Aborigine to educate and organise fifty non aboriginal people. We have to do this ourselves. We must, in some way have a meaningful relationship with Aboriginal people to be able to learn but this must not be a drain on Aboriginal Australia or our search for truth will become a genocidal force in itself. Our connections to Aboriginal Australia have to be those that resource and facilitate aboriginal agendas. To look at the demographics again, enormous progress could be made if each Aboriginal person had financial and other assistance from fifty non Aboriginal people. If everyone gave only ten dollars a week then that Aborigine could be employed to do cultural and community business, pay off a loan to secure land and accommodation or develop some business enterprise Things will only change when things change. Having stolen all material wealth from Aboriginal people, white society must return, even some, wealth before Aboriginal society will have any capacity for social rebuilding and economic self determination.
I do not believe that the governments and bureaucracy will, in the future, do any more than regurgitate dysfunctional programs and continue to erode Aboriginal power and lifestyle. If we wait for the governments the genocide continues
and reconciliation with Aboriginal Australia
By John Tracey
Some Basic Information
Wherever we live in Australia we are on the ancestral homeland of a particular Aboriginal family, we are either on or in the vicinity of their ancient birthing centres, cemeteries, ceremonial areas and agricultural areas.
**1770 Aboriginal people have occupied this continent for many thousands of years, evolving a highly sophisticated system of law, language and economy. Trade routes ran throughout the country and north into Asia.
**1788 The fist fleet estimated that there were three million Aborigines in Australia based on the population in the vicinity of the new colony. This estimate was based on the assumption that Aborigines only inhabited coastal areas and were incapable of surviving inland.
** The first one hundred years of Australia was marked by a vicious war between Aborigines and settlers. In some areas guerilla resistance continued into the twentieth century. The gun, water and food poisoning and smallpox were the weapons that subdued the guerilla armies that rose all around the country,
**In the late eighteen hundreds bands of Native Police under the command of white officers tracked and murdered Aboriginal people still posing a threat to the expansion
of white farms
** The beginning of last century saw the birth of Australian federation. Also the Aboriginal protection laws and reserves were instituted around the country. Most of the surviving aboriginal population were rounded up onto reserves and their lives were regulated, including travel, marriages and employment by white protectors, often police.
Under the protection laws Aboriginal people were paid under award wages, most of which was held by various state governments and never paid to workers or their families. Many Aboriginal Children, especially fair skinned children and those still living a traditional lifestyle, were forcibly removed from their families and raised in orphanages or adopted to white families.
** Today an Aboriginal person is more than 27 times as likely to be imprisoned than a white person, On Average, Aboriginal people die twenty years younger than white people.
Australians all let us rejoice for we are young and free.......Aboriginal culture is the oldest living culture on the planet and Aboriginal people are the most imprisoned people on the planet.
What is exploitation and liberation? Who defines it, the exploited or exploiter, Aboriginal culture or English/Australian culture? Australia's racial discrimination laws gives people of all races and cultures the right to be white. All have legal equality within the frameworks of white industrial democracy and culture. Indigenous rights, or rights generated from migrant cultures other than English are ignored. For example, an aboriginal worker has a legal right to award conditions the same as anyone else. However if they miss work for attending to essential cultural business they may be sacked, they have no indigenous legal rights.
Similarly native title law gives to Aboriginal people certain rights to land within a white framework of land law. White courts and judges adjudicate land disputes and define the territories and legal rights of native titleholders. Aboriginal people have no right within native title to exercise rights and obligations within Aboriginal law except those that conform to white land use notions. For example native title holders will go to gaol if they hunt a protected species of animal on their own country.
Recent movements for justice and social change have included indigenous issues amongst their political demands. I remember the chants echoing around the city skyscrapers "One struggle One fight, women workers blacks unite" as Joh Bjelke Petersens storm troopers were confronted in the streets of Brisbane. This notion of a united front of progressive social movements was itself an alternative dismissal of black perspective. Aboriginal oppression was defined from a Marxist, feminist, anarchist, ecological or social democratic framework. Likewise the strategy for Aboriginal liberation was perceived along white ideological lines.
Today most social activists admit to an ignorance of indigenous issues . This ignorance allows for no constructive collaboration with Aboriginal people. White social movements have objectified Aboriginal people, creating their own concept of what Aboriginal oppression is and how that can be used to further their own white ideologies. In this sense the mode of operation of the alternative movement apes the grotesque failures of mainstream bureaucracy.
