ABORIGINAL POLICY: REFORM OR GENOCIDE?

Dr. A.B. Kelly 21.03.2011

From the earliest settlement it was assumed that Aborigines are just like other people, so what was good for others had to be good for Aborigines.   But Full-blood Aborigines are vastly different from other Australians.  They are a Palaeolithic people who can only survive in their own Palaeolithic culture.

In 1839 Governor Gawler of South Australia addressed South Australian Aborigines as follows:   "Blackmen! We wish to make you happy.  But you cannot be happy unless you imitate white men, build huts, wear clothes, work and be useful.  Learn to speak English."   The present policies are based on the same false assumption that Aborigines are just the same as other people.  This is why the outcome of those policies is such a disaster, and why this disaster will continue until the Aboriginal difference is appreciated.

When I first encountered Aborigines in the Northern Territory in 1950 they had maintained their culture under the policy of Protection.  The failure of Governor Gawler's approach had long been realised by the practical people who lived and worked with Aborigines.  These people recognised that Aborigines were different.  The policy of Protection that continued in force through the 1950's resulted in Aborigines being healthy, long-lived and law-abiding.  The vast majority of part-Aborigines lived in the general Australian society without difficulty and did not seek to associate with Aborigines.

THE ABORIGINAL DIFFERENCE

Aborigines are cognitively and genetically distinctive as a result of their isolation from other people for over 40,000 years and also because Australia became deficient in food resources after the extermination of the Mega fauna.   The only way they could survive was to form small tribal groups occupying large areas of country and developing an intimate knowledge of the occurrence of food resources in that area.  These small isolated groups also developed the fundamental "skin" system as a defence against the potential for inbreeding.

Humans elsewhere developed significantly over that same time period, particularly in more productive environments.  The most significant human cognitive developments occurred in the Mediterranean area within the last 3,000 years.  These human cognitive developments have been considered by Bruno Snell in "The Discovery of the Mind" (1953) and by Julian Jaynes in "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-cameral mind" (1976).  Both authors detail the human cognitive developments that occurred in the first millennium B.C., particularly in Greece and Judea, which spread throughout the rest of the world.  There were no similar cognitive developments among Aborigines. 

These cognitive developments become expressed in human genes.  This has been demonstrated by local research.  A paper by M.M. de Lemos, republished in "The Psychology of Aboriginal Australians" (1973 Kearney & Os)  records a series of tests, based on the work of Piaget, that were carried out by de Lemos in the 1960's at Hermannsburg, a Central Australian Aboriginal Mission. Of the group of 80 children tested, half were Aborigines and the other half were part-Aboriginal, each one having a white great-grandfather.

This comparative test was able to be carried out because the first generation of part-Aborigines had been incorporated into the tribal marriage system because the tribe failed to realise they were the children of white men, rather than of their mothers' tribal husbands.  The tribal and Mission environments of all the children tested were identical.  The only difference between the two groups was their different genetic inheritance. 

The children with a trace of European ancestry showed markedly better performance in the tests.   They performed the same as the children of European Australians.  But De Lemos found that the general standard of the full-blood Aboriginal children implied:   "an inability to form logical concepts or to apply logical operations to the organization and systematisation of concrete data . . . affecting the level of logical thinking in all areas."   This research indicates that part-Aborigines are not in need of the special treatment that Aborigines require.  The fact that the result could not be replicated in the same situation is not surprising.  They would have mimicked the first tests and discovered the white fellow "tricks".

A Masters Thesis by Margaret S. Bain, published as "The Aboriginal-White Encounter" (1992), based on her research in the Finke district, concluded that Aborigines are only capable of first-degree abstractions, those that retain a direct link with empirical reality.  Social processes in Western cultures are both interactional and transactional, making use of both first-degree and second-degree abstractions.  Bain found that Aboriginal social processes are purely interactional, one-way actions prescribed by tribal law.  That does not indicate that Aborigines are incapable of learning to utilize second-degree abstractions.

ABORIGINAL OR INDIGENOUS?

The real Aboriginal issue, their deficit in cognitive development for over 40,000 years, has to be taken into account in Aboriginal policies.  The cognitive difference between real Aborigines and part-Aborigines was ignored by the 1960's reforms that reinstated Governor Gawler's policy.  By that time the vast majority of Australians had never even seen a real Aborigine.  They were ignorant of the cognitive difference between Aborigines and part-Aborigines, which warranted the policy of Protection for Aborigines.  Full-blood Aborigines need to be provided with a protective environment, in which they can maintain their existing culture.   Any future Aboriginal cultural development would need to be generated by Aborigines themselves.

The term "Indigenous" is a weasel word.  It is both inaccurate and objectionable.  The inclusion of both Aborigines and vast numbers of non-Aborigines in the single "Indigenous" category opens the way for the present Aboriginal Genocide to achieve its "final solution" without disturbing the official statistics.  This statistical manoeuvre is truly Orwellian.

I speak from first-hand experience as well as study.  I first encountered both Aborigines and part-Aborigines when I joined the Northern Territory Police in 1950.  I had been brought up with the idea that all people were much the same.  I had previously encountered refugees and other foreign-born people who exhibited minor cultural differences, but I found Aborigines to be significantly different from all other people.  This difference was not shared by part-Aborigines.  I became intrigued by the Aboriginal difference.  Under the policy of Protection they were long lived, healthy and generally law-abiding.  However their minds operated quite differently from ours. 

