Not something I'm familiar with apart from picking up hints on the periphery, but well worth reading even for someone with such threadbare knowledge as mine. A familiar political theme of course.
Timeless History Invented Yesterday
I have never read the “First Knowledges” box set and, after a decade spent immersed in this field, probably never will. That is not intellectual laziness. It is recognition of a relentless and deceitful genre. The first box set of six books was released in 2023 and in June this year we are told we will be privileged to have a box set of 10 books for $195.
This article is not a review of the 10 books but rather a consideration of a cultural moment: one in which Aboriginal Australia has been steadily transformed from a small-scale hunter-gatherer society into a profound ‘civilisation’ of extraordinary sophistication retrospectively credited with astronomy, engineering, politics, mathematics, economics, architecture, agriculture and environmental science in forms supposedly hidden from every serious observer until the present age.
What may have begun as an attempt to elevate awareness of Aboriginal culture has metastasised into something else entirely: a sprawling house of cards in which every human achievement must now be retrospectively rediscovered in pre-contact Australia.
Timeless History Invented Yesterday
I have never read the “First Knowledges” box set and, after a decade spent immersed in this field, probably never will. That is not intellectual laziness. It is recognition of a relentless and deceitful genre. The first box set of six books was released in 2023 and in June this year we are told we will be privileged to have a box set of 10 books for $195.
This article is not a review of the 10 books but rather a consideration of a cultural moment: one in which Aboriginal Australia has been steadily transformed from a small-scale hunter-gatherer society into a profound ‘civilisation’ of extraordinary sophistication retrospectively credited with astronomy, engineering, politics, mathematics, economics, architecture, agriculture and environmental science in forms supposedly hidden from every serious observer until the present age.
What may have begun as an attempt to elevate awareness of Aboriginal culture has metastasised into something else entirely: a sprawling house of cards in which every human achievement must now be retrospectively rediscovered in pre-contact Australia.
2 comments:
A succession of tribes coming inwards from the coastal areas, stronger on the edges, pushing the softer inwards, bloody battles, nothing gentle and lovable ... 1788 was just the next tribe to add to the Carpentarians, Murrayans and Negritos, among others. They weren't expecting white self-loathing.
I warmly recommend the late Keith Windschuttle's "The Fabrication of Aboriginal History". To see a real historian pull apart the flimsy lies of The Left is a joy.
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