I am suggesting that many of the philosophies and ideologies that we espouse as an alternative to the oppression of the mainstream are just as ethnocentric, culturally specific, illusory and oppressive as the status quo. Our movements are charachterised by the three strands of environmentalism, socialism and feminism . It is easy to point the finger at Christianity and see how it was and is used as a tool of invasion and genocide. We should be just as critical of our own sacred cows. Alternative philosophies are just a part of the rich fabric of the invader society imposed on this Aboriginal country.
The Green movement has built a concept of wilderness, without consultation with Aboriginal people, we have generalised that concept, politicised it and it is now a significant issue on the Australian political landscape. Yet the way we have described the natural environment bears no resemblance to its ancient reality.
Modern Australia began with the legal principle of Terra Nullius, meaning a land with no law or government, no sovereign population. The British declared this continent to be Terra Nullius after Captain Cook "discovered" it, which allowed the British Crown to claim possession of the land in accordance with international law. Terra Nullius of course is a lie and was found to be such by the Australian High Court when Eddie Mabo proved that his family had owned their block of land since before Captain Cook.. Anthropologists and Aboriginal people assert that there was, prior to Cook and up until today, a complex and sophisticated system of law, government, economy and language, all the defining points of a sovereign nation.
Despite the high courts findings, Terra Nullius remains as the legal foundation for the sovereignty of the crown in Australia which in turn is the foundation authority for the parliament, courts, police, military and every other migrant legal institution.
Modern Australian conservationism dovetails with the legal fiction of Terra Nullius. Both deny the reality that this country was and still is occupied by a large complex Aboriginal society.
The conservation values of the Australian Bush are usually articulated in terms of species of plants and animals, geological considerations and often last and least, cultural heritage; usually a description of the history of the European colony and, occasionally, a reference to native title holders or Aboriginal place names (with little understanding of the meaning of either).
The principles of ecology and biodiversity have made us aware of the devastating consequences to an eco system if a particular species of plant or animal is removed. For example if a particular bird becomes extinct, the seeds it used to carry do not propagate and the insects it used to eat swell in numbers. Insect plague and reduced propagation in turn affects an infinite number of other organisms, radically degrading the systems of the ecosystem. The balance of bio-diversity has become an accepted principle in green ideology, yet how much have we considered the devastating consequences of removing the human species from wilderness eco-systems? For thousands of years humans interacted with the bush which provided them with all of the resources of daily life.. Human society and the natural eco systems evolved as one. Today we protect places in national parks and nature reserves and pretend that we are preserving their ancient integrity. Yet the form of bush that is protected in the national parks of today, places without the human species, are a phenomenon of the last hundred years, younger than many Australian urban centres. The removal of human beings from the bush in the last two hundred years has turned our wilderness areas into overgrown untended gardens.
Bushfire management is one example that highlights our misunderstandings of the bush. Conservationists have often argued that preventative burning strategies threaten eco systems; and they are right. Many farmers and fire authorities say the only way to avoid super-fires is to burn forest litter, and they are right also. In the old days the landscape was scattered with sacred campfires burning twenty-four hours a day providing a wide range of functional and spiritual purposes. These fires, along with hunting and cleansing fires, were fuelled solely by forest litter, gently and gradually cleaning the bush in a way that does not disrupt the sacred ecosystems that sustained the fire makers.
It has been a long time between sacred fires in many of our protected areas and as such they have degenerated into dormant infernos awaiting ignition.
Environmentalism tends to subscribe to the notion that the natural habitat of the human species is towns and cities, this is our territory and we should stay out of the territories of the other species. Centuries old notions of the evolution of humanity identify a progression from living in the bush in a savage and unsophisticated consciousness, through the epoch of barbarism into civilised society. This Darwinian notion conforms to the idea that the habitat of the modern human is urbanity. The inherent contradiction of this is it is the city structure that is doing most damage to the habitats of all species, including human. As a product of feudalism, industrialisation and capitalism, cities have grown as ever extending cancers, totally destroying the ecosystems of Europe and almost completing that process in Australia. By the simple evolutionary imperative of survival of the species, industrial civilisation represents a failure, it is our greatest threat as a species. the development of urban civilisation has been a process of ignorantly shitting in our own nests for millennia. Compared to the hundreds of thousands of years or more of sustainable human society in the bush, urban society is a dysfunctional devolution and disintegration.
