BS: Australian Aborgines=Special Day

Subject: BS: Australian Aborgines=Special Day
From: Azizi
Date: 26 May 07 - 09:52 PM

Some days are more momentous than others.

Mudcatter Hilda Fish started an above the line thread earlier this week in which she shared information about the importance of May 27th for Australian Aborigines. Few people have posted to that thread, perhaps because it has the sub-title "folk-lore", or maybe because some people who post below the line don't check out and post to the above the line threads.

For those who may have missed that thread thread.cfm?threadid=101934&messages=7 here's an excerpt from Hilda's initial post:

Subject: Folklore: 1967 Aboriginal Referendum
From: hilda fish - PM
Date: 25 May 07 - 04:27 PM

The referendum of 27 May 1967 allowed my people to be counted as citizens of our own country. Prior to that we were listed as 'fauna', as 'vermin' to be dealt with. In global terms the event, it is said, that people most remember is what they were doing when JFK was assasinated. For my people it is our response to the results of that referendum. I remember my Elders crying and crying and myself with them. We did not think the Australian people cared. I remember, and I was a very young woman then who did not know much, that I was so happy because I KNEW that whatever my children, born and unborn, had to go through, it would never be as bad as what my Grandmother, Mother and myself had grown up with. There is nothing worse than living in the shadow at the edge of human as rats in the drain. Tomorrow it will be 40 years since that referendum was passed. So.......can you raise your glasses with me? And here's to 40 years on, when there are other fights and other horrors but none as bad as that."

-snip-

I've started this thread without Hilda's prior knowledge, to encouragae folks to raise a glass with Hilda in celebration of this important day for her people-and in a wider sense, for all the world's people.

My preference is that folks post on Hilda's initial thread. Or Mudcat members and guests who have not done so yet, and wish to do so, can post their well wishes to Hilda Fish and her people on this thread.

Either way, I hope that we show Hilda some love!

Subject: RE: BS: Australian Aborgines=Special Day
From: Azizi
Date: 26 May 07 - 10:02 PM

Sorry, I misspelled Aborigines.

And maybe I should have said "Indigenous Australians".

I'm not sure which referent is correct or preferred.

??

Subject: RE: BS: Australian Aborgines=Special Day
From: Bob Bolton
Date: 27 May 07 - 05:54 AM

G'day Azizi,

Many of our Indigenous Australians don't like the word "Aborigine" ... mostly because it is not their own word. They seem less worried about the adjective aboriginal ... but there is not a national agreement on a single preferred term. Locally (Sydney region, in east coast New South Wales) the preferred term is Koori ... meaning, like most preferred terms of indigenous people around the world, "person" or "man".

As there was a vast range of regional languages, there are several other names preferred in their own localities. I like to keep a map of the whole country, without any of our European-imposed states, boundaries and regions ... and simply marked with the preferred names for each region's indigenous people. (I believe the list I have worked from was the list of peoples heading the "Bark Scroll" presented to the Australian Parliament.)

It is, in one sense, a pity to lose the clear meaning - hidden (to most, being non-Latinists!) in the word Aborigine: "(here) from the beginning" - so appropriate for a people who have the longest continuous history in the world ... The people whose mastery of the land they roamed, perhaps 60,000 years ago, let them spend more time pondering their religious views than anybody else on Earth ... and whose land was seized by Europeans who claimed it as "Terra Nullius" - nobody's land!

However, Whatever name is eventually universal ... will have to came from the people themselves.

Regards,

Bob

Subject: RE: BS: Australian Aborgines=Special Day
From: Mickey191
Date: 27 May 07 - 09:31 AM

My good wishes to Hilda and her people. I truly do not know what to say to address the terrible hurts you've endured. To be referred to as fauna - not living, breathing humanbeings is cruelty beyond measure. I'm sorry.

Subject: RE: BS: Australian Aborgines=Special Day
From: Alice
Date: 27 May 07 - 10:42 AM

Hilda! Sorry I missed your other thread!
Here's to more awareness of the Specialness of the day.

