What if you lived in Australia?

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by effCup

~7.3 for Maori. Gap narrowing since mid-1990s. There's also a recognised systemic bias in how Maori are treated by the health system--i.e. badly.

Some historical context.

Very interesting on the pre-contact Maori life expectancies . . . they were pretty near living in heaven, so far as the world at the time was. The Pacific Northwest was similar, lots and lots of food . . . salmon at your doorstep.

Much of the rest of native Americans seem to have been malnourished, on the edge of starvation-- bones suggest that iron was hard to come by, anemia rampant.

But in the Pacific Northwest, between seafood and berries, folks were fat and happy . . . till smallpox came and wiped out much of the population.

Originally Posted by effCup

edit: Speaking of which, Oregonians make beer from sewage. What does fourex stand for, again? Weak peas?

Yup, they'll make beer out of anything, and Portlandia isn't really parody, there's a lot of earnest do-gooders, and the world's richest man made a point of drinking water from recycled from human waste

"Bill Gates drinks water distilled from human faeces"
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30709273

But back to Oz: the thing about the Aboriginals that impresses me is that they lived successfully in a climate that's got a million ways to kill you. That's the tragedy: what they were really good at, isn't valued anymore. There were tracks I drove, and thought dangerous, that these folks routinely walked, barefoot.

The things the Maori and the native Americans were good at are easier for us to understand-- everyone admires a big warrior, even an Indian fighter like Sherman was named after an Indian warrior. But being able to survive in the Simpson desert?

That's just beyond our ken. We couldn't even imagine doing it. Aboriginals routinely made journeys on bare feet that no one would even try.

[Dr Pepper]

Originally Posted by deepsepia

Very interesting on the pre-contact Maori life expectancies . . . they were pretty near living in heaven, so far as the world at the time was. The Pacific Northwest was similar, lots and lots of food . . . salmon at your doorstep.

Much of the rest of native Americans seem to have been malnourished, on the edge of starvation-- bones suggest that iron was hard to come by, anemia rampant.

But in the Pacific Northwest, between seafood and berries, folks were fat and happy . . . till smallpox came and wiped out much of the population.





The things the Maori and the native Americans were good at are easier for us to understand-- everyone admires a big warrior, even an Indian fighter like Sherman was named after an Indian warrior. But being able to survive in the Simpson desert?

That's just beyond our ken. We couldn't even imagine doing it. Aboriginals routinely made journeys on bare feet that no one would even try.

At the risk of pointing out the blindingly obvious-Maori are the indigenous inhabitants of NZ not Australia-and of totally different racial and cultural history. Other than the fact that several hundred thousand currently live in Australia, they are hardly germane to a discussion on Australian indigenous peoples.......

More to the point-you cannot make any meaningful comparisons between the (pre-European contact) respective cultures and way of life of each racial group.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by Dr Pepper

At the risk of pointing out the blindingly obvious-Maori are the indigenous inhabitants of NZ not Australia-and of totally different racial and cultural history. Other than the fact that several hundred thousand currently live in Australia, they are hardly germane to a discussion on Australian indigenous peoples.......

More to the point-you cannot make any meaningful comparisons between the (pre-European contact) respective cultures and way of life of each racial group.

Yes, I know that the Maori are in NZ/ Aotearoa - and rather recent arrivals at that.

My point was to look at the experience of indigenous peoples in three British offshoot nations-- NZ, Australia, and the U.S. (I didn't mention Canada, though there are some important distinctions between the Canadian experience and the U.S.) I don't think that Australian intentions were any better or worse than those of white folks in NZ or North America, but the outcomes seem quite different.

My impression is that the aboriginal Australians fared the worst, and that's what the numbers indicate. The question is why.

There are some institutional reasons -- in NZ and the US, indigenous peoples have a constitutional status, in NZ because of Waitangi, in the US because they're recognized as foreign nations in the Constitution. In Australia, by contrast, the country was declared "terra nullius" -- an empty land. It's only in our lifetimes that they've actually become full citizens of Australia, in the 1967 referendum, and only much more recently -- up to the present-- that they've gotten land titles.

But I think that the constitutional status was much less important than the political and military status. Aboriginal Australians were never able to put up a signficant fight, in the way that the Maori and the native Americans were.

Similarly, no Aboriginal leaders were able to have the political impact of the King Movement in NZ, or Chief Joseph in the US.

