THE ABORIGINAL WORLDVIEW

Australia's Population Density 2000 [source ABS]

Though most of us cling to the fertile margins of the mainland, our identity as Australians is informed by psychic and digital images of a vast, inhospitable, red emptiness on the other side of the black stump.

To illustrate the gulf between the western worldview and the Aboriginal worldview, let’s focus on the lives of traditional desert peoples rather than today’s urban Aboriginals.

There are three very significant differences between Australian conditions and the European conditions which gave rise first to agriculture and then to industrialisation:

1.      Australia’s seasons were less neatly divided into four predictable parts, than in the west, where temperatures, snow and rainfall levels were different;

2.      In Australia there was not the right mixture of native plants, animals, soils and water for the development of agriculture, and

3.      In Australia opportunities for cross-fertilisation of ideas were limited.