Subject: RE: BS: Australian Aborgines=Special Day
From: Azizi
Date: 27 May 07 - 12:00 PM

Hello, Bob.

Thanks for shating moe information about group referents for the indingenous people of Australia.

I agree that "Whatever name is eventually universal ... will have to came from the people themselves".

Best wishes to all those folks on this special day and to all other citizens of Australia too.

Azizi

Subject: RE: BS: Australian Aborgines=Special Day
From: Azizi
Date: 27 May 07 - 12:05 PM

Ugh!

I'm sorry I made those typos in my last post.But I hope my meaning was clear.

Happy Referendum Day!!

{or whatever the appropriate greeting is}

Subject: RE: BS: Australian Aborgines=Special Day
From: hilda fish
Date: 27 May 07 - 05:50 PM

No worries Azizi and thanx. Saw Aunty Joycie Clague on tv last night - one of the first Indigenous people to sign the petition. It was lovely to see her. Also saw Paul Kelly, Troy Cassar Daly and Uncle Kev Carmody perform "From Little Things Big Things Grow" with Leah Purcell joining in chorus. My heart was full as they remembered the amazing Vincent Lingiari who led the walk off Wave Hill. It has been a day of tears and laughter and I have a whole week and more of events still to get through! It is a momentous time remembering those days and how it was for us, and it is momentous as a way to push forward discussion - and action - on reconciliation in this country of ours. It would be a terrible thing if all my people who died for us met their grandchildren and great grandchildren in the hereafter and they said "nothings changed". I think of my mother and my grandmother who lived and died without hope and I think of my children living and those future generations yet unborn who will have hope and dreams. Important to remember the fight is not over by a long shot and it will take courage and will to continue. That both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people got together as partners to make the change then, and that reconciliation has the same possibility is vital to our future as a nation that lives equality.

Subject: RE: BS: Australian Aborgines=Special Day
From: Nigel Parsons
Date: 28 May 07 - 03:08 PM

However, recent news stories suggest that Australian Aborigines were not originally native to Australia, but came initially from Africa.
I read the original in the Daily Telegraph, but a quick 'Google' finds a similar story recently in The Sydney Morning Herald

Not to decry the indigenous peoples. Their claim to the country is clearly far better than that of the imperial powers that tried to lay claim to it all.

CHEERS
Nigel

Subject: RE: BS: Australian Aborgines=Special Day
From: hilda fish
Date: 28 May 07 - 05:10 PM

I thought about not answering this but I have to. This is the same sort of thinking that says we were cannibals, we killed our babies, we didn't know how pro-creation happened, our brains are such that we can't 'get' abstract thought, etc. etc.. If we came from Africa we would be negroid i.e. looking more like Afro-Americans wouldn't we? Yet we are caucassian. It's yet another way of dispossessing us. It's got no logical reasoning or scientific evidence. Although, it is said, that all humanity comes from Africa - that it was the original garden of Eden. Then again, there are still many who say the Earth is flat!

Subject: RE: BS: Australian Aborgines=Special Day
From: John O'L
Date: 28 May 07 - 05:35 PM

Hilda your post was beautifully written. Nigel's post is off-topic and entirely inappropriate.

Subject: RE: BS: Australian Aborgines=Special Day
From: Rowan
Date: 28 May 07 - 06:40 PM

"I read the original in the Daily Telegraph"

Not the most authoritative (nor honest) source, I'd suggest. You'd have to have some familiarity with Oz culture (such as it is) to realise the irony of Nigel's post.

Cheers, Rowan

Subject: RE: BS: Australian Aborgines=Special Day
From: Bob Bolton
Date: 28 May 07 - 07:33 PM

G'day Rowan, hilda, Nigel, Azizi,

The really interesting thing is to see how individuals "slant" an article (I just looked at the Sydney Morning Herald version) that really says what we should all know ... we are all the one race - the one family ... it's called "Human". The DNA testing was to show that suggestions of "cross-breeding with 'earlier forms of homo' were just a "myth" (or, maybe more accurately, "propaganda" for those with their own barrow to push!

