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this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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Incorrect, indigenous Australians used fire extensively for land management. They were the first society in the world that we have evidence of milling seed for flour (36k years ago), they had yam plantations, built stone weirs for fish farming, and a bunch of other things. The reason people believe they didn't is because their way of life was systematically erased and dismissed as 'primitive' by the colonialists.
They didn't use wheels, because many groups used waterways for transport instead. Other groups were on land where the environment wasn't really conducive to wheeled transport.
They also didn't have writing, instead relying on an extensive oral history, as many cultures have.
Please don't spread misinformation.
Largely incorrect as well, even if Australians are having issues with their government and the mining/energy industries.
Kudos for your wholesome response.
Interesting. Any sources I could look up?
You bet!
If you're not familiar with Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander cultures generally, the Deadly Stories history timeline and the rest of the site gives a good high level overview from an aboriginal perspective. Especially for the creation stories which is a core similarity between different groups. There's some who claim elements in the stories go as far back as when there were still megafauna. True? No idea. But fun to consider.
Bruce Pascoe wrote Dark Emu in 2019 which is a very important book about agriculture and tech that upset a lot of people. I've linked you a page that contains a brief summary plus links to academic responses to it, because it did cause controversy. Apologies for the school-age-centric link, there's a big push in education right now to teach kids about the aboriginal stuff they didn't teach adults, so links to aboriginal science tend to be at this level or uni research papers.
The whole movie about the writing of that book, criticism and backlash is up on ABC iView - The Dark Emu Story if you're keen for something more human that gets into the racism of erasing aboriginal science too. A shit VPN might be needed, but I doubt ABC has done much more to geoblock.
Short article on aboriginal engineering, from NITV who cover news from an aboriginal perspective.
Older article on fire as land management by aboriginal peoples with a few pics is a good entry point for that topic. Fire is a huge part of many aboriginal groups, so the idea they didn't have it is frankly ridiculous on the surface. Like they only ate raw food and huddled in caves for warmth for 60k years or something, i mean come on.
And just because I enjoy it, this map of the aboriginal groups in Australia. Also because people keep talking about Aboriginal Australians as though they are a monolith. There are at least 250 languages.
Thank you very much for the information. I will check it out.
Did the aboriginals use fire to cook food?
We have evidence of ovens from 4000 years ago, so very much yes. They always have, and it is baffling to me that anyone would say otherwise. Even 20 years ago nobody claimed bizarre things like that.
I remember seeing a talk by Bruce Pascoe where he described how the published journals of the early white explorers had been censored to remove references to the extensive agriculture, grain silos and aquaculture except where they painted them in a negative light.
He also told off one journal entry where a cake given by a First Nation person was described as the softest, sweetest cake he had ever eaten. He made the point that this was a comment coming from an Englishman!
It's much easier to be xenophobic when there are no rumours or evidence that a culture has worthwhile inventions and knowledge. It's also easier to stamp out cultures which rely mostly on oral history and have a strong tradition of secrecy, even within immediate families. Even though Aboriginals didn't have writing, many had detailed maps. It's just that they were in a temporary medium like sand accompanied by stories that were memorised.
I only clued in maybe 6 years ago that it wasn't just clueless arrogant colonialists killing people for their land and not knowing what indigenous farms looked like; and that the claims of deliberate cultural erasure had real weight. I was lucky enough to meet by chance some aboriginal educators who pointed me to actual physical evidence like the grinding stones. Had I never met them I may not have known.
I could not explain, without it being at least partially intentional, how we weren't taught that we knew Australia's native peoples baked bread 20k years before anywhere else in the world. And how we were even told they had no bread or buildings.
So when I see things like "they didn't have fire", especially a week before the referendum... I just can't even. We're asking a bunch of people who were taught lies and some who intentionally spread them to decide on the worthiness of a genocided minority group. It's just tragic.
History is written by the winners.
I'd imagine most of the history we know is incorrect due to the obvious bias in our sources.
I prefer to use the word 'victor' than 'winner'. Only because winner feels like it implies a fair game.
I prefer the term "violent pieces of shit".
I still cannot believe that there are idiots who think the native peoples of Australia had no knowledge of fire.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_tucker