New Zealand readers will be familiar with the routine promotion of a Stone Aged culture as some sort of cultural acme. In New Zealand, it’s the near-ubiquitous extolling of magic Maori-dom, to the point of the Maori Party literally claiming racial supremacy. In Australia, it’s the tiresome, fatuous fawning over the supposed “World’s Oldest Living Culture”.
To which we might be entitled to ask: so what?
Even supposing the claim to be true (which might amuse a great many folk still living in the cradle of humanity, Africa), so what? What’s so great about a literally (by its own claims) Stone Aged culture? Not so long ago, to call something Stone Age was to imply an embarrassing backwardness (an attitude we might suspect still lingers even in the consciousnesses of the ochre-and-greenstone crowd, given their invariably furious reaction to the literally accurate description of those cultures).
But, no: we are screeched at, by “academics” no less, that “matauranga Maori” is “the equal of Western science”. That’s right: a stone axe is every bit as advanced as a particle accelerator. Here in Australia, we’re finger-wagged about the “enormous resource” that is Aboriginal culture.
Enormous resource of what, exactly?
Just as peddlers of magic Maori-dom tend to hem and haw and conveniently neglect to mention stuff like cannibalism, slavery, genocide and species extinction, the World’s Oldest Culture™ vultures omit an awful lot of stuff.
Which is odd, given their endless bloviating about “truth telling”. OK, let’s tell some inconvenient truths about this culture that’s supposedly such an enormous resource. What follows is hardly the rantings of genocidal “white supremacists”. Much of it is from the work of people entirely sympathetic to the Aboriginal communities in which they’ve often spent decades.
Sorcery: Belief in sorcery as the explanation for deaths due to injury and disease is a feature of the culture that remains widespread in Aboriginal communities.
Anthropologist Professor Peter Sutton writes:
The ancient institution of sorcery continues to maintain a function for many groups […]
It is a feature of the culture that causes much harm. Belief in sorcery impedes delivery of modern and effective medical treatments in Aboriginal communities.
[Sutton says] well-meaning whitefellas who support traditional doctors in their quest to peel back the post-colonial power differential have to face the fact that traditional healers are likely to constitute a danger to the already disastrous health of their communities.
While some wokesters try to even deny it, it’s a deplorable fact that violence against Aboriginal Australian women is staggeringly disproportionate to non-Aboriginal women. When they do, grudgingly acknowledge this deplorable fact, the common tactic is to sheet it home to “colonisation”. Prominent Aboriginal activists flatly deny that there was any violence in pre-European Australia.
This is a lie.
Though unfashionable to admit it, violent misogyny has long been an element of Aboriginal culture.
Paleopathologist Stephen Webb in 1995 published his analysis of 4500 individuals’ bones from mainland Australia going back 50,000 years. Across the continent as a general rule, depressed skull fractures were substantially more common in female remains. A depressed skull fracture is a type of fracture usually resulting from blunt force trauma.
The evidence of violence to Aboriginal women described by Webb cannot be blamed on intergenerational trauma due to white colonisation. Dr Webb could not of course identify the sex of the attackers. But the inference that they were very likely males is suggested by the observations of First Fleet officers. They were shocked at the routine violence they witnessed by Aboriginal males to their females. This violence commonly took the form of blows to the head of the victim.
Many of these observers were sensitive to and keenly interested in the culture with which they were colliding. Sympathetic colonial observers and modern anthropologists all reach the same grim conclusion:
Earlier versions of what is now called `family violence’ or ‘community violence’ were also widespread and frequent in Australia under `traditional’ conditions …Today, this kind of assault is found at its worst in communities that have remained closest to their cultural traditions, and where alcohol is available in quantity.
The status of women in traditional culture was described by Robert Hughes (no raving right-winger) as a root-grubbing, shell-gathering chattel, whose social assets were wiry arms, prehensile toes and a vagina.
From the earliest contact with traditional Aborigines, it was clear that women were little more than chattels, to be traded and used as the men saw fit. While the notorious Bass Strait sealers undoubtedly stole Aboriginal women as sex slaves, they just as often traded them for goods the men coveted (dogs, especially). Such patterns of behaviour persisted well into modern times. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, accounts abound of Aboriginal men prostituting their women out to pearling luggers, and European and Chinese farmers, in return for payments of tobacco, sugar, tea and other valued commodities.
Child marriage, enforced with astonishing brutality, was also common.
It often involves sexual abuse of young girls. The Northern Territory has a large indigenous population with many living in an approximation to traditional ways. There, the conflict between Australian law, which aims at protecting children, and traditional law and culture which permits an often elderly male to have sexual relations with a promised child has provoked much controversy.
One instructive case, from 2005 in the Northern Territory, involved a respected 55-year-old traditional elder.
He was a respected leader in his community and was responsible for teaching young men traditional ways. He had forcible vaginal and anal intercourse with a child, who was then 14, with the complicity of his adult wife and the child’s own grandmother. He claimed she had been promised to him as a wife when she was four. He was charged only with unlawful sexual intercourse with a child.
Quadrant Online
This is just the beginning.
Violence, “demand sharing” and the sort of nepotism that would swiftly bring criminal charges in non-Aboriginal society, still persist in the World’s Oldest Culture™. Other, more heinous though once widespread practises, such as infanticide and cannibalism were forcibly suppressed by the “colonisers”.
One wonders whether the fanatics of “de-colonisation” and the worshippers of the World’s Oldest Culture™ would like to see those practises revived?
They’re an “enormous resource”, after all.