THE DISASTER WE HAVE INFLICTED ON ABORIGINES

Based on a Paper presented to Catholic Institute of Sydney Conference 2-3-4 Oct 2008.

Copyright Dr. A.B. Kelly 13.10.08

I am concerned at the disaster that has been visited upon Aborigines over the last 40 years. The 1960’s reforms of Aboriginal Policy were initiated with the best of intentions, but in total ignorance of the Aboriginal reality. The inconvenient truth is that Aborigines are vastly different from us. They are a Palaeolithic people with Palaeolithic minds, who can only survive in their own Palaeolithic culture. Without their culture, Aborigines die. The present Aboriginal Policy is Genocidal because it destroys the Aboriginal Culture.

From the earliest settlement it was assumed that Aborigines were just like other people, so what was good for others had to be good for them. 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 1960’s reforms were based on the same false assumptions that Aborigines were just like other people. This is why the outcome of those reforms has been such a disaster.

When I first encountered Aborigines in the Northern Territory in 1950 they were maintaining 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 practical people realised that Aborigines were different.

THE ABORIGINAL DIFFERENCE

Aborigines are cognitively and genetically distinctive as a result of their isolation from other people for over 40,000 years. Humans elsewhere had developed cognitively over that time. The most significant developments appear to have occurred in the Mediterranean area within the last 3,000 years. These cognitive developments are 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 cognitive and moral developments that occurred in the first millennium B.C., particularly in Greece and Judea. 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 when the tribe failed to realise they were the children of white men, rather than of the 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 as if they were Europeans. De Lemos found 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 also indicates that part-Aborigines do not need the special treatment that Aborigines require.

A Masters Thesis by Margaret S. Bain, published as “The Aboriginal-White Encounter” (1992), based on her research in the Finke district, also 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.

ABORIGINAL OR INDIGENOUS?

The only appropriate definition of an Aboriginal is; “a person who is genetically nothing but Aboriginal”. This definition would ensure that the real Aboriginal problem, the deficit in their cognitive development over 40,000 years, is taken into account in Aboriginal policies. It would also ensure that they are provided with a protective environment in which they can maintain their existing culture. Any Aboriginal cultural development would have to be generated by Aborigines themselves.

Before it was abandoned in the 1960’s the policy of Protection in force in the 1950’s had resulted in Aborigines being healthy, long-lived and law-abiding. The vast majority of part-Aborigines lived in the normal Australian society. Most did so without difficulty. One such was Bruce Tilmouth of Alice Springs, who ran his own trucking business before becoming “Tracker” Tilmouth, as Director of the Central Land Council.

The cognitive difference between real Aborigines and part-Aborigines was ignored by the reforms that reinstated Governor Gawler’s policy. By that time most Australians knew nothing of Aborigines as they 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 real Aborigines.

The term “Indigenous” 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 maneuver is truly Orwellian.

I first encountered both real 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. Not only were they 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. They even appear not 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. They are essentially pre-moral. They have mores, tribal rules, but 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 they are the ancestors producing and maintaining the world.

The Dreamtime belief-system had some 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 FOUR STAGES OF THE COGNITIVE PROCESS

Bernard Lonergan, Philosopher and Theologian, shows there are four stages in the process of the development of any area of knowledge. These stages are Experience, Understanding, Judgement and Evaluation-action. The first stage of the process – Experience, is based on sense experience. This is similar to the way animals know. Animals instinctively know what they need to know for their species to survive. They also learn to recognise some situations that threaten their individual survival

Humans need to do more than just survive. They need to make sense of the world. They seek to understand their experience. Understanding, making some sense of the world, is the second stage of the human process of knowledge development. All cultures reach this stage in their relation to the world. The Dreamtime stories made sense of the Aboriginal world and had significant practical applications.

The third stage of the process of knowledge development is Judgement. This is the critical stage which asks “Is it really so” of an existing understanding of the world. It was the achievement of this stage that broke down the mythological understanding of the world of the Ancient Greeks and of the Jews, initiating Philosophy and Theology. This stage began in both Greece and Judea within the last 3,000 years, initiating a great step forward in human cognitive development. The Australian Aborigines have still not reached this stage in their understanding of the world.

The critical and moral thought of both the Greeks and the Hebrews began within the last Millennium B.C. This development has been traced by Bruno Snell in “The Discovery of the Mind” (1953) as well as by Julian Jaynes. 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 fourth stage, Evaluation-action, in which knowledge of the world is continuously applied and evaluated, began to be applied in the West in the Industrial Revolution. This development led to the foundation of Australia in 1788. Every culture reflects the stage that has been reached in understanding the world through this four stage process.

The Aboriginal culture has been characterised as violent. While some of the actions it prescribes, such as “paybacks” are violent, they are also measured and generally fair. They resolve issues to the satisfaction of all parties. The Aboriginal culture has no Police or Judiciary, but problems within the tribe are usually settled both fairly and expeditiously. 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 40,000 years of cognitive and cultural development in a few generations has to be futile.

John Stone maintained 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 any 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.

It is nearly too late. The Aboriginal culture has only one institution, the tribal elder. No-one gets to be an elder simply by growing old. Elders are the “library” of the tribe, the repositories of the essential tribal knowledge that enables Aborigines to survive in their environment – an environment in which we perish. The elders’ status is dependent on the range of his knowledge, which is reflected in the number of “knowledge songs” he knows. 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. Under the policy of Protection we prohibited the supply of alcohol to Aborigines. The elder’s function cannot be replaced. Aborigines cannot function in our culture. They need their own culture to survive. Unless we act soon to restore the policy of Protection we will all be guilty of the Aboriginal Genocide.