Indigenous Australians have had a long time to fit into the land they arrived in at least 50,000 years back - they look different from others - they look Australian! The ancestors of Scandinavians appear to have moved out of the Mediterranean just 2000 years ago - and now they don't look anything like Greek - or Maltese - or Italian people... because they have adapted to a cold climate and largely indoor living - but they are just another part of the big Human family!

We all fit into our place of living and, by and large, those that fit best prosper - and eventually look like they belong there. Maybe the distant descendants of those of "European" background, in Australia, will one day look - much more sensibly - more like those who have been here tens of thousands of years more (as long as we haven't blown up - or otherwise destroyed - the whole planet in the meantime).

Regards,

Bob

Subject: RE: BS: Australian Aborgines=Special Day
From: Azizi
Date: 28 May 07 - 09:36 PM

I started this thread to call attention to Hilda's above the line Folklore: 1967 Aboriginal Referendum (Aus) thread which, for some reason, is now closed.

My sense is that Hilda's thread about the May 27th Australian referendum was commemorative and celebratory. In my opinion, that Australian referendumt addressed similar types of corrective actions such as the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the constitution of the USA.

I believe it was appropriate in that thread-or in this thread-to talk about other occassions when nations took corrective action to right old wrongs as Peace did when he shared the comment in Hilda's thread that "In 1968, Leonard Marchand became the first Status [Status is a term meaning 'recognized under the Indian Act as being Indian'] Indian to be elected to Canada's House of Commons... At that time, Canadians were not used to seeing Aboriginal politicians on the campaign trail or serving at any level of government. Until 1960, Status Indians could not even vote in a federal election unless they first gave up their right to be registered under the Indian Act, their treaty rights and their statutory right to property tax exemption..."

However, in my opinion, the spirit of Hilda's thread and certainly the intent of my starting this thread is not well served by debating or discussing the origins of Indigenous Australians or any other groups of people in the world, the physical appearances of Indigenous Australians compared to African Americans or any other specific groups of people, and/or which racial category or categories Indigenous Australians or any other groups of people "belong" to.

I've said all I care to say-at this time-about race on Mudcat's
thread.cfm?threadid=101762
BS: Does Being Dark Matter?

I choose not to discuss that topic further on this thread.

Subject: RE: BS: Australian Aborgines=Special Day
From: Rowan
Date: 28 May 07 - 10:16 PM

"The ancestors of Scandinavians appear to have moved out of the Mediterranean just 2000 years ago"

I suspect you meant 20,000 yearts ago, Bob, as my recollection of the archaeology is that changes to the northern ice sheets allowed people to colonise particular parts of the landscape quite early. But your general point is dead right.

Australian archaeology is a most interesting engagement of the (supposed) cultural neutrality and 'values-free' perspective of the scientific method with the cultural baggage and 'values-laden' perspectives (emphatically plural) of a post-colonial society. And that's just among the really well informed specialists; it's open slather everywhere else.

When I was a postgrad botany-ecology student there was an announcement of the discovery that skeletal remains from Kow Swamp (Victoria) had been dated at 10,000 years bp. On the basis of their classification as "robust" or "gracile" (thick boned vs thin boned, in summary) the crania "appeared" (ie, were interpreted) to come from two distinct populations. The first inferences getting around the university staff rooms (the details of the remains were not formally published for more than twenty years, a really slack lack of activity on the part of the physical anthropologist "responsible") was that a population of Homo erectus was coexistent with one of Homo sapiens.

The implications of such an interpretation were astounding and wide ranging. As a bushfire/succession ecologist there was the possibility that H. erectus had been in Oz for yonks (there was recent evidence of human occupation in Oz for about 20k years, at that time) and that H. sapiens had recently arrived and brought fire technology; 10k years was calculated as long enough to cause the genetic lability of eucalypts and acacias that were then being investigated. Great stuff! But without the archaeology published properly, nobody could formally publish anything about such possibilities. Which didn't stop the great Welsh story teller of Oz archaeology publishing (with no supporting data) his extremely influential opus on firestick farming.

