Posts Tagged ‘Australian Aborigines’
are Australian Aboriginal societies egalitarian?
In years gone by I’ve heard talk of hunter-gatherer societies in terms of the males out in the field competing with each other in bringing down the biggest game, and increasing their status thereby, while the women gathered their nuts and berries collectively while gossiping about the menfolk. Or something along those lines. I’ve also heard talk that ‘hunter-gatherer’ is an obsolete term – this from fellow Australians, who point out that fish and seafood, for example, both from rivers and the sea, was an essential part of Aboriginal diets, and that generally their ways of obtaining food were too diverse and complex to be so categorised.
Of course, what interests me about the term is whether there was a more or less clear division of labour in Aboriginal society, along gender lines. And for that matter, was Aboriginal society ever One Thing, bearing in mind that, according to AI (never lies), there were over 250 Aboriginal languages and 800 dialects at the time of white colonisation.
All this is really about patriarchy, matriarchy, or whether there can be (or has been) a general ‘equal but different’ social structure in human society. I’ve noted that of all the social primates, leaving aside H sapiens, none are egalitarian. They’re hierarchical, and mostly male dominant. AI tells me that only bonobos, ring-tail lemurs, mouse lemurs and some macaques swing the other way. That’s why I prefer to promote matriarchy rather than egalitarianism, or even ‘feminism’. But of course referring to other primates gets me nowhere in my quest, because we humans believe that we’re so far, far above and beyond other primates that comparisons really are odorous.
Unfortunately, between chimps/bonobos and H sapiens – the gap in time being filled by extinct species – H neanderthalensis, the Denisovans (scientific designation still under dispute), H rudolfensis, H floresiensis, H erectus, H habilis, H heidelbergensis, H naledi, H antecessor, and then Australopithecus africanus, A anamensis, A afarensis, A garhi, A sediba, and then Paranthropus boisei, P aethiopicus, P robustus, to name a few, and who knows how many more will be identified, mis-identified, merged or split in the future – that gap in time is somewhere between 8 and 6 million years, plenty of time for us to mysteriously develop our super-smart superiority. And of course, in respect of every one of these aforementioned species, and the more to be discovered, this question of matriarchy, patriarchy or ‘equal but different’ is currently without answer, and probably always will be. It’s exhausting just to think about.
So getting back to pre-colonial Australia and its Aboriginal societies, which is a complicated enough subject in itself, it seems that ‘separate but equal’ seems mostly true, though it doesn’t mean entirely separate, obviously, nor entirely equal. I’m far from being particularly knowledgeable in this field, but I know that many groups have separate ‘men’s business’ and ‘women’s business’, not just in terms of activity but in terms of group knowledge and history of country.
It just occurred to me to check for patrilocality in Aboriginal societies, because I visited the Tiwi Islands a few years ago and was told, in a public talk given there by an Islander, that this was their practice. It seems that most Aboriginal societies practised patrilocality, and they made the most of that practice, with men’s knowledge focussing on ‘country’ and history, while women brought kinship and trade connections between groups, but the variations to this practice were complex and multifactorial. When I think of the many female Aboriginal activists that I’ve been made aware of over the past fifty years, I can’t help but feel that Aboriginal women in general haven’t been backward in coming forward regarding their rights and their treatment, both within white society and their own. So I would conclude, more or less hesitantly, that women were generally treated as equal but different in Aboriginal societies.
The reference is to a work I’ve only just discovered, which gives more than a few glimpses of the complexities involved.
Reference
Australia Day? Hmmm…
too black and white?
Canto: Okay, so today marks the day, 235 years ago, when British arrivals in what is now known as Sydney Harbour hoisted a British flag and declared that the land they were now standing on belonged to Britain. And this day has been commemorated ever since as Australia Day. These arrivals – a collection of convicted criminals, their minders and British government officials – had no idea of the extent of this ‘southern land’, the eastern coast of which had been mapped in around 1770 by Captain Cook, nor did it greatly concern them that the land was inhabited by other humans. The descendants of those earlier inhabitants are of course still with us, and many of them are still rather miffed about the events of that day, and its commemoration.