If we are serious about preserving the Australian environment and indeed the human species we must take direction from Aboriginal people, their traditions of are the only record of the true history and nature of the bush, including how humans manage it. Aboriginal culture itself is a working example of a social ecology, including law and the individual and collective consciousness' that have been created by the interrelationship between human society and the wilderness.
Socialism is an ideology born of the emerging working class of the industrial revolution in Europe. The process of environmental degradation, hierarchical social structures, militarisation and the development of the nation state was the social context of socialism. Marx and Lenin both advocated industrialisation as historically inevitable and in the interests if the emancipation of the working class. The push towards centralised industry fuelled by the great wealth and greater greed of the ruling class was a wave on which socialism surfed, failing in any environmental foresight or radical analysis of the means and process of production beyond economic parameters.
Marx's fellow ideologue,Engels speaks of his understanding of Australian Aboriginal society as savagery, the bottom of social evolution yet to transcend into barbarism and then civilisation. (The origin of Family, Private property and the state) Marx and Lenin's prescriptions for European industrialisation were both racist and ignorant of the land rights of peasants sacrificing their land and land based cultures, for the benefit of the developing urban working class.
In Australia the working class has developed as a necessary component of the imposed industrial capitalist economy. There was no working class here until there was capitalism and the both grew together in a symbiotic, yet unfair, history.
Around the beginning of the twentieth century, the highpoint of European socialism, two significant historical events occurred in Australia. One was the development of trade unions and the other was the rounding up of the remnant Aboriginal population from rural areas and incarcerating them on Aboriginal reserves and missions. Up until then there had been over a hundred years of armed resistance to the expansion of white agriculture. The last decades of the nineteenth century saw the native police and their paramilitary commanders systematically massacre aborigines providing any resistance to the new farmlands.
The reserve system and Aboriginal protection laws mopped up the survivors of the war. Only now was it safe for pastoralists to propagate their sheep, cows, pigs, wheat, sugar etc. These developments lead to the necessity of a growing working class.
Today the struggle for control of the means of production is fought over between capital and labour over an economy that was stolen in the first place from Aboriginal people who are poor and unhealthy today as a direct consequence of the original theft. Imperialism and colonisation has always involved the transmigration of a working class as the primary occupation force in securing land from indigenous people. British and Scottish workers in Ireland, Indian workers in Fiji and south Africa, Australia's white Australia policy etc.
The working class did not develop in Australia as in Europe. It was imposed here. The indigenous Australian economy provided a prosperous lifestyle for millions of Aborigines. Trade routes through Indonesia to Asia and the rest of the world meant Australia was a modern dynamic trader in this part of the world also. Yet socialist intellectualism, while welcoming aborigines as fellow workers, has never acknowledged the integrity of the indigenous modes of production in particular the core principle that the earth, not labor, is the basis of the economy. John Howard took full advantage of this situation with his masterful manipulation of unionist forestry workers in Tasmania during the 2004 election campaign. Left wing unions appeared to abandon the labour party and its environmental policies and publicly endorse Howard and his policy that jobs (meaning bosses profit) was more important than the environment. The task of reorganising industry so that it is sustainable into the future has not yet been tackled by the agencies of the working class.
Feminism shares many cultural underpinnings with patriarchy and the nuclear family. Historically feminism is a reaction to patriarchal structures, European notions of freedom, the self and society have not been dismissed by feminism, indeed it is because these notions were not fulfilled for women that feminism been embraced. While feminism has caused superstructural change, more women are achieving more power in white society, the social infrastructure, consciousness itself, remains unchanged.
White consciousness, including feminism sees relationships as isolated units, and men and women as isolated units within that isolated relationship. White consciousness is ego based, the supremacy of the concept of an individual self. Here the nuclear patriarchy and feminism mirror each other, that identity is based on individual ego relationships, . Feminism however goes further in identifying relationship with men as being inherently oppressive. Men therefore need to be disconnected and transcended as a prerequisite to ego satisfaction or "liberation".
The materialistic and individualistic consciousness of capitalism and its consequent mobile workforces dovetail perfectly with feminism and nuclear families alike. The individual is more attracted to upward mobility and individual satisfaction than connection with family and country.
