THE PRESERVATION OF THE CULTURE AND THE LIVES

OF AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINES

Copyright, Dr. A.B. Kelly, 23 March 2005.

In the 1950’s I was OIC of Finke Police District, an area from just South of Alice Springs to the South Australian Border and from Queensland to the West Australian Border. The vast majority of the District’s population was Aboriginal.

At that time Aborigines lived long and healthy lives. I liaised with the Flying Doctor and maintained the Flying Doctor Medical Kit. I supplied Rations to Aged and Infirm Aborigines. I also attended secret ceremonies, at their invitation. Despite my close contacts I found the Aborigines, and their culture, difficult to understand.

In 1998 I was awarded a PhD for my Thesis: The Process of the Cosmos. This Thesis was initially inspired by my contacts with Aborigines. It focused on the overall development of mankind, since the evolution of Homo sapiens, and on the role of culture in that development.

There are two distinct cultures in Australia, the Australian culture and the Aboriginal culture. They are significantly different. The vast majority of part-Aborigines are members of the Australian culture. They are not Aborigines in any real sense, either culturally or genetically.

The Aboriginal policy that was introduced in the 1960’s is based on two fundamental mistakes. It assumes that Aborigines are not significantly different from other Australians, and that Aborigines and part-Aborigines should not be distinguished.

Aborigines are a Palaeolithic people with their own Palaeolithic culture. Their difference from other Australians was recognized in the era of Protection. The present policies are killing the Aborigines, who lack the capacity to adapt to another, significantly different, culture. Prior to the 1960’s Aborigines were able to preserve their familiar culture, and thus to preserve their lives. They were happy and healthy because their culture told them who they were, what they were, and what the world was all about.

The present policies make the preservation of the Aboriginal culture impossible. The 1960’s policy may be considered by some to be enlightened, but it kills Aborigines.

Pretending that Aborigines are not significantly different from other Australians has prevented the restoration of an appropriate policy.

A recent paper published by the Centre for Independent Studies: A New Deal for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in Remote Communities, recognizes that the present policy has been a disaster, but it makes the same two fundamental mistakes about Aborigines, and their culture, that the present policy does. It would be just as much a disaster.

A radical approach is needed if the health and happiness of Aborigines is to be restored. Any successful approach has to recognize the stage occupied by Aborigines in the story of human cultural development.

THE PROCESS OF HUMAN CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT

Homo sapiens first evolved as a new species of animal, not as humans, some 160,000 years ago. The species then began the long process of self-development towards becoming human. Homo sapiens and other Hominid species did not become locked into an instinctive pattern of behaviour as other animals had. They developed cultural patterns instead, initially involving various forms of hunter-gathering.

There is no evidence of any change in Homo sapiens’ approach to the world until some 40,000 years ago, in what is known as the upper Palaeolithic revolution. This revolution was characterized by the development of new tool-making technology, the use of new materials for tools, and the use of tools to make tools. These changes did not occur in Australia, where Aborigines have been isolated for some 60,000 years.

The changes that took place in the Palaeolithic revolution are taken to reflect a development in the cognitive faculties of those hominids who participated in the revolution. Beyond Australia there were a series of further cognitive revolutions, the most significant of which were the beginning of the development of critical thinking and the beginning of the development of moral perceptions. Both these developments occurred within the last 3,000 years. These developments are still far from complete. They vary from culture to culture, and within cultures. More importantly, the Aborigines did not participate in any of these developments due to their isolation.

THE COGNITIVE CAPACITY OF ABORIGINES

Everyone who has had contact with real Aborigines, particularly in those areas of Australia where there was no contact with other races prior to the arrival of Europeans, has described the cognitive ability of Aborigines as childlike.

Objective support for this anecdotal view has been provided by a series of tests, based on the work of Piaget, carried out in Hermannsburg, a remote Central Australian Aboriginal Mission, in the 1960’s. Piaget is an educational psychologist who describes three distinct periods of mental development through which children pass.

The first stage lasts until about age 2, the second to age 11 and then there begins the development of the final stage, where children begin to reason realistically about the future and to deal comfortably with abstractions. The capacity to deal with abstract matters is considered the mark of mental maturity.

A paper by M.M. de Lemos, who carried out the Hermannsburg tests, is republished in ‘The Psychology of Aboriginal Australians’ (1973) Kearney & Os. In the group of 80 children tested by de Lemos in the 1960’s, half the children were Aborigines and the other half were seven-eights Aboriginal. The environment of both groups was identical. The part-Aboriginal children had white great-grandfathers. These children, with a trace of European ancestry, showed markedly better performances in the tests.

De Lemos found the general standard of the full-blood Aborigines 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.’

The occurrence of children in a tribal situation with white great-grandparents is rare. In the case of the Hermannsburg children it appears that the first part-Aboriginal children born after the initial contact with whites were thought to be children of their Aboriginal parents, so they were initiated and incorporated in the tribe.

The remoteness of European ancestry in the Hermannsburg test group shows that it took some time for Aborigines to realise that those, who the Aborigines would later categorise as ‘yellow fellows’, did not have an Aboriginal ‘skin’ and so could not fit into the marriage structure of the tribe.

A Masters Thesis by Margaret S. Bain, published as ‘The Aboriginal-White Encounter’ (1992) is based on her research in the Finke district. It concluded that Aborigines are only capable of first-degree abstractions, those that retain a direct link with empirical reality.

Bain also finds that while social processes in western society are both interactional and transactional, utilising both first degree and second-degree abstractions, Aboriginal social transactions are purely interactional, utilising only first-degree abstractions. They are one-way actions, prescribed by law.