For a generation of students, the fact that the Kow Swamp remains exhibited more variation than the current (and extremely multicultural) Oz population has led to essay topics on whether there was one founding population or successive migrations into Oz before the Balandas arrived. If there was only one founding population then the current Indigenous community could hold the moral and political high ground on all sorts of issues including, but certainly not limited to, management of landscapes and biodiversity. If there had been more than one migration phase, the current Indigenous community could be regarded as no different from the white fellas; they just arrived earlier than the white fellas. Even among the experts, any scientific investigation into this, otherwise quite 'ordinary', topic runs foul of such political implications. And Oz archaeology is replete with other examples.

You can imagine what the sophisticates of the Daily Telegraph and their Hansonite hangers-on would do with the complexities of any such discussion. And, until recently, nobody bothered asking the Indigenous community for their engagement with the debate. For far too long, Aborigines were there to be studied as objects (much like the pre-1967 Referendum fauna) and, while Oz archaeologists are (generally) reconstructed in such matters, the recent battles the Tasmanians had with the British Museum would suggest that old habits die hard.

There's a way to go yet! End of today's rave.

Cheers, Rowan

Subject: RE: BS: Australian Aborgines=Special Day
From: Bob Bolton
Date: 28 May 07 - 11:40 PM

G'day Rowan,

Not pursuing the Australian founding population side... but with reference to my "Scandinavian" dating - I should probably have been more specific and referred to what we lump together as "Vikings" - the seafarers who build such sophisticated ships and sailed beyond the known limits of their day.

Irrespective of land-based movements of the previous 20 -odd millennia, I have read of evidence that the direct ancestors of these "Vikings" were of (~) "Mediterranean" origins ... around the modern Lebanon ... and moved their field of operations during the Roman ascendancy. I have come across references in one of the Norse Edda to a family proclaiming they were of such ancient lineage that they could trace their forefathers back to "Asia".

I don't know what the DNA looks like!

Regards,

Bob

Subject: RE: BS: Australian Aborgines=Special Day
From: Nigel Parsons
Date: 29 May 07 - 01:53 PM

My apologies if I have caused any upset, I was merely responding to Bob's comment "It is, in one sense, a pity to lose the clear meaning - hidden (to most, being non-Latinists!) in the word Aborigine: "(here) from the beginning" "

I did go on to say Not to decry the indigenous peoples. Their claim to the country is clearly far better than that of the imperial powers that tried to lay claim to it all.

Again, I apologise for any offence given

CHEERS

Nigel

Subject: RE: BS: Australian Aborgines=Special Day
From: Mrrzy
Date: 29 May 07 - 02:36 PM

I hadn't known about the Aborigines being classified as Fauna - wonder if that's where JKRowling got the idea of the Harry Potter world centaurs refusing to be classified as people, preferring to be instead classed as Beasts, for political reasons?

I wonder why people, when meeting new people, seemed always to think of them as not people? And it wasn't just the whites, although they seem to have gotten away with it more. Most people's word for themselves tends to mean People, rather than The people who do something/are from somewhere/that makes them different from other people.

Subject: RE: BS: Australian Aborgines=Special Day
From: Ebbie
Date: 29 May 07 - 06:45 PM

When I read something like this it reminds me of how far we've come- and how far we have yet to go. Hope and despair traveling hand in hand.

Subject: RE: BS: Australian Aborgines=Special Day
From: Rowan
Date: 29 May 07 - 07:02 PM

G'day Bob,
"I don't know what the DNA looks like!"

Yair! That's the great leveller, isn't it! With umpty million base pairs all made out of the same glucosides and only four bases to choose from, I'd reckon DNA from anywhere in particular looks much like DNA everywhere else. And the supposed differences didn't appear to prevent people coupling across boundaries to produce all those vigourous hybrids that could (as offspring should) do better than their parents.

Cheers, Rowan

Subject: RE: BS: Australian Aborgines=Special Day
From: katlaughing
Date: 29 May 07 - 07:21 PM

:-) So that's what my grandsons are..."vigorous hybrids!" I like that image!