Very off-topic, but it's one of the most shameful episodes in Western, British, and Australian history. Almost 200 years of racism, persecution, forced assimilation, kidnapping children and putting them into religious institutions, and a lot more - and it was only in 2008 that the Australian govt cared to apologize. Incredible cultures, incredible wealth of lifestyles, ideas, beliefs - almost destroyed in the name of "making [Aboriginal people] more civilized and industrious".
Yes, the glorious Western civilization did the same pretty much everywhere, but Australian Aboriginal people's culture is unique due to their very long period of isolation - it's a gem and wonder worth studying and learning from. Yet, the Western instinct was to trample on and destroy it, systematically, irreversibly, just for the sake of it. Reading the Wiki page you linked some time back literally left me in tears. How could we. I don't even.
Even further off topic, but you may be surprised to learn how much culture the imperial powers erased within their own countries. Take a country like France: it's hard to believe that French wasn't the majority language until almost the 20th century. Now look at it - many of the regional languages are extinct or endangered with French overwhelmingly dominant. Think that this was a peaceful and consensual process? Think again!
Yes, that's very true, thanks for making that point.
I'd like to add that it's never too late to try to preserve these cultures, traditions and languages. Getting interested to the ones of your place of residence, even if you're not from there originally, can be a great experience.
One of the best ways to do it is through singing and dancing (they go great together), and more generally, there are often chorals and various groups dedicated to these cultures, traditions and languages.
And indeed when you get into this kind of thing, you realize how much culture has been erased (in my case, the Occitan culture), but also you can see how much is left, and how important it is to preserve it.
It also helps a lot when reflecting on our own modern, imposed, culture, and realize that some of the things we think have always been there, have not.
> It might be useful to explore the less savoury aspects of Aboriginal culture
Could you please share some links? What I read did not justify the genocide and centuries of abuse, but that's probably because my sources are biased, right?
On another note: it's hard to believe people can just swing by and start throwing insults and making degrading assumptions about others that they have never met and only know from 2 paragraphs of text, but... here we are.
Please see my other reply. There's no shortage of shocking accounts, you only need to want to find them.
I'm surprised that you perceived it as insulting. Your comment sounded like someone demoralised and self-loathing based on your race and heritage; it's a reminder to be conscious of attempts to manipulate your identity in this way, and suspicious of the perpetrators.
My argument is that few people are aware of how barbaric many aspects of Aboriginal culture were. This was not some flawless society to be fawned over and emulated, as modern woke scholars might have you believe, this was a culture rife with violence, rape, torture and cannibalism.
Only last week I read a primary account from a settler describing an Aboriginal practice where a stick would be tipped with a various makeshift hooks, attached with sap and string. A young girl from the tribe would be selected and restrained, and the stick used to penetrate her and render injuries to the point of sterilisation. She would then be used by the tribe's men at will, notably in ceremonies where she would be gang-raped, with the subsequent blood and semen collected to be consumed by the frail and weak to boost their vitality.
And so I put the question to you: If you had the means and will to rescue a child from this fate, by taking her away to be homed and schooled in a facility for this purpose, would you still - in all your cultured wisdom - instead choose to sit idly by and "let nature take its course"?
Tell me you know nothing of colonization without telling me you know nothing about colonization. Massive massacres of unarmed people across the entire expanse of the empire, raping of children ‘round the world, deliberately slow torture as punishment before death, the whole gamut of sick and depraved actions, every bit as cruel and barbaric as anything you can claim against the aborigine, carried out by your “rescuing” white saviour-invaders. Your justification for destroying the aboriginal culture is built on a mountain of pain and torture and your own abysmal ignorance of history.
> Only last week I read a primary account from a settler describing an [graphic depiction of allegedly institutionalized violence used for ritualistic, magical or religious purposes].
You know, I also read quite a few primary accounts of how the suspected witches were "convinced" to admit their "guilt" in Europe and later in North America. You can find similar examples everywhere - on every continent, in every culture. Humans are violent beasts by nature, there's really nothing shocking about that. And in terms of time-frames - the "settlers" (scare quotes because if they were settlers, then Putin's soldiers in Ukraine would be, too) were not strangers to torture, rape, and killing, both on societal and personal levels. Did they all get banished for non-violent crimes? Do you happen to know when the last European hand was chopped off for stealing?
Then there's an issue of how believable the account itself is. I'm not saying it's impossible for such a ritual to have been performed, but I'm skeptical: how was the settler allowed to witness the ceremony? How was he able to understand the meaning of it ("weak to boost vitality")? What could he gain by relying just the truth versus embellishing the story? How many other people independently verified that such a ritual took place? Which group of Aboriginal people, exactly, performed that ritual, and what evidence there is that it was widespread among other groups?
> This was not some flawless society to be fawned over and emulated
Which society is flawless? Other than yours, I mean - whatever it is. I also didn't say anything about "emulating" that culture: I said we should study it and learn from it. That doesn't imply that we should learn the violent parts, unless you think there are no non-violent things to be learned from it?
> this was a culture rife with violence, rape, torture and cannibalism.
So? It's a culture that flourished in one of the least welcoming pieces of land on Earth, I'd say that doing away with a taboo of cannibalism - that I don't know the evidence for, but I'll take your word that it existed - could have well been a survival strategy. Are people wrong to try to survive? Also, wouldn't cannibalism have a very visible long-term health effects? Is there evidence of such effects?
And again: violence, rape, torture? That's shocking? Not at all. There are nations with nuclear bombs (or close to it) where gang-raping 12 years old girls is normal - and it happens right now, just like it has been happening since before we started walking upright.
> And so I put the question to you: If you had the means and will to rescue a child from this fate, by taking her away to be homed and schooled in a facility for this purpose, would you still - in all your cultured wisdom - instead choose to sit idly by and "let nature take its course"?
That's a false dichotomy. You can both save the girl from suffering and preserve her ties with her family. You can influence the culture without shattering it. You can ease the dependency on violence without adding more violence to the mix.
Reading your other comments, you seem to say that there was nothing worth preserving in the Aboriginal culture, and probably many other cultures around the world, so why bother inventing other ways of "civilizing" the "savages"? I happen to disagree - a culture that stood the test of time so well has to have interesting aspects to it. There are quite a few such aspects that we know now - but there's no telling how many of them we've irreversibly lost. Lost, just because the "settlers" didn't bother to think and fell back to what they knew best: violence and contempt. That's really nothing worthy of praise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Indigenous_Australi...