Again, that's not a slight on the Aboriginals -- they were good at something entirely different, living and surviving on a huge continent, for perhaps 40,000 years or more with no contact with anyone else. They are descended, most likely, from the very first men to push out from Africa and across Asia (they -- I think uniquely among modern men-- have Denisovan DNA)

So in my travels I saw aboriginal communities that looked to be doing very badly. By contrast, I thought white Australians paid much more attention to the issue than white Americans do to naive American issues. In an aboriginal community near Broome, I ran into girls from a rather posh Melbourne school who were up there for school holidays working . . . Would be unusual to see something like that in the US.

Similarly, Tony Abbott made a point of saying that he wanted to make aboriginal affairs a personal responsibility -- we've never had a US president say anything like that about Native American issues.

NZ is obviously quite different because the Maori population is so much larger, proportionately, so they can't be ignored politically.

[Dr Pepper]

Is this discussion morphing into a comparison of various natives peoples' experience of western colonisation-in which case I 'd suggest that most examples are uniformly bad-or a discussion on why the state of the Australian native peoples seems-to the outsider so much worse than the other examples? [we haven't even looked at Africa-and that could provide fodder for an entire forum till the end of time.]

I think it is an oversimplification to even make the comparisons-the histories of the various examples are driven by their physical environments and established well before any European contact. In the case of the Australian peoples I would argue that having survived for such an extended period in a physical environment that was largely inimical to humans and did not permit anything other than a nomadic hunter gatherer existence, confined to small extended family groups there was neither the opportunity nor the cultural evolutionary pressure to aggregate in to larger group which in turn permit both cultural expansion-in terms of tribalism-and the competition for resources which drives both warfare and development.

If this is the case-and there is little evidence for the counter argument-then you have a society which does not change significantly over millennia-and hence the relative gap between indigenes and colonisers is about as wide a you can get anywhere in human society (with the possible exception of a few relict Amazonian populations) . Can 200 years of western influence-both positive and negative influences-close a 40 millennia gap?

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by Dr Pepper

Is this discussion morphing into a comparison of various natives peoples' experience of western colonisation-in which case I 'd suggest that most examples are uniformly bad-or a discussion on why the state of the Australian native peoples seems-to the outsider so much worse than the other examples? [we haven't even looked at Africa-and that could provide fodder for an entire forum till the end of time.]

Australia, NZ, the US and Canada are quite similar as British offshoot nations. I wouldn't compare African or other colonial/indigene encounters to them.

And the general thrust of my observations just reflects my experience of Australia, a place which is very similar in many ways to the US in attitudes and in many aspects of politics.

So its interesting to compare. The same thought occurred to Neville Shute a generation ago, see his book Beyond the Black Stump.

Originally Posted by Dr Pepper

I think it is an oversimplification to even make the comparisons-the histories of the various examples are driven by their physical environments and established well before any European contact.

But political scientists do make these comparisons, all the time. You can always argue that the particulars are too different, but I do think its useful to look at the distinctions in constitutional status, and how they came about. There will always be limitations to comparisons, but I think you can draw some conclusions -- for example "its better to have constitutional standing than not".

Originally Posted by Dr Pepper

In the case of the Australian peoples I would argue that having survived for such an extended period in a physical environment that was largely inimical to humans and did not permit anything other than a nomadic hunter gatherer existence, confined to small extended family groups there was neither the opportunity nor the cultural evolutionary pressure to aggregate in to larger group which in turn permit both cultural expansion-in terms of tribalism-and the competition for resources which drives both warfare and development.

Yes, that's probably true. One of the distinctions you see in both NZ and the US is much larger numbers of indigenous surviving, so that, for example, there are some 200,000 people on the Hopi and Navajo reservation in the Four Corners area. That's enough to sustain native language and culture, in a way that scattered bands can't. Maori numbers and concentration on the North Island are probably roughly similar.

Originally Posted by Dr Pepper

If this is the case-and there is little evidence for the counter argument-then you have a society which does not change significantly over millennia-and hence the relative gap between indigenes and colonisers is about as wide a you can get anywhere in human society (with the possible exception of a few relict Amazonian populations) . Can 200 years of western influence-both positive and negative influences-close a 40 millennia gap?

I think the Western encounter with the aboriginals was more decisively destructive than with indigenous Maori or native Americans. Native Americans and Maori understood what was happening to them, and were able to respond politically-- that facilitated their survival as cultures.

