You Won’t See That as Pre-Game Entertainment

Imagine if they preceded the opening of Australia’s peak science body with a mass led by a Pentecostal preacher. The collective shrieking of the chattering classes would be deafening. But, put on a bit of oogabooga mysticism, and suddenly, everyone comes over all solemn and worshipful.

That’s what happened last year in Canberra, when the Australian Academy of Science re-opened its headquarters with an “Aboriginal smoking ceremony”. No, not the “traditional smoking ceremony” of 2021, where Aboriginal activists tried to burn down the Museum of Australian Democracy. This was the full, ungabunga package.

The Academy aimed to “cleanse the energy” of those present. What the scientists meant by “cleanse the energy” I’m not sure, it sounds like a soap ad. I thought smoking ceremonies were to drive out bad spirits – that’s what it says here […] with the authority of the CSIRO:

Smoking Ceremony: The ceremony aims to cleanse the space (of evil spirits) in which the ceremony takes place and to cleanse the participants, who are asked to take in the smoke that comes from the earth to protect them on that Country… People are encouraged to walk through the smoke to cleanse their spirits.

Why don’t they just wave around a few crystals and clang on a Tibetan Singing Bowl, while they’re at it? Such New Age pantomime would be every bit as authentic.

The Academy pretends that the Welcomes, a bit of theatrics invented by Ernie Dingo and Dr Richard Whalley in Perth in 1976, have been part of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures “for thousands of years” […] In a pastiche of Polyanna, Disney and La La Land.

This is what’s most notable about the sort of chattering ninny who prattles about “the world’s oldest living culture”. As Orwell so aptly said, “the average human being never bothers to examine catchwords”. By what authority is Aboriginal culture “the world’s oldest”? Africans who never left the cradle of humanity, as the ancestors of the Aborigines did, might have something to say about that.

But, even allowing that, what, exactly is so admirable about a literal Stone Age culture?

The sort of prating lackwit who parrots the “oldest living culture” catchwords rarely seems to have all but the most facile, fairyland delusions about traditional Aboriginal culture. It’s all made-up, pantomime nonsense like “Welcome to Country”, which is about as authentic as Elizabeth Warren in a plastic war-bonnet, chanting, “Hi-howareya, hi-howareya…”

What they’ll never want to talk about is real traditional Aboriginal culture, with all its yucky, patriarchal, violent, brutal bits and all.

Any check of the real anthropology turns up rituals such as presenting a group of women for sex usage, penis holdings, sweat exchanges and, commonly across Australia, ritual thigh spearings to avenge sorceries by the outsiders. Bess Price of Alice Springs, mother of successful “No” campaigner Jacinta, has bluntly called welcomes and smoking ceremonies “bullshit”.

When it comes to the “smoking ceremonies” in particular, some real “truth-telling” is long overdue.

I’ve been sceptical of the “smoking ceremonies” since I visited the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC two decades ago and found myself reading about smoking ceremonies of the Navaho or Cherokee (I forget the details). I think the Australian leaves-in-a bucket deal is a pinch from that Museum Mile along the Mall that connects Capitol Hill at one end with the Lincoln memorial at the other.

Around the turn of the century, anthropologists studying Aboriginal society were often remarkably sympathetic, but also rigorously honest (or, “racist”, as modern wokeists would have it). In 1906, Northern Territory anthropologist, explorer, medico and geologist Herbert Basedow, who persistently lobbied for better treatment of Aborigines, provided the Royal Society with a hair-raising description of real traditional Aboriginal culture.

Female infants are subjected to mutilation by removal of two joints of the right forefinger. In the western tribes the finger is cut off with a stone knife. Elsewhere it is amputated at a later age by binding tightly around the joint a ligature made of cobwebs of a spider that lives in the mangroves. In certain cases the joints are removed by biting, and among the Wogait tribe the amputated segment is buried in an anthill.

Let’s see the AFL include that in the pre-match entertainment.

As it happens, Basedow also records one of the few instances of an actual smoking ceremony. Suffice to say, one wouldn’t expect to see it being re-enacted at the Australian Academy of Science.

It’s a prelude to a pubescent girl’s enforced “marriage” to a mature or elderly man.
The girls of the Larrekiya and Wogait tribes are given away to men at a very early age, although marriage is not fully consummated until after the “smoking ceremony” of the girl – a ceremony which is not attended by the men, although they may witness the proceedings at a distance. The girl, having been decorated, is seized from behind by the old gin who has cared for her and who places her hands upon the novice’s shoulders… The chant suddenly ceases and a new one breaks out, whereupon the old gin delivers three smart blows upon the back of the girl. This procedure is continued for the greater part of a night….

The third part of the performance is the smoking of the young gin. Upon a harmless but excessively smoky fire the old gin seats herself with the girl on her lap, both being completely obscured by the dense volumes of smoke. The smoking completed, the novice is led into the bush by the old women, and returns with them to the camp on the same day… A subsequent secret corrobboree of initiation, about which very little is known, takes place several years later.”

Quadrant Online

If accounts of initiations from other tribes are anything to go by, they’re hardly the sort of thing you’d want to have to be subjected to on your next Qantas flight. Not if you wanted to keep your in-flight meal down, anyway.

It’s funny just how little the sort of people who fawn all over “the world’s oldest living culture” actually know, much less want to know, about it. Easier to stick to some dress-up play-acting with a possum-skin cloak and gum leaves.