Aboriginal First Nations people existed and prospered over the entirety of the continent now known as Australia for over 80,000 years, making theirs the longest continuous surviving culture on earth and existing in a deep time; inconceivable to the now dominant post-Industrial Western culture and philosophies. Our cultures combined song, dance, visual design, and ornamentation for performance and education long before Classical Greek theatre. The potent mix of these now compartmentalised (in the Western European sense) skills and practices was a vehicle for countless generations to learn and retain knowledge and cultural practices. Agricultural cultivation of our various and distinct territories was common. Various native yams and rices were staple crops and were grown over massive swathes of plantations.[1] These areas of fertile yam beds were the first to be seized by the colonial aggressors, used to grow the ill-fitting corn and potatoes. Introduced livestock were also set loose to gobble up the native crops, roots and all. Within a few short years, native crop plantations around the continent were all but destroyed.

 Through this destruction, the colonists were able to easily fabricate the stereotypes of the ‘hungry-hunter-gatherer’ wandering in search of food and the passive, or pacified, lethargic Aborigine grateful for the charity of the King’s/Queen’s rations. The second of these fictions is depicted in “The Black Camp” of NSW, After the Annual Gift of Blankets from the Governor (1852), which appeared in the Illustrated London News.

 The earliest image of Aboriginal Australians published in Britain, William Blake’s Aboriginal Family of NSW, is a classicised representation based on an almost caricatural drawing by Philip Gidley King. It set a pattern, and not just in its selection of a generic type, as a mode of representation. Such scenes of Aboriginal families or groups ‘shifting camp’ or returning from a hunt were most common in nineteenth-century popular illustration. These images, and the more recent equally insidious literary equivalent of ‘going walkabout’, were aimed to establish a nomadic predestination for Aboriginal people as wanderers and to act as powerful metaphors for the perceived transience of the Aborigine in the historical, if not cosmic, timeframe established by evolutionary science.

 So much for the ‘natural’ fading away of Aboriginal First Nations: Australia can lay claim to the highest rate of extinction in the world. Per capita, we are also among the most egregious emitters of carbon dioxide pollution in the world. In 2018, the typically conservative IPCC report of global warming warned that the Earth faces global catastrophe within the next decade should business continue as usual.[2] Here lies the major difference between cultures: one of longevity, nuance and care, and the other of consumption, pomp and erasure. Rock engravings around the country remind us of life

[1] See Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? (Broome, WA: Magabala Books, 2014).

[2] See Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5ºC. (Incheon, Republic of Korea: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC], 2018).

 (Ryan Presley Aug. 2019)

Copyright © All rights reserved