Jacinta: Interesting times for the Brits. Their colonies in North America had rebelled rather nastily. In fact, that’s why they were ‘down under’. They’d lost the American War of Independence a little over four years earlier, and the northern regions – Canada today – were too politically unstable for the British government to offload their felons. Having a whole new territory to call their own seemed an irresistible proposition. But I’m wondering – exactly how much did they know? You had Abel Tasman encountering what’s now Tasmania almost 150 years before, but managing to miss the mainland, and then there was Dampier…
Canto: Actually Tasman came up with one of the first names for the southern land – New Holland. He was Dutch of course. Or it might have been one of his compatriots – the Dutch were around the place in numbers at that time. Willem Janszoon was the first back in 1608, and then there was Torres, hence the Strait. But he was Spanish. On his second voyage, from Batavia in the Dutch East Indies, Tasman mapped much of Australia’s north and north-west coast. William Dampier used his maps in his own little trip to the west coast around 1699-1700, and himself charted the coast from Shark Bay to Broome, so, yes, the Brits did have a fair idea of the extent of this land. But getting back to Australia Day…
Jacinta: Well, yes, they must have had a fair idea of the enormity of their proposed acquisition, as well as the difficulty of maintaining such a claim to land so far from home.
Canto: And they didn’t even call it Australia at the time. It was generally known as New Holland still. So the Dutch must surely have been miffed as well.
Jacinta: Anyway there wasn’t much in the way of international law, or any sense of internationalism, in the eighteenth century, and it’s easy for us to be holier-than-thou when talking about the past. It’s another country, on dit.
Canto: Well even so, the day has earned an alternative moniker, Invasion Day. What thinks thou?
Jacinta: Well I thinks it’s complicated, as always. I do think we should change the date, but to call it an invasion is a bit harsh. What Putin has done in Ukraine, I’d call that an invasion. Also what the USA did in Iraq (with the help of Australian forces). I’d say that what the Brits did in 1788 and subsequent decades was colonisation. You might call it illegal colonisation, but of course there were no legal avenues.
Canto: Like what Britain did throughout the world in its Empire days.
Jacinta: And the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, Italians, Belgians… And there have been attempts to make them pay for the damage done, but we can’t expect too much can we?
Canto: Others have suggested that we – I mean Europeans – brought civilisation to benighted peoples. Or, to be more even-handed, that they ultimately might have brought more good than harm.
Jacinta: Well, anyway, Aboriginal people have a good argument – a very good argument I’d say, for objecting to the celebration of Australia occurring on January 26, because the landing of the first fleet was a disaster for a culture that had established itself here, no doubt with great difficulty at first, over tens of thousands of years.
Canto: Yes it raises the question, what was this land like, in terms of climate and resources, 50,000 years ago? Probably a dumb question considering the enormity of the land-mass.
Jacinta: Yes and I’ve often wondered how long the first ‘Australians’ have been here, I’ve heard so many conflicting estimates, and also it’s sometimes hard to tabulate with the out-of Africa story for H sapiens.
Canto: You’re not kidding. Estimates of the Aboriginal presence here are all over the map. Australia’s National Museum, which is presumably reliable, says this:
Aboriginal people are known to have occupied mainland Australia for at least 65,000 years. It is widely accepted that this predates the modern human settlement of Europe and the Americas.
And I recall an Aboriginal elder (though he looked rather young) disputing the date with a sympathetic scientist, insisting that his people have been here since ‘the beginning of the world’. I’m not sure if he meant 4.6 billion or 13.8 billion years ago.
Jacinta: Another site, an indigenous one I think, claims their presence could date as far back as 120,000 years, but no evidence or dating techniques mentioned. As to the other question – when H sapiens first left Africa, here’s something from a National Geographic article:
Though it is unclear when some modern humans first left Africa, evidence shows that these modern humans did not leave Africa until between 60,000 and 90,000 years ago. Most likely, a change in climate helped to push them out.
So if these dates can be trusted – and I remain skeptical – the 65,000ya date for arriving in Australia is plausible.
Canto: So getting back to Australia/Invasion Day, what is to be done?
Jacinta: Well, to me, the screamingly obvious solution would be to celebrate the day when Australia ceased to be a colony and became an independent nation. That was 1901 I think…
Canto: Would this be acceptable to first Australians? They didn’t exactly have much in the way of rights in 1901.
Jacinta: Did anyone have rights before the 1948 Declaration? People are always screaming about rights these days, they don’t seem to realise how recent the concept is.
Canto: Hang on – Olympe de Gouges, The Declaration of the Rights of Woman (September 1791)..
References
https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/evidence-of-first-peoples
https://www.nla.gov.au/faq/who-was-the-first-european-to-land-on-australia
http://www.workingwithindigenousaustralians.info/content/History_2_60,000_years.html
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/their-footsteps-human-migration-out-africa