It’s been quite a week in the ‘you couldn’t make this up if you tried’ stakes. First, there was Sudanese race-grifter Nyadol Nyuon sneering that there is no white culture, closely followed by revelations that her father was a brutal warlord who ran guns and child soldiers for Joseph Kony, among many other unsavoury activities. Then, just when the chattering elite were losing their minds at Pauline Hanson for noting just how primitive ‘the world’s oldest living culture’ really was… the current members of that culture started once again acting as primitive as could be.
Unless, perhaps burdened by a modern education, you think that warring clans of desert-dwelling tribes going at it hammer-and-tongs – or more correctly, spear-and-axe – in the dusty strip between rows of tin humpies is the acme of civilisation.
The two family groups fought with spears, compound bows and metal objects at about 11.45pm on Monday in the troubled Northern Territory township of Wadeye, police said.
[A] 22-year-old man suffered serious injuries after being hit with the spear, and he was extracted from a home by police and taken to the local health clinic for treatment.
A vehicle was also set alight during the clash, which came less than a week after a 28-year-old man was shot in the chest with an arrow in a drive-by attack near the town’s main oval.
Wadeye is home to about 2,000 people from 28 different clans.
And they hate each other with a Paleolithic rage.
Last month a large group of armed men attacked police with arrows and rocks, in March officers were attacked with spears, in February hundreds of armed men fought in the street during multiple large-scale disturbances, and in January a brawl erupted involving hundreds of people, some armed with edged weapons.
That is totally not the sort of thing knuckle-dragging primitives would do.
Let’s be fair, though: it’s just that ‘oldest living culture’ doing what it’s been doing for 45,000 years. Only now with metal weapons and bows and arrows. Who said they’re primitive?
Hanson’s crime was to notice the toolkit. On a podcast last year she asked what, exactly, tens of thousands of years of continuous culture had produced besides rock art and a stubborn refusal to invent the wheel. The uniparty and the identitarian commentariat clutched their pearls so hard they nearly dislocated a shoulder. ‘Racist.’ ‘Vile.’ ‘Belittling.’ Meanwhile, in Wadeye, the continuity was being demonstrated with a sharp stick, rather than a bent one.
The fashionable dodge is to blither some empty piety about ‘colonialism’. The only problem is that blood was staining the wattle, and the red dirt, for 45,000 years before the British effectively beamed in in a spaceship.
The British did not enter a peaceful continent. They entered a continent occupied by peoples living in what, in the older anthropological sense, was one of the most materially primitive and socially fragmented forms of human organisation still surviving on earth: thousands of small, mobile, familial groups, without settled agriculture, cities, writing, courts, police or any authority standing above them capable of ending feud and revenge. It is difficult to conceive of a substantially simpler enduring form of human social organisation. Below the small local group lies little more than the immediate or extended family itself.
The biggest problem is that this primitive society was reproductively isolated in a very small population for a very long time: around 1600 generations. A guaranteed recipe for devastating in-breeding without some form of female transfer between groups, which, if you know anything about human behaviour, was never going to be remotely peaceful.
Revenge killing, payback, punitive expeditions, sorcery killing, ritual punishment, conflict over women and armed fighting between neighbouring groups were already part of the continent’s human landscape. Within the societies in which these practices operated, much of this violence was not regarded as aberrant criminality but as culturally sanctioned conduct, expected, legitimate and, in some circumstances, obligatory.
Even if you try, as so many people who should know better (and a great many more who are incapable of doing so) do, to dismiss this as ‘a colonial narrative’, there’s the inescapable evidence of the archaeological record. Well, whatever’s left that hasn’t been ‘repatriated’ and conveniently buried again, out of sight of scientific scrutiny.
Narrabeen Man on Sydney’s northern beaches was speared about four thousand years before Arthur Phillip. Kaakutja in north-western NSW died of weapon trauma in the 13th century. The bones keep turning up. Across tens of thousands of years, even a modest recurring rate of lethal violence adds up to a body count measured in millions.
The great con is to treat 1788 as Year Zero for violence and 45,000 years as a hippy commune with ochre. If the culture is truly continuous, then so is the payback. British law, police and a state monopoly on force did not invent Aboriginal killing. They interrupted it.
Where that monopoly frays – Wadeye, Yuendumu and Alice on a Friday night – the old software reboots. Same clans, same grievances, better hardware (entirely thanks to the ‘colonisers’).
Hanson used an ugly word. Wadeye used an ugly weapon. One of those things is a description and the other is a demonstration. Guess which one the chattering elite would rather hold a forum about.