One of the great comparison reads is about events in the NT in the 1920s. There's a fantastic book by a Englishman turned jackaroo, Tom Cole called "Hell West and Crooked". There's another book, by an anthropologist called "Donald Thompson in Arnhem Land", which covers some of the same events, but giving the aboriginal side of the story (Thomson was a great linguist, and spoke several Aboriginal languages). The events were famous at the time, involving rape of aboriginal women by pearl fisherman, revenge killings, and then a subsequent police mission.

For my money, reading these two books together was a great education on "what happens on a frontier" between indigenes and colonialists, and I can think of many similar episodes in the history of US- native American encounters.

[Krackerjackdk]

The ONLY way to fix this world is to OUTLAW (ban) ALL political parties!

ONLY truely independent politicians to be alowed to sit in parliament or be allowed to run for public office.

[Krackerjackdk]

"Political Parties are the cancer at the heart of our democracy" - DIRECT QUOTE from recently retired US Republican Congressman Michael 'Mickey' Edwards

[Krackerjackdk]

Further, NO MORE 'Professional Career Politicians' allowed!!

Outlaw the ridiculous practice, whereby politically active schoolies, 'VIRTUALLY ALWAYS' from families strongly connected to some political party, leave school to attend university SOLELY to become involved in student politics and then leave uni to offer their services as staffers to MP's of their favorite political party in the hope that they will receive pre-selection for a future safe seat in parliament so that they can bludge off the public purse for the rest of their miserable parasitic lives!!!

Make it 'LAW' that All politicians MUST have held a normal regular job for a minimum of 15 years before being allowed to run for parliament in order to have experienced life outside of politics and acquired normal life skills like the general population have to!!!

This is the ONLY way to rid the democratic system of crooked career party affiliated politicians who are so easily corrupted by rich media moguls and other high wealth individuals and return ownership of the democratic process back to the people.

[blondifan]

Originally Posted by deepsepia

...

Again, that's not a slight on the Aboriginals -- they were good at something entirely different, living and surviving on a huge continent, for perhaps 40,000 years or more with no contact with anyone else.

60,000 years.

"There were many violent acts of resistance, replicated the country over, as Aboriginal people took a stand against the occupation of their land and the destruction of their social, religious, legal and communal systems. Some Aboriginal people soon become afraid of entering Sydney Town because of the threat of gunshot wounds and death. There had been many wounded and killed and other encounters known of in the bush because Aboriginal people were present wherever farmers went and they always resisted the taking over of their land." http://www.sydneybarani.com.au/sites/first-contact/

Originally Posted by deepsepia

...
Similarly, Tony Abbott made a point of saying that he wanted to make aboriginal affairs a personal responsibility ...

What Tony says and what he attempts to do, before it's usually blocked by a hostile senate, are two entirely different things, unless he backflips again.
There was a kind of pre-election pledge to spend time in Aboriginal communities on an annual basis.
Around 18 months later he showed up for a photo opportunity.

The Prime Minister looked directly at the television cameramen recording his every move.
"Okay, ready?",
And then, he planted a delicate kiss on the head of a Yolngu baby being held by its mother in a nursery in Gunyangara.
It was a presidential moment. What the networks didn't show was what happened next.
"Was I allowed to do that?", he laughed nervously.

... and in atypical fashion, acts first and thinks about it later.

...the visit was highly choreographed, at least from the media's point of view. To give an idea of scale, there were more than a dozen journalists, cameramen and photographers following the PM. We needed a convoy of our own (of course with Departmental staff the drivers) to follow him around. Much of the time, we were told where to go, where to stand and when to leave.

http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2...us-australians

Compared with Abbott's Australia Day faux par of 26th Jan 2014 ” stating that Australia was “nothing but bush” before British invasion and called pre-colonisation civilisation “extraordinarily basic and raw”. https://newmatilda.com/2014/11/14/to...ite-settlement

$534 million cut to Indigenous programs.
Hardly befitting of a 'self appointed' “Prime Minister for Aboriginal Affairs”/"Minister for Womens Affairs"/"The infrastructure PM/One Man band."

[blondifan]

Words (& Music) by Matt Taylor.
1st chorus and latter part of second chorus. It seems topical and has been playing in my head for days.

"I got the fair dinkum fair dinkum Aussie Blues
Sometimes I get the feeling this poor boy has been abused
Weaned on Mickey Mouse the t.v. big cars and processed food
Where the dollar is religion, this sure aint doing me no good.

... the black man and his dreamtime seem to be far more real
than the party pies and beer that make the iron man big deal"

Lyrics do not exist online for this radio single from 1974, nor does audio streaming (Youtube or otherwise) for the song.


Cultural cringe?