Historically, Aboriginal society has not suffered from notions of patriarchy and the nuclear family until the invasion.. The frameworks of extended family, men's and women's law and men's and women's country has created notions of freedom , self and society based on relationship and connectedness. Exploitation has not been the dynamic between men and women but between white society and and black society. Domestic violence is not a product of a testosterone induced patriarchy inherent in all men but' as with all social dysfunction is a direct consequence of invasion, genocide and colonisation. Similarly notions of healing are based on reconnection with family and country, resolving issues one way or the other.This stands in contrast to feminism's imperative to break free of connection, especially with men.
I assert that feminism, like socialism, Christianity and environmentalism are social constructs of European consciousness that along with capitalism, the nuclear family and everything else make up the colonial matrix that occupies this country. .
The extended family is not just more relatives, it is social processes and law to deal with everything including crisis. These are the very processes that have been smashed in the war of invasion. The fragile system of customary law today, including consciousness based on men's and women's business, family and country need to be respected, resourced and reinforced. It is a different way of life and doing things to the European nuclear family, the state and feminism.
I do not believe that reconciliation can occur by Aboriginal and non Aboriginal Australia meeting in the middle. English/Australian consciousness and culture is at essence hierarchical, literary, individualistic and material/property based. Indigenous culture is at essence lateral and egalitarian, oral (as different from literary), communal and spiritual. Where is the middle ground? So much of traditional Aboriginal society has been smashed during the past two hundred years, including language, the halfway mark of today is well within the cultural "turf" of European society. How far does Aboriginal society have to suffer and move away from its essence before white culture will start to move to the middle? Why would a comfortably numb white society change?
I don't think there is a middle ground, it is an either/or situation : I believe that after thousands of years of war and dislocation there is little left in mainstream culture that is worth preserving. We have created a social monster that is in the process of devouring itself unto extinction. This stands as an antithesis to Aboriginal culture, not as an equal standard by which to design the future.
Reconciliation can only occur when non-indigenous people cross the line. We do not become Aboriginal, we remain the descendants of Irish, English, Japanese etc. We are that same person in the context of Aboriginal reality, rather than colonial reality. As such our own aboriginality of Ireland, England, Japan or wherever comes into focus as does the necessity to contribute to the aboriginal law of where we live now. This is a spiritual transcendence (or paradigm shift if you prefer) that , I claim, is an essential prerequisite to demolish imposed colonial illusions such as Terra Nullius, the "untouched" wilderness and white supremacy in Australia.
Social change in post Nazi Germany involved coming to terms with the reality of history in order to prevent its repeat. Similarly in post apartheid South Africa, the truth and reconciliation process has been central to creating a new nation. In this country I believe the starting point is to come to terms with the history of Invasion, genocide and colonisation of this country. Doing this not only provides political support for Aboriginal Australia, it also demolishes the dominant Australian world view and consciousness that justifies not only genocide but also ecocide.. This allows us, psychologically, to overcome, or at least be aware of the power of hegemonic force to control perspective and opens the door for us to embrace new concepts and perspectives. Like the realisation that Santa is not true, the demolition of the Australian myth is a key part of our maturing as a people. Such an enlightenment calls to question every aspect of modern society and our own place in it, not just Aboriginal issues.
Personally, I do not identify as an Australian. I am an Aborigine of Ireland and England, born in the country of the Yarra people and living on Jaggerra/Turrable country at the time of writing. Aboriginal perspective is a universal consciousness equally as relevant to migrants and indigenous people. Our sacred places including ancestral burial and birthing places are not in this country but they do exist. Our law and traditions have been smashed and in many cases we have been forced off our own land centuries ago. What happened to our families in other parts of the world is happening to Australian Aborigines today. Much of the old culture is left in Australia today and these are signposts, or metaphors even, suggesting to us different parameters of our own reality. What belongs to the people of this country can never belong to us, we have our own places. By learning from people who still have connection to ecological consciousness opens doors to our own humanity that have been closed by mainstream western society. We have a working model of a different way to relate to each other and the environment. This is the twenty-first century and an ecological consciousness will manifest differently today, for both aboriginal and non aboriginal people, than it does in anthropological museums. I must emphasise that I believe that any attempt to reconstruct models of centuries ago, whether traditional Aboriginal culture or Marxism, they will remain as hollow anachronisms. The essence of the ancient cultures around the world is consciousness itself, how consciousness manifests in the material world has always adapted and developed to the conditions of the time, culture is alive and always relevant.
