If we’re to believe the ‘indigenous culture’ vultures, pre-1788 Australia was a paradise, where Aborigines lived in blissful plenty. Violence was unknown – indeed, Aboriginal ‘academics’ like Marcia Langton flatly assert that violence was only introduced to Australia by ‘colonialism’.
Which is odd, given the extraordinary rates of trauma evident in the few Aboriginal remains scientifically studied. One wonders why so many Aboriginal activists are so keen to ‘repatriate’ Aboriginal remains and secretly ‘re-bury’ them. It’s almost like they’re trying to dispose of the evidence.
And no wonder the ‘culture’ vultures are so ga-ga for Bruce Pascoe’s risible nonsense, Dark Emu. Like the magic Māori supposedly discovering science and Antarctica, Pascoe’s magic Aborigines supposedly invented everything from agriculture to democracy.
Which is odd, considering that 10,000 years of progress kicked off in the rest of the world by the Neolithic Revolution completely bypassed the Australian continent.
One continent, and only one, is entirely lacking in any evidence of a “Neolithic Revolution”: Australia, whose indigenous population continued very largely, if not entirely, as nomadic hunter-gatherers until Europeans arrived in 1788 […]
The total failure of pre-contact Aboriginal society to advance in nearly all significant areas of the economy and technology is indicative of what Aboriginal society was actually like. To put the matter bluntly, pre-contact Aboriginal society consisted of 65,000 years of murderous, barbaric savagery.
Not even that. The ‘65,000 years’ claim, despite being promoted enthusiastically by the culture vultures, is almost certainly completely fictitious. It relies entirely on a single study that was long ago debunked by other scientists.
Ancient and non-Western peoples regularly built structures of enormous, even incredible, size, obviously without any mechanical equipment.
The Great Pyramid was built around 5,000 years ago. It remained the tallest man-made structure in the world for the next 3500 years. Angkor Wat, built in Cambodia a thousand years ago, is the largest religious structure ever built.
Even in the heart of the “Dark Continent”, Great Zimbabwe, built between 1100 and 1300 AD, was a gigantic royal palace, with walls 11 metres high. Impressive ancient structures like these, built entirely by non-Europeans, can be found in all parts of the world – with one striking exception. Pre-contact Australia was entirely devoid, not merely of impressive buildings, but of permanent structures of any kind.
Beginning with the Sumerians nearly 6,000 years ago, every inhabited continent on Earth produced written languages. Except one: Australia.
For all their blatherskite about ‘truth-telling’, the Aboriginal industry is notably averse to admitting the harsh truth: Aboriginal Australia was a savage, violent place.
Living, as hunter-gatherers invariably do, entirely at the whim of nature, Aborigines widely practiced infanticide and cannibalism. Faced with the perennial problem of too many mouths to feed, they simply eliminated the excess mouths.
As the University of Michigan anthropology professor Aram Yengoyan put it:
“Infanticide [in Aboriginal society] was the primary means of population control. In theory, infanticide could have been as high as 40 per cent to 50 per cent of all births, and the population would have survived. In actuality, infanticide rates were lower, and probably ranged from 15 per cent to 30 per cent of all births.”
Contemporary European observers generally agreed that about 30 per cent of Aboriginal babies were murdered at birth.
To be fair, this was a necessary and brutal practical result to an existential problem. As was the well-attested practice of eliminating children born with any form of disability. It was a matter of survival.
But that doesn’t make it at all attractive. Not even the most stridently ‘anti-Colony’ activist would – and they conspicuously don’t – choose to live an authentically pre-1788 lifestyle.
Unquestionably the most dramatically appalling aspect of pre-contact Aboriginal society was the widespread custom of eating human flesh. There are literally hundreds of accounts of Aboriginal cannibalism, dating from the earliest European settlements through to the 1930s or even later. These accounts came from every part of Australia with the possible exception of Tasmania; they were written by intelligent and honourable persons who were not in contact with each other, in writings often not meant for publication, by commentators who were often highly sympathetic to the Aborigines – for example Daisy Bates (1859–1951). Their many descriptions of Aboriginal cannibalism were made so often and so regularly as to seem ubiquitous.
Without a doubt, vocal ‘Aboriginal activist’ women, from Marcia Langton to Lidia Thorpe, would be appalled at their treatment in traditional Aboriginal society.
The savage and brutal mistreatment of their women was endemic to Aboriginal society. In the words of the Congregationalist missionary George Taplin:
“The treatment which women experience must be taken into account in considering the causes which lead to the destruction of native tribes. Amongst them the woman is an absolute slave. She is treated with the greatest cruelty and indignity, and has to do all laborious work, and to carry all the burthens. For the slightest offence or dereliction of duty, she is beaten with a waddy or yamstick and not infrequently speared […] The woman’s life is of no account if the husband wishes to destroy it, and no one ever attempts to protect or take her part under any circumstance” […]
Given the appalling history of the mistreatment of Aboriginal women during the 65,000 years before the arrival of Europeans, it seems certain that their comprising a disproportionate percentage of domestic violence victims must be a continuation of this age-old pattern.
Which is in stark contrast the claims of Langton in Australia, and Marama Davidson in New Zealand, that the outsized proportion of indigenous women and children in domestic violence and abuse statistics is all the White Man’s fault.
Anything but real truth-telling.
