A new British colony

On 22 August 1770, Captain Cook hoisted the Union Jack on Possession Island and claimed the whole east coast of New Holland on behalf of King George III, calling the newly acquired portion New South Wales.

Under International Law at that time - presumably to stop European countries from throwing tantrums over who got more than somebody else – claiming new land required either negotiation of purchase or treaty with existing inhabitants, or that the land be empty. Cook didn't manage to organise a purchase or treaty, so the country was deemed terra nullius - literally a 'land belonging to nobody'.

This transparent lie notwithstanding, when Governor Phillip and the First Fleet arrived in 1788, Phillip was under orders from the British Colonial Office that the natives should be treated kindly, converted to Christianity, offered the blessings of civilisation in the form of food, clothing and education, and hopefully encouraged to trade with Britain.

In Australia’s case there were some factors which would make this 'Church and Trade' policy difficult to implement:

·         the enormous distance from Britain and the communication problems this entailed;

·         the Australian colony was designed as a penal settlement, not as an opportunity to develop a new trading partnership;

·         the first settlers came close to starvation and chose food over friendship with the natives; and, later

·         the enormous distances between Australian settlements, and the communication problems this caused.

The belief of the Colonial Office that they could manage a colony from the other side of the world was a tad optimistic. Governor Phillip took his orders seriously but, as the voyage from England to New South Wales had taken eight months, a quick word with the boss back home was going to be a problem.

In the very first year of settlement, 1788, Governor Phillip sent a message to the Colonial Office outlining his belief that the local Aboriginals had a very strong attachment to the land. (This might sound like an understatement, but I think it reflects Phillip’s relatively decent intentions).

The idea that we are what we do

One of the ways westerners introduce themselves or reveal themselves to strangers is by explaining what they ‘do’ – presumably for a living. We might have a calling, or a career, or a passion, a job, or a Centrelink number. To traditional Aboriginals, this would have all been meaningless.

When people gathered food or ate this was not a living, it was living.

If we could travel back in time and ask a pre-contact Aboriginal what they did all day, they might look at us like we are idiots. Their answer would be they ate food or drank water where it was available, and fulfilled social and religious duties. This is not a job description, but a list of functions like breathing. These are things you do without thinking or questioning because the point of life is to live.

In the west, a large number of us tend to think of those receiving government benefits – whether Aboriginals or whitefellas – as bludgers.

From a traditional Aboriginal’s perspective, government benefits might be thought of in this way:

·         we used to travel, and gather or hunt food.

·         we are no longer able to travel, and gather or hunt food.

·         we no longer have access to our place.

·         we are now expected to go away, sit down and do nothing.

·         we call these benefits ‘sit-down’ money because that is what it represents.

·         this is a strange new idea but it’s the way we must live now.

There is no doubt that for some non-traditional Aboriginals and whitefellas alike the expression ‘sit-down-money’ has something of an ironic ring to it. This is another ‘jobs’ issue we shall return to later.

Origins of the aboriginal worldview. Cross fertilisation of ideas

Early Europe was divided into a series of nations/states primarily as an accident of physical geography. Mountain passes or seas provided natural barriers allowing peoples to form communities and develop languages and ideas in isolation. As the natural barriers were conquered or one people invaded or traded with another, ideas travelled and groups of people learned from each other.

As the environments of most countries had some elements in common, ideas from outside groups were more or less easy to adopt or adapt.

The opportunities for cross-fertilisation of ideas made Europe the home of the industrial revolution. Gunpowder, stirrups and even the humble wheelbarrow were all originally developed in China. Gutenberg was credited with first using moveable type for printing, though the Chinese had even done that before; double-entry book keeping was developed in Italy; the steam engine born in England.

Western ‘advancement’ did not, in any real sense, arise spontaneously in a genetically superior people: In Europe, people advanced technologically because they had the right resources, environments and opportunities to learn from each other.

Before colonisation, Aboriginal trade routes criss-crossed the Australian mainland, bringing coastal people into contact with Indonesians, Malaysians, and Chinese as well as sealers, whalers, and even the odd maritime explorer or two. We use the expression ‘trade-routes’ but this might be a misrepresentation of their function in Aboriginal culture.

For Aboriginals, bartering ensured the availability of some essentials, but its functions were co-operative and social rather than a source of income.

Where ideas available from outsiders were not taken up before colonisation, it was because there was no possibility of applying those ideas.

Aboriginals were not too stupid to try new ideas; for example, once it became clear whitefellas weren't going to take their strange animals and bugger off, Aboriginals had been very quick to build their own pens and herd stock into them.

