The Australian Aborigines were also hard done by by white Australians. But that also does not mean that their lives were idyllic.
Like most of the human race for most of history, they were hunter gatherers. In the South Australian Museum you can see Aboriginal stone tools on display next to almost identical ones from Europe. The fact that they progressed no further was not their fault, but the fault of the country. The Australian flora is poorly suited for the development of agriculture, and its fauna even less suited for domestication.
Traditionally, the Aborigines went about stark naked. Even the occasional string pubic apron was an exception to the rule. Their houses were the most basic of shelters. In summer, when we swelter in humid heat, and I need to apply sunscreen just to walk around outside, I appreciate why the original inhabitants were black. However, when people complain about the cold in wintertime, I also say, "On days like this the original inhabitants wore nothing at all." It must have been particularly bad in the southern states, where winter is also the wet season. Sure, they had possum skin cloaks, but their feet were always bare, and you can't hunt kangaroos wrapped in a possum skin robe. I can't imagine what it must have been like for mothers of new babies during the rainy southern winter, because no white man ever visited their camps at such times to inform us. I notice that not even the "back to nature" crowd want to discard clothes, blankets, and solid buildings.
Hunter gatherers adjust poorly to settled life, because their customs are so different, beginning with their child rearing methods. Hunter gatherers train their children in self-reliance, whereas settled people, even the more primitive ones, train them in obedience and respect for property. Thus, a Zulu boy would be put in charge of a herd of cattle, and would be severely punished if he let one get lost. His Aboriginal counterpart, however, would be allowed to eat the small animal he caught, being freed from the rule of sharing imposed on the adult hunter, because they want him to grow up to be an effective hunter.
In a hunter gatherer society, when the food becomes scarce in one area, they move to another. If there have been personal quarrels, they make sure that when the new camp is set up, those involved are living apart. In other words, hunter gatherers solve problems by walking away from them. Little facility also exists for the storage of food, or the accumulation of wealth, so hunter gatherers stop working once they have achieved their immediate aim. They work in order to buy leisure. There is evidence that urban Aborigines have carried over these habits into city life, where they are inappropriate. Furthermore, Aboriginal society had the laudable custom of sharing. When a hunter brought in a kangaroo, it was divided up according to a rigorous formula, ensuring that those unlucky in the hunt didn't miss out. Unfortunately, this custom is one of the biggest obstacles to advancement in civilisation. Any Aborigine who earns significant money is immediately set upon by relatives intent on getting their cut. There is even a name for it: "humbugging", and it ensures that no individual can succeed by hard work.
Although it is not specific to hunter gatherers, an important part of child rearing among the Aborigines was the initiation. Children were, by and large, indulged. However, the boys at least knew that when they entered their teens they would be put through the initiation into manhood, a ritual intended to knuckle them down under the authority of the older men. Secret religious beliefs would be explained to them. More to the point, they would go through a long series of phases in which certain foods were taboo, and it was tabooed to speak to certain relatives. Whenever an adult male spoke to an initiate, the latter had to stop and think whether he was allowed to reply in words. Men who went through such an initiation developed strong self control. However, nowadays a lot of the males are not initiated, but they are still molly-coddled as children. The result is that many of them are not the men their grandfathers were.
Frequently, initiation involved painful procedures which the boy was supposed to accept manfully without murmur - procedures such as knocking out a tooth, or the cutting and scarification of the chest, or circumcision (with stone knives). The desert tribes used to, and may well still do, practise subincision, in which the bottom of the penis is cut open to expose the urethra. Often, while the boy was being initiated, one of the older men would further extend his own subincision. The tribes who practised it insisted that sex was more enjoyable for both men and women if the man was subincised. It is a contention I have preferred not to put to the test.
In the desert life was hard, but even in the best of climes feeding all the extra mouths was not easy. Infanticide ran at thirty to fifty percent.
Needless to say, Aboriginal religion was, and is, superstition. They would will themselves to die if a witchdoctor pointed a bone at them. They lived in terror of the kurdaitcha man, the tribal executioner who walked on shoes of emu feathers to avoid leaving prints. When a person died, his name became taboo, lest his ghost hear it and come back to trouble the living. (Is this also the reason for avoiding photos and tape recordings of deceased persons? This is obviously a new custom, but nobody ever asks the rationale for it.) The C.S.I.R.O. (that is the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization) actually endorsed the ubiquitous smoking ceremony as driving out evil spirits. Does any scientist really believe this? Ditto such things as the Rainbow Serpent and the Lightning Man. As a matter of respect, we should not desecrate their sacred sites, but we do the Aborigines a disfavour if we talk as if we consider there is any validity in their superstitions.
Traditional society was violent. Constant raiding for women and blood feuds ("pay back") were an endless source of killings. In Arnhem Land during the period 1909 to 1929, there were 200 men killed in pitched battles and smaller raids - all this is a population of about 3,000, making an average annual casualty rate of 1:300. William Buckley, who lived for three decades among the Wathaurung of Victoria before the commencement of white settlement, witnessed 50 violent deaths. Although cannibalism was rare among the Aborigines, it was well attested on the Cape York Peninsula. Even during "normal" camp live, there was a tendency to bring out the nulla nullas when quarrels arose. The anthropologist, M. J. Meggitt, who worked among the Warlpiri in the 1950s ie before the introduction of alcohol, recorded how, with the egging-on by the women such fights would envelope half the camp.