Aborigines were invaluable to Police in investigations.   They invited me to attend their secret ceremonies, a rare honour.  I was OIC Finke Police District, a one-man Station, from 1951 to 1954.  The Police District covered the entire Northern Territory South of the Alice Springs Airport and to the three adjoining State borders.  I also "showed the flag" in the North of South Australia, particularly at Ernabella, at the request of Police at Oodnadatta.  In those three years there was only one criminal offence committed by an Aborigine in that entire area.   There were no minor offences that warranted arrest.  Contrast that with the present situation in the Territory.

When I retired in 1985 I enrolled in Flinders University with the intention of discovering why the Aborigines were so different.  My research ultimately indicated that the Aboriginal difference was a result of them being isolated from the cultural and cognitive developments that had occurred among other humans over the 40,000 or more years that they had been isolated from any external influence. 

Aborigines were isolated from all the cognitive developments that occurred and spread elsewhere during the previous 40,000 years, the most significant of which occurred in the last 5,000 years.   Not only were Aborigines isolated from all other human cultures and developments, they had the same "Dreamtime" belief system throughout Australia.  There was no possibility of a clash of cultures or of beliefs, such as had occurred elsewhere.  There was none of the warfare over resources that occurred in other countries.  The Aborigines do not appear to have developed to the bi-cameral cognitive stage postulated by Jaynes in "The Origin of

Consciousness in the breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" (1976),  in which cognitive functions are divided between one part of the brain that appears to be "speaking" and a second part which hears and obeys the innovatory and moral commands of the first part.  The Aborigines have mores, tribal rules, but appear to have no morality in Kant's sense of a consciousness of the natural moral law.

The Dreamtime belief system tells Aborigines who and what they are, and what the world is all about.  In Aboriginal society there are no dissenters from this belief-system, which provides an explanation of everything.  In this belief-system everything in the world was produced by the Dreamtime ancestors.  The role of Aborigines is to ceremonially reproduce the actions of the ancestors to maintain the world.  "ceremonial reproduction" is our perspective.  From their perspective, in their ceremonies they are the ancestors producing and maintaining the world.

The Aboriginal Dreamtime belief-system had some severe adverse consequences.  When Captain Cook sailed the tropical and sub-tropical East Coast of Australia he noted the absence of Coconut trees.  It was clear to him (or perhaps to Banks) that the tropical and sub-tropical shores would have been covered by Coconut trees but for the actions of the natives.  The Aboriginal mind had not made the connection between the propagation of coconuts by sea and the continuation of the supply of home-grown coconuts.  Cook planted coconuts on offshore islands to provide a future food source for shipwrecked sailors. 

The connection between the Aboriginal belief system and their perspective on the world became clear to me at Finke.  Finke had a water supply.  It was one of the sidings where the old Ghan took on water.  The Cook in the fettler's camp had a vegetable garden. The Police House also had a garden.  I tried to get Aborigines interested in growing pitjuri, a popular native tobacco.  Their response was to hold a pitjuri increase ceremony.   That was how their world functioned.  The centrality of their culture is fundamental to Aborigines. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTURE

As a culture, Aboriginal culture is an ideal type.   It tells its people who and what they are and what the world is all about, but it has no mechanism to cope with the development of knowledge.   Central Australian Aborigines have been cut off from other cultures for about one quarter of the lifespan of Homo sapiens as a species.

Every culture has an understanding of the world at its base.   As T.S. Lewis noted every culture is "the incarnation of a belief system".  The whole pattern of life within a culture develops from this understanding of the world.  The Australian Aboriginal culture is expressed in the Dreamtime stories.  These explain the Aboriginal world.  The Aborigines did not question whether the Dreamtime stories were true.  Their understanding of the world was never doubted or questioned. They did not reach the cognitive stage which begins to question existing explanations of the world.

The critical and moral thought of the Greeks and the Hebrews, which we have inherited, only began within the last Millennium B.C.  This development has been traced by Bruno Snell in "The Discovery of the Mind" (1953).  A mere 3,000 years ago no-one could think the way we expect most people to think today.  Aborigines have yet to reach this stage.  The Aboriginal culture may seem to be a problem to us, but it is no problem for Aborigines.  Their problems arise when we seek to impose our cultural practices on them.  Any attempt to make Aborigines absorb thousands of years of cognitive and cultural development in a few generations has to be futile.

It has been suggested that: "unless the children and grandchildren of Aborigines can throw off the shackles" of the Aboriginal culture "there can be little hope for them".  The reality is that the Aboriginal culture is not a shackle to Aborigines.  It is their life-support system.  They cannot live without it.  There is no hope for real Aborigines outside their own culture.  The disastrous results of the experiments over the last forty years, where we have tried to impose our standards on Aborigines, clearly demonstrate this.

Under the policy of Protection we prohibited the supply of alcohol to Aborigines.  Since the 1960's we appear to be bent on destroying the elders' function as the repositories of tribal knowledge by allowing them to drink alcohol.  The elder's function cannot be replaced.  Aborigines cannot function in our culture.  They need their own culture to survive.

The choice is clear.  Do you want to be a party to the Aboriginal Genocide?