Origins of the aboriginal worldview. Natural resources

As one early campaigner for Aboriginal equality put it, it would be pretty darned hard to plant anything with only kangaroos to pull a plough – not that there were any ‘farmable’ plants available in a sense westerners identify with agriculture. Many of our native animals produce milk, but koala cheese is not yet widely available from supermarkets. Water in Australia flows unpredictably, and many native plant seeds are only germinated by fire.

In a good year, before colonisation, Aboriginals had no need for a surplus. Even in a bad year, the best way to preserve the food or water available was mostly to leave it where it might be found if needed.

To peoples who have no choice but to take food when and where it can be found, the ideas of deferred gratification, savings or the accumulation of wealth could make no sense at all. It was taken for granted that no one took any more water or food than they needed. Resources were respected rather than ‘saved’ – there was no image in anyone’s head of a store of supplies in the way that we might remember how much cash we have in the rice canister at home.

Before colonisation, the collection of food in Australia was a co-operative effort, and food collected was distributed as part of a reciprocal obligation. Food was not necessarily distributed according to the effort an individual had contributed to its production in the way the western market system rewards individuals for, and encourages, measurable effort.

If an older Aboriginal was given the choicest cuts of kangaroo out of respect, it also meant these cuts were probably the easiest to digest.

In hunter-gatherer societies, most meals come from the women’s and children’s share of food gathering, supplemented at intervals by the super-duper tucker hunted by men. Everyone’s contribution was valued. The distribution of what was produced was based on relationships and protocol.

This system of reciprocity, or mutual obligation, is deeply ingrained in traditional Aboriginal thinking. If there is no greater cohesive force than a mutual threat, the threat of starvation must have created social bonds many westerners don’t experience today. Today, as westerners, we can only guess at how important mutual obligations continue to be for even the most urbanised Aboriginals.

Today, westerners of various religious beliefs congregate together regularly and share food or troubles, but this communion or community is not a constant as it was in traditional Aboriginal society; for us it usually represents at most a partial break from ‘real life’ hours spent earning a wage, travelling to school or shopping. In ‘real life’ food preparation is not always a group effort.

In the absence of any link between an individual's effort today and his/her relative status tomorrow, the western focus on individual achievement could not be relevant to traditional Aboriginals. There was no need for power over the land or even ownership; people were part of the landscape itself, and land had the power to sustain life.

Origins of the aboriginal worldview. Seasons

Australia can be fairly evenly divided into two climate zones: The north is tropical and so has wet and dry seasons, while the south is in a temperate zone with four seasons. As the world’s oldest continent, Australia is also rather flat. Forty percent of the country consists of sand dunes, while in the areas whose climate is temperate most of the land is close to sea level: Snow only falls annually in a very few mountain areas of Australia, and these are not highly populated. Rainfall in either zone in Australia is unreliable, and cycles of drought or wet weather can take years to play out.

Even if there had been the native plants and animals necessary for agriculture to develop in Australia before colonisation, the environment was never going to allow for neat, seasonal spring planting, autumn harvesting, or the production of a surplus.

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.

Timeless western ideas

When I learned at school about the feudal and Georgian eras in England, I was relieved to be living in a nicer time. But no matter how much the world has changed in the last few hundred years or so, there are many western assumptions which have not changed over those years, for example:

·         Land is something which can be bought or sold but ultimately belongs to the Crown;

·         God told Adam and Eve they owned and should control plants and animals, and that they should be farmers;

·         Man is in charge of the landscape. It makes sense to drain swampland, divert rivers, or cut down forests (sometimes);

·         The law is English law;

·         Laws change;

·         Personal gain flows from personal effort;

·         A lack of personal gain must be caused by a lack of personal effort;

·         Personal success leads to a higher status;

·         We have to work hard both to survive and to save;

·         Our duty to ourselves is stronger than our duty to our community;

·         Saving is good; [Not saving is bad.]

·         Some goods are consumed instantly when we use them. Some things like land can be used repeatedly to increase wealth;

·         There are only four certainties in life: Birth, death, taxes and warfare.

Few of us, in Australia or anywhere else in the west, would have much trouble following the potted history above, whether we agree with its opinions or not. 
I doubt many early settlers questioned these assumptions which would make it difficult to ‘civilise’ Australia’s indigenous people. Beyond curiosity or fear, many seem to have given little thought to Australia’s first people at all. 
Certainly, none of these ideas we take for granted would have made any sense to Aboriginal Australians: Many Aboriginal Australians today still have no frame of reference which could help them follow these ideas. But when Australia was colonised, these ideas were neither questioned nor negotiable.