Last week, I had the great privilege of embarking upon a camping trip led by aboriginal elder Russell Butler and his son Darren. In order to better appreciate the native way of life, we weren’t allowed to bring computers, cameras, or even watches. Aboriginal culture is all about living in the present while acknowledging the past. Even quite recently, a mere two-hundred years ago, they had no concept of man-made time divisions such as hours, minutes, and seconds. In fact, to this day, many of them see our time system as lifeless and dehumanizing, which is a fascinating topic of discussion that I don’t really have a lot of information on. Yet :)
First, we visited Undara, a charming campground in the Australian savannah; the “bush” as it is commonly referred to by locals. This region is too far away from the coast and its abundant rainfall to support large rainforest systems, so the landscape is instead dominated by cool, open eucalypt forest, which is nearly as beautiful and significantly more comfortable than the rainforest with its stifling humidity. The natural landscape is characterized by sparsely distributed, wild-looking eucalypt trees, grasses, rocks, snakes, birds, and best of all, an abundance of wallabies and kangaroos. There was a group of about 20 rock wallabies right at the campsite, many with joeys still in the pouch. The cutest ones were getting too big and had to stick their legs out the front. When they stuck their heads out for some fresh air, it looked impeccably like they were chillin’ in a Lazy Boy. So cool! During our stay at Undara, we had a wonderful ranger and guide named Ross who was just a bundle of energy despite his advanced age. He treated us to two solid hours of Australian folk songs (complete with a ukelele) and stories on our first night there and guided tours of stunning lava tubes up to 50 feet in diameter thereafter; one with a single bat community of over 500,000 members.
Our second campsite was a solid half-hour drive through a cattle plantation to a remote, sandy riverbank site in a similar climate. This was really in the bush. Here, we passed the days reading, cooking, fishing, swimming, and having ideological discussions about education, religion, culture, and whatever happened to be on our minds. Not bad for a week of school, eh? Over the course of the week, “Uncle” Russ taught us about his tribe’s religious stories, innumerable culinary and medicinal uses for native plants, as well as the intricacies of spear throwing. I even managed to win my very own woomera (throwing stick) in the end of the week contest! The trip also opened up my eyes to the immense difficulties facing opportunities facing aboriginal communities today. In order to understand the full scope of what’s going on, we’ll need to delve into the social and environmental history of this continent.
Scholars agree that Aboriginal Australians had one the longest, if not the longest, uninterrupted occupation of a single continent in human history before European settlement. Over the course of thousands of years, they developed a complex culture involving webs of intertribal and interfamilial relations, a widely established system of law, and unwavering religious devotion. Hundreds of tribes, languages, and dialects dotted the Australian landscape. There are many profoundly beautiful aspects of this culture and much that European society could learn from it, even today. First and foremost is a commitment to the land. The religion, tribal associations, and food supply were all intimately connected to and dependent upon the land which the tribes occupied. The resulting respect for nature led to sustainable living on both an individual and communal scale. No large-scale wars broke out between the tribes, because they loved and took responsibility for the land they had. The semi-nomadic nature of the tribes ensured that plants and animals were free from the stress of having to cope with year-round human use. In some tribes, kangaroos, an important source of lean protein, were protected by religious customs, which outlawed hunting at their breeding sites. Amazingly, all of this was accomplished without a written language. They instead depended on the much more personal process of orally transferring information from generation to generation. The result was continuity, in the truest sense of the word. It wasn’t perfect, but also wasn’t marred by some of the drawbacks of the European colonial system which left a trail of minority oppression and cultural and environmental destruction in its wake.
This is getting a little long, so I’ll come back to current aboriginal issues later. Suffice to say that they have experienced a similar degree of racism, injustice, and long-term abuse to that suffered by African Americans over the last two hundred years, and they are about twenty years behind the United States in terms of public perception, prejudices, and their place in society as a whole. There are a number of reasons for this, none of them simple, but there is a lot of movement toward political social reform, especially amongst the younger white Australians and elderly Aboriginal Australians. I’ve had almost a full week of rainforest ecology lectures back in Cairns and am (almost) ready to embark on a 10-day rainforest field trip in the morning. I’ll have details on that in my next post. Thanks for reading!
No comments:
Post a Comment