This was posted on aus.politics and I have permission to repost it. It was submitted by someone with the Newsgroup 'name' of 'soupnazi'. I thought you might like to read it. Trudy ********************************* International attention given to Australia over the immigration and race debate has raised lots of questions about white Australia's relationship with it's multicultural population and particularly with our Aboriginal people. It has brought to the surface again, similar questions raised by the High Court's Mabo decision on land rights. It has also stirred up the disturbing sediment of racist attitudes within our community. It has also given us the opportunity to take a look back into the past and trace the history of black/white relationships. Perhaps one of the biggest mistakes we've all made in the recent past is to lump all Aboriginal people together as if they were all the same. Aboriginal culture and Aboriginal people are as diverse as any. Not all Aboriginal tribes threw boomerangs or played didgeridoos or lived in bark huts. Not all get along with one another. There isn't even one common language to link the 500 or so tribes that were scattered across Australia. And, not surprisingly, not all Aborigines like or want the same thing out of life now. What does land rights mean to that old woman whose tribe once fished the waters of Bondi (an Aboriginal name meaning 'water breaking over rocks')? How can a dusty strip of cutback replace that? What about the Aboriginal boy thundering down inner-city streets on his skateboard - where does he fit in? Where does his future lie? Throughout history armies have invaded and settled in new lands, and when they do they bring with them all the culture and ways of their homeland. But after a while something strange begins to happen. The children of the invading people grow to be more like the locals, taking up many of their ideas and ways of doing things. History has proved that time and time again. And that's just what happened in the early days of our own history. Unfortunately our history books don't tell us much about that side of things. Instead, all we ever hear about are the killings , the hatred, the terror, the lies - about the British invaders ripping off the 'poor black fella'. One English doctor filed this supposed scientific study on the Aborigines. �Sometimes they feast upon the Kangaroo, but I believe them to be too stupid and lazy to be able often to catch them.� But others saw past their own racial hang-ups, as did one lady who wrote back home: �I always noticed how open-handed and generous the Aborigines were�. And another early settler who came across a group of Aborigines carrying a woman in a hammock wrote:�The old woman had been born deformed and had been carried about and cared for � all her life, I left them feeling never could I think ill of a race that tended a fragile, useless old cripple with so much loving care.� So they were the sort of people the early Australians were rubbing shoulders with, and maybe we learnt to be a lot like them. Maybe that typical Aussie sense of democracy and 'fair go' was picked up from the Aborigines. You see, they had no upper or lower class like the British, no big chiefs or bosses. Instead they had something like union meetings where the spokesmen from each family group got together to make decisions. As well, that easy-going good nature of the Aborigines must have deeply impressed itself on the young Australians. Russel Ward, Australia's official historian, has commented that in 40,000 years of Aboriginal history there is no evidence that the Aboriginal people had any wars as we know wars to be; no slavery, no stealing of land or possessions. He suggests that "the unwarlike nature of the Aboriginal race may well have had a lasting influence on Australian society." Indeed we Aussies are less likely to murder one another than any other nation on the face of the earth! And have you ever thought how those early explorers would have got on without the help of the Aborigines? If Matthew Flinders didn't take Bungaree to show him the way? If Burke and Wills hadn't been kept alive and guarded by the local Aborigines? It was the explorer Mitchell who said in thanks to his guide Yuranigh, "he acted with determined courage, resolution. intelligence and judgement.� All that, and more, is true. But there is another story as well. It is about blokes like young Archy Hamilton, the runner from the bush whose story is told in the film Gallipolli. Here was one Australian white who truly loved his Aboriginal mate Zac, for Zac knew what life in Australia was about. Listen to this bit from the book Gallipolli: �But it was from Zac that Archy received what he called his real education. Zac, after all, taught him practical things - how to dig for water in a long-dry creek bed. Which roots and bulbs were edible. How to make a fire without matches, to weave carrying baskets from shaved sticks, to watch the dawn and evening flights of birds which usually led to water of ripening fruit or berries. He taught Archy the secret meanings of the marks around the water-holes and on smooth patches of rock and sand - and the faint shirrings and almost invisible scratches suddenly opened like a book to the white boy ...� That was how it was for many of the Australian born whites, the Archy�s of the new land. They looked up to the Aboriginal people as the masters of this hard country. But the British generally looked down on both the Aborigines and the Australian born whites. Henry Lawson claims that he was suckled at the breast of an aboriginal woman, and a good case could be put that many of the first white children of this country were also nurtured by the Aboriginals and that this nurturing was so deep in its impact that it is a reason why many Australians still today have a deep love for the bush even though 80% of us live in suburb: One of the first musters of the colony in 1800 revealed that there were 950 babies born in those first 12 years, but according to early records, almost half of these were orphaned or neglected. Sydney was a wild old town! While Governor King tried to put an orphan school together for some of them, it was just not possible to cater for the numbers needing nurture. And so it seems that those little orphans clung together as mates and as often as not, local aboriginal tribes, particularly at Potts Point and Point Piper, willingly welcomed them into their camps, where they learned important skills of survival in the Australian bush. It was also from the Aboriginal adults that the white kids, known as Currency lads and lasses, learnt to love the bush. They saw their black friends as competent and potent in this environment, whereas the Englishmen were mostly despised for their incompetence in the bush and their attachment to the country they called "home�. As the colony spread out, in sharp distinction to many new settlers from Europe and England who regarded the Aborigines as alien creatures, not to be trusted, children born and bred in the bush grew up knowing the Aboriginals as a part of their life. While it's dangerous to over- simplify, there are many books reporting the pioneer period that tell of white and black children playing together in the bush they called home. Ammie Livingston Stirling in �Memories of an Australian Childhood� writes about her brother: �By this time Victor was Mr Arlington's very best pupil. A kind of star in the firmament of boys. Not only did he shine in his studies, but also in games. He was a good cricketer and that meant a lot in Melbourne in those days. He was a good swimmer, and had helped to save an older boy who'd been attacked by a shark. He was also admired for the accomplishments taught him by the blacks - throwing boomerangs, bows and arrows and sling shots, spearing fish, and mending wounded birds and animals.� Such experiences seem to have been common. We never heard that side of the story because all our history was written from the white British point of view. That's why the Aborigines and Australia's Archys don't figure much in it. But in reality they are Australia - the people who made the nation. So it seems a part of who we are as Australians comes from what we learnt from the Aboriginal people. We have adopted something of the Aboriginal mind - and we never knew it! Perhaps that is why we do things so differently to the British or the Americans or anyone else. But the story doesn't have to end there. If we listen carefully, the Aboriginal people are still telling us something - about the importance of people above material possessions; about respecting the land we live in and not ripping the heart out of it for money; about learning to live in harmony with life. And that could well be the way forward for all of us - black and white. ------------------------------------------------------- RecOzNet2 has a page @ http://www.green.net.au/recoznet2 and is archived at http://www.mail-archive.com/ To unsubscribe from this list, mail [EMAIL PROTECTED], and in the body of the message, include the words: unsubscribe announce or click here mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20announce This posting is provided to the individual members of this group without permission from the copyright owner for purposes of criticism, comment, scholarship and research under the "fair use" provisions of the Federal copyright laws and it may not be distributed further without permission of the copyright owner, except for "fair use." RecOzNet2 is archived for members @ http://www.mail-archive.com/recoznet2%40paradigm4.com.au/