I have noticed that many non-Aboriginal people are seeking insight into Aboriginal spirituality. It appears to me that each person has their own ideological or philosophical matrix that is like a jigsaw puzzle. Over time we build up understandings of ourselves, society and our environment, filling in pieces of the jigsaw. The older we get the more pieces of the jigsaw are put together, beginning to develop a coherent form that can be understood. Yet their is a gap, missing pieces in the area of Aboriginality and the ancient spirituality of the land we are on. We search for missing pieces, usually asking premeditated questions of aboriginal people, based on the logic and form of the rest of the jigsaw. We never get the answers we are looking for, we are given responses to our questions but they do not seem to fit the shape of the missing pieces in our jigsaw, so we continue hunting for more pieces. Whatever the size of our jigsaw, the aboriginal jigsaw will be at least the same size and cannot be crammed into the area of missing pieces in our own jigsaw. To remove a single piece of the Aboriginal jigsaw, which would of itself betray the Aboriginal principle of holism, and then see if it can fit the gaps in the western jigsaw will create a discordant absurdity.
Many of the spiritual questions that non-Aboriginal people ask Aboriginal people can only be answered by people of higher understandings. These understandings were acquired through pain and suffering, both in day to day life and through sacred ceremony and cannot br explained in a one dimensional communication such as writing or speaking. It is unfair to expect these answers, that aboriginal people must labour and suffer for over time, to be handed out cheaply to curious non-Aboriginal people.
So, because the core of the spiritual essence of country resides in a very specific group of people, the issue of Aboriginal authority arises. While we may learn from and participate in dreaming processes, we are visitors, passengers. This is not a black and white issue for the same understandings exist for aboriginal people from other dreamings and areas who must similarly abide by the aboriginal authority of that particular place. Non Aboriginal peoples education of and participation in Aboriginal dreaming and culture will be through relationship and connection with Aboriginal people. Again this is not a black and white thing as all Aboriginal people learn and practice culture by way of relationship and connection.
The genocidal war smashed many of the systems of education into the dreaming and the political structures of governance within Aboriginal sociology. Aboriginal people are denied the proper education of country and dreaming, and that is their birth right, so our capacity as non aboriginal people to learn of the dreaming is severely restricted.
Obviously for non-Aboriginal peopleto learn, Aboriginal culture needs to be healed and reestablished in Aboriginal society. Cultural revival. Cultural revival is an enterprise in itself requiring budgets and resources, while there is a desperate need for it and an eagerness for it to occur it will not simply occur on its own. This is a key role for non indigenous supporters, to provide resources and budgets to develop cultural processes amongst traditional owners and other local aboriginal people. Apart from beginning to rectify the injustices of history, this creates a working entity from whom to learn ( a by-product of involvement in the process).
Reconciliation must be action and outcome based otherwise nothing changes .....If we are not part of the solution we are part of the problem. If we are not directly supporting Aboriginal people and their assertion of sovereignty, no matter what our ideology or personality. we are simply adding to the bulk of the imposed invader society.
Apparently two percent of the Australian population are indigenous. It is too much to ask every Aborigine to educate and organise fifty non aboriginal people. We have to do this ourselves. We must, in some way have a meaningful relationship with Aboriginal people to be able to learn but this must not be a drain on Aboriginal Australia or our search for truth will become a genocidal force in itself. Our connections to Aboriginal Australia have to be those that resource and facilitate aboriginal agendas. To look at the demographics again, enormous progress could be made if each Aboriginal person had financial and other assistance from fifty non Aboriginal people. If everyone gave only ten dollars a week then that Aborigine could be employed to do cultural and community business, pay off a loan to secure land and accommodation or develop some business enterprise Things will only change when things change. Having stolen all material wealth from Aboriginal people, white society must return, even some, wealth before Aboriginal society will have any capacity for social rebuilding and economic self determination.
I do not believe that the governments and bureaucracy will, in the future, do any more than regurgitate dysfunctional programs and continue to erode Aboriginal power and lifestyle. If we wait for the governments the genocide continues
posted by John Tracey | 7:39 PM
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