Violence against women was endemic and universal. The earliest white settlers reported women repeatedly being bashed on the head with clubs for trivial reasons. Examination of thousands of bones spanning a period of 50,000 years revealed evidence of female head injuries indicative of being hit with clubs, usually from behind: 20 - 33% in the tropics, 44% around Adelaide - much higher than on male skulls.
Polygamy was uncommon among hunter gatherers due to the difficulty of a man in supporting more than one family. However, the Aborigines got around it by their custom of sharing. The older men monopolized the women while the younger men as often as not went without. Husbands were a generation older than their wives, and girls were married off very young - sometimes as young as eight. Meggitt reports how, if a man already had a wife, the new prepubescent wife would be left alone for a while, but if he had no other wife he would enthusiastically copulate with an eight year old girl. When women are hitched with men a generation older, and every man had to wait until he is 30 or even 40 before he can marry, you can imagine the sexual tensions in the society. While the older men had multiple wives, every woman ended up passing through several harems during her lifetime. The irony is, you will read on the internet that patriarchy did not commence until the invention of agriculture.
Nothing of this is controversial. It is all well documented. Looked at objectively, what is the value of traditional society? Is there any manner in which it can be considered superior to ours?
What about the present day? It is no secret that their lives, particularly those of the full bloods in the remote communities, are inferior to those of white people in almost every measure. Their economic level is pathetic. They are more than ten times as likely to end up in prison. Their lifespan is lower by a couple of decades. So what are the major barriers which stand in their way?
- Firstly, there is the obvious fact that most of the tribal lands are situated far from industries. What sort of industry is likely to develop in the heart of the desert, or along the coast of Arnhem Land? White people move to where the jobs are. Capitalists start their enterprises where the people are, or where the resources they need are available. In many cases, that means leaving the tribesmen behind.
- As mentioned previously, many of the customs of a hunter gatherer society are counterproductive in the modern world.
- Lack of education. Universities provide scholarships and special facilities for white people with some remote Aboriginal ancestry. However, in the remote, largely full blood communities the main trouble is getting the children to attend primary school rather than play truant.
- Lack of English skills. This relates back to the no. 3. In the past it was the older generation who lacked English skills. Now, all too often, the elders can speak it but the youngsters are woeful.
- In traditional society adults were pretty healthy. Now their life span is much reduced. However, on observation this will be seen not to be due to infections, but to lifestyle type diseases e.g. those due to alcohol, tobacco, junk food, and violence.
- And most of all, there is the baleful lifestyle of the remote communities, crippled by alcohol, pornography, and welfare i.e. "sit down money". Traditional society was violent, and women were treated as a lower form of life, but the level of violence is remote communities is so horrific it is hard to contemplate - along with the sexual abuse of children, which was rare in the old days. I don't know of anybody who denies these facts.
The half-Aboriginal Senator, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, the face of the "No" campaign against the Voice, ruffled the feathers of the usual suspects when she said that modern Aborigines do not suffer from "colonisation". However, looked at objectively, how are the above problems the fault of white society except in the most general way? The authorities want Aboriginal children to attend school, not to wag them. It is not the fault of white society that it is uneconomical to start industries in remote tribal areas. I suppose one could say that alcohol, tobacco, and pornography were introduced by white society, but they are "gifts" which the Aborigines are perfectly capable of rejecting. Looked at objectively, also, these problems are structural and long-standing. They won't be easily solved by Government action.
It is equally obvious that the old, tired explanation, "racism" doesn't apply. On the contrary, if these conditions disappeared, so would a lot of prejudice against Aborigines. There are a few people who, for some unfathomable reason, simply despise people different from themselves, but for most people prejudice is something which comes with having negative experiences of the group in question, and extrapolating from there. As for "systemic racism", if you ever see an explanation of what this is supposed to be, you will see that it accepts, totally uncritically, the supposition that, in the normal course of events, all groups would end up exactly equal in all respects, and the only reason it doesn't happen is that the better off group is somehow suppressing the other. Remove that supposition, and the whole house of cards disappears.
As for "compensation" or "reparations" or "paying the rent", I've noticed that all the Aborigines (mostly light skinned) advocating such things are wearing clothes. I'm also prepared to bet that they sleep on mattresses under solid roofs, use metal tools and cooking equipment, and, when they get sick, go to a doctor. None of these were available in traditional tribal society. If this isn't compensation, what is? Dispossession was not pleasant, but that was a long time ago. No-one wants to go back to the traditional lifestyle. The problem is integrating Aborigines into modern white society.
For that matter, I have serious doubts about the value of "land rights". No-one is trying to turf Aborigines out of their homes in order to make money, and even if they were, the practice should be illegal without asking whether the current occupants of the relevant area were the traditional owners. Land rights legislation typically holds up economic development of a site while rival Aboriginal groups squabble over who the traditional owners really are, and then they squabble over what sort of royalties or compensation should be involved. What they really should be concerned about is setting up industries and providing work for the local Aborigines. They need to be integrated into modern society.
There is one other point that needs to be made. A small racial or ethnic minority can survive only if it remains poor and marginalised. Once they become prosperous, the individuals move out of the ethnic enclave, marry into the greater society, and become assimilated to it. The Jews are aware of this, and recognize that in the Diaspora assimilation is destroying their identity. In New Zealand a lot of people identify as Māoris, but few if any of them are full blooded. Likewise, when the Aborigines eventually cease to be poor and marginalised, it will mean the virtual extinction of full blooded Aborigines, and a major connection with the remote past will have been severed. It is not something I relish. I would like to see the Aboriginal race remain a distinct branch of the human family indefinitely, but not at the expense of the suffering of the individuals.
More discussion here.
