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.
7 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.
I assume the lack of bridges, schools, hospitals, mass transportation systems, etc, when Cook and other Europeans arrived, was due to white privilege.
Penseivat
Progressives hold several assertions to be true:
1) The mind is a blank state that may be educated to a higher consciousness
2) Savages were noble
3) Ancient groups held great wisdom
None of these assertions is true but they all support the idea that we live in a damaged modern society - that may nevertheless be guided towards a glorious Socialist Utopia. A case of 'the ends' justifying the motivated retrospective interpretation of older societies.
James - that's my impression from the other side of the world - nothing gentle and lovable.
dearieme - thanks, I've bookmarked a copy of his address to The Sydney
Institute in 2003. I see he refers to lies as "fabrications" as he politely tears it all apart.
Penseivat - good point, it must have been white privilege holding them back. Even the development of simple lenses for telescopes and microscopes was held back by it.
DJ - and the 'blank slate' notion seems to be fundamental, presumably because without it the complexities of human behaviour have to be taken into account and that doesn't fit the rigidity of central planning.
We've been told for years that the evil white colonists took aboriginal children from their families and forced them into white run schools. Has now transpired that the evil whites were horrified when they learnt of the aboriginal practice of killing excess children if the harshness of their journeys through the interior wouldn't support their numbers. Tell me about the noble savage again.
Tammly - yes, the noble savage myth was just that, a myth.
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