Post by Kiwi Frontline on Oct 4, 2023 10:49:04 GMT 12
ALWAYS WAS, ALWAYS WILL BE ABOUT POWER – David Barton.
None of this means Aborigines need to lose their culture – far from it. Unfortunately, much of what passes for Aboriginal ‘culture’ today is an invention of the last 50 years. Fortunately, much authentic Aboriginal culture of the past has vanished. The gruesome initiations, genital mutilation, inflicted cicatrices, burns, ritual spearings, sorcery and payback murders have by and large disappeared. Nevertheless, inter-tribe clan grievances often remain, as can be seen at some football indigenous matches, both on the field and amongst the spectators. Even though these encounters can still become violent, at least those conflicts are mostly played out with a football, not spears and clubs.
Meanwhile, the Aboriginal Industry is chock full of ill-informed urban myth-makers and illusionists, this caste of urgers and deluded pretenders giving rise to the patronising insistence on the uniqueness of ‘Aboriginal knowledge’ about everything from agriculture and fish farms (a lá Bruce Pascoe), water and fire management (a lá ‘cultural burning’) to Aboriginal ‘art’, ‘fashion’ and even ‘astronomy’, and not to mention Ernie Dingo and Richard Walley’s thoroughly overdone ‘Welcome to Country”. This is mostly snake oil fakery, an effort to convince contemporary Australians that the Aborigines of old were something they clearly were not. Worse, histories and observational accounts of early Aboriginal life and culture are vanishing from library shelves, replaced by the anti-white post-modern dogma of ‘invasion, colonisation and inter-generational trauma’. It is unusual today to find any history book about Aborigines in a secondary or tertiary institution that is more than fifteen years old. This is cultural censure and erasure happening right under our noses. We are all the poorer for it, black and white alike......
www.nzcpr.com/always-was-always-will-be-about-power/
None of this means Aborigines need to lose their culture – far from it. Unfortunately, much of what passes for Aboriginal ‘culture’ today is an invention of the last 50 years. Fortunately, much authentic Aboriginal culture of the past has vanished. The gruesome initiations, genital mutilation, inflicted cicatrices, burns, ritual spearings, sorcery and payback murders have by and large disappeared. Nevertheless, inter-tribe clan grievances often remain, as can be seen at some football indigenous matches, both on the field and amongst the spectators. Even though these encounters can still become violent, at least those conflicts are mostly played out with a football, not spears and clubs.
Meanwhile, the Aboriginal Industry is chock full of ill-informed urban myth-makers and illusionists, this caste of urgers and deluded pretenders giving rise to the patronising insistence on the uniqueness of ‘Aboriginal knowledge’ about everything from agriculture and fish farms (a lá Bruce Pascoe), water and fire management (a lá ‘cultural burning’) to Aboriginal ‘art’, ‘fashion’ and even ‘astronomy’, and not to mention Ernie Dingo and Richard Walley’s thoroughly overdone ‘Welcome to Country”. This is mostly snake oil fakery, an effort to convince contemporary Australians that the Aborigines of old were something they clearly were not. Worse, histories and observational accounts of early Aboriginal life and culture are vanishing from library shelves, replaced by the anti-white post-modern dogma of ‘invasion, colonisation and inter-generational trauma’. It is unusual today to find any history book about Aborigines in a secondary or tertiary institution that is more than fifteen years old. This is cultural censure and erasure happening right under our noses. We are all the poorer for it, black and white alike......
www.nzcpr.com/always-was-always-will-be-about-power/