In ‘The Psychology of Aboriginal Australians’, Mathew concluded in 1910 that Aborigines ‘were unreflective and averse to both abstract reasoning and sustained mental effort’. In 1872 Wake had suggested that to speak ‘of intellectual phenomena in relation to the Australian Aborigines is somewhat of a misnomer’. The explanations of these phenomena put forward at the time were all evolutionist, the assumption being that social development could be understood on the biological model. It can not.

I argue that the absence of significant Aboriginal cognitive development is better understood as a function of the absence of alternative world-views. The Aborigines had a culture that provided a complete explanation of the world. Knowledge of the Dreamtime stories and of the tasks of practical living was passed on, but there was never any challenge to the Dreamtime explanations of the world, and no motive to increase the sum of practical knowledge. They had a complete explanation of the world and of their part in it.

Aboriginal Australians were locked into a static world-view which limited the possibility of mental and cultural self-development. The fact that a small admixture of European genes has a significant effect on mental development seems to indicate a Lamarckian form of genetic mental development in societies that have had to cope with a series of challenges to existing world-views. Evidence of the ‘Flynn Effect’, which shows a regular generational increase in IQ in problem-solving societies, supports this view.

The differences between real Aborigines and part-Aborigines have to be taken seriously if Aboriginal policy is to be effective. Most Aboriginal policy is premised on the assumption that there is no difference between Aborigines and part-Aborigines, or between Aborigines and Europeans. This is clearly not the case. Aborigines think, understand and act differently from Westerners and part- Aborigines. They find any contact with the white man’s law confusing. In their culture, punishment is immediate, physical and mandatory.

There is no room for a plea in mitigation. The rituals of our law are largely meaningless charades to them. The approach of our law to offenders is constantly changing. Law enforcement in 2005 is different from what it was in 1950. It is even more different from what it was in the 1890’s. It is vastly different from what it was in 1788. Is it reasonable to apply the latest fashion of such variable standards to people whose idea of law was set in stone thousands of years ago?

The present day situation of real Aborigines is worse than it has ever been in the past. Most of the damage that has been inflicted on Aborigines since the 1960’s has been based on the best of motives, but in total ignorance of the reality. The activities of good-hearted but ignorant do-gooders have hastened the passing of the Aborigines more rapidly in the last half Century than in the previous 150 years. It is time for a rethink.

The primary cause of the disastrously mistaken policies that are applied to Aborigines is the failure to recognize how different they are, particularly in their cognitive development, and in the consequent projection of Western attitudes and concepts onto them.

The Aboriginal cognitive ability and mind-set is fundamentally different from ours. Western man is oriented towards the future. Aboriginal man is oriented to the present and the past. Aborigines think, understand and act differently from other Australians.

Western thought is essentially abstract. There is a premium on the making of distinctions, which comprise the essence of clear thought. However clear thinking is impeded by faulty basic assumptions, lack of knowledge or by the ‘thought control’ of political correctness. All of these factors are affecting and have affected Aboriginal policy. Aborigines have suffered and still suffer from the consequent policies.

Aborigines have never lived in communities. Our remote ancestors took hundreds, if not thousands, of years to make the transition from hunter gatherers to inhabitants of communities. This transition depended on the gradual invention and spread of Agriculture, and the domestication of animals. We have expected Aborigines to make this radical transition within a generation.

THE STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT OF HUMAN COGNITION

Bernard Lonergan has analysed the stages of the development of human cognition. There are four such stages involved in the full process of human knowing. Lonergan labels these as Experience, Understanding, Judgement and Evaluation. Homo sapiens initially move from simply experiencing the world to developing an explanation of that experience, originally in terms of Myth. This is the stage labelled Understanding. It is the second stage of the cognitive process. This is the stage that was reached by the Australian Aborigines. The understanding reached at that stage is not likely to be correct.

The next stage of human cognitive development is Judgement. In this stage the initial understanding of the world is subjected to critical examination, involving reflection, doubt and the weighing of evidence. The stage of Judgement was never reached by Aborigines. Their Dreamtime stories were never questioned. As Bruno Snell has shown in The Discovery of Mind, the Jews and the Greeks were the first people to reach this stage. This transition to the third cognitive stage only began during the first millennium BC.

The fourth stage, Evaluation, was reached by some cultures in the Scientific Revolution. This stage began within the last 500 years. It is the pattern of thinking that we have developed in this stage that we seek to impose on Aborigines despite the fact that Aborigines have not yet reached the cultural stage of the Palaeolithic Revolution.

It took 120,000 years for the first detectable cognitive change to occur within the species Homo sapiens. This change, the Palaeolithic Revolution, was still only a cognitive change within the stage of Understanding, the second of Lonergan’s four stages, rather than a move to the next cognitive stage. It was a further 37,000 years before the third cognitive stage of Judgement began to be achieved in any culture.

A policy distinction has to be made between Aborigines and part-Aborigines. This distinction is based on the distinctiveness of Aboriginal thought patterns, which does not apply to part-Aborigines. Real Aborigines are in need of specifically tailored policies, which take account of their cultural and cognitive situation. Their cultural base is essentially Palaeolithic in both material and cognitive terms. Any successful policy for Aborigines must take into account the real differences that exist between Aborigines and all other Australians, including part-Aborigines.

That is not to say that there should not be appropriate policies for disadvantaged part-Aborigines, but because the circumstances and cognitive abilities of Aborigines and part-Aborigines are quite different, the policies that apply to them should be different. There does not appear to be any good reason for any distinction between the policies that should be applied to disadvantaged part-Aborigines and those applied to any other disadvantaged Australians.