This video talks about the ‘map’ supposedly showing the areas ‘owned’ by the aboriginal tribes
prior to the European tribes coming here.
Elder Speaks Out Against Native Title Claim
Daily Insight 38.6K subscribers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asyCIXhHKn8
Thinking about it I come to see it like this:
It’s all done on the basis of verbal accounts. Account from people that were hunter gather nomads. Meaning they ‘had’ no land but had ‘a range’. A hunting/gathering area over which they wandered and hunted and gathered upon. Now where was that ‘range’ ?
It was wherever they could make it be. They took as much as they could at all times. That’s still the nature of human beings even today. Did you just see Syria? You see Kiev Ukraine trying to take Donbas Ukraine?
The stronger tribes took the better land: coastal land with fish and shellfish available most of the time, land with the best rainfall and most vegetable growth and most huntable meat.
And the to and fro pressure between tribes was constant, gaining here and losing there.
These ‘maps’ are rough ‘slices in time’ showing where the wandering tribes mainly were at a certain time on the one hand and showing what the most vociferous and plausible of them wanted the whitefeller to believe is where they were at all times and got away with it on the other hand.
The underlying point is that it was ‘range’, hunting range and gathering range. And constantly under threat.
An old abo questioned about what he thought of european settlement stated firmly and frankly that they thought it was great for they didn’t have to live in fear any more. That’s a major point. That shows what it is like when your range is always only what you can keep by force.
The ‘land’ was never land as we understand it. And that’s not some airy fairy legal/schmegle nonsense, that’s real solid fact in human terms.
Like is it yours? and can you keep it? and what’s it worth? and what can you do with it?
So today my land is mine and the whole society recognises that, clear to the Parliament and the whole Law and all its forces will enforce my right to have it and keep it.
And on the other side it comes with legal obligations on me. Things I must do, acquiesce with, costs I must meet.
And it is tradeable because of this sophistication. It is real wealth for me. I can go to the furthest ends of the earth and that wealth of mine will be recognised and I can trade it there.
And it has government supplied services that the government on its side contracts to provide to me:
water, power, sewage. It is a ‘serviced’ block and the govt meets its obligations.
It is defined to the millimetre just exactly where it is.
That’s the land. Let’s leave the property built on it to one side.
That’s quite clearly a very different thing to anything ‘owned’ by a nomadic culture in constant war with adjoining cultures.
They had nothing comparable. They could not have anything comparable for most of what my land is today it is because of its existence within a sophisticated civilization.
That sophisticated civilization has overtaken the world and cannot be avoided now. It is the reality of today.
To pretend today is the reality of yesterday is wrong and unsupportable.
I live in today in this respect and I cannot escape it.
My land is as I say and I cannot escape that fact.
If I try to maintain that my land is stone age land and I refuse to accept the services the govt provides and I refuse to meet the obligations imposed on me as owner of the land I will simply lose the land before long. They will take if from me.
I cannot escape from the fact that my land is today’s land and is as I describe.
I cannot and no aboriginal part blood descendant can either. There is no aboriginal land in Australia any more, no ‘stone age hunter gatherer land’. It doesn’t exist.
We are talking different realities.
And talking realities what is the reality of the aboriginal land question?
It is that part descendants of people who hunted and gathered over hunter gatherer ranges as best they could or were allowed to by adjoining hunter gatherers are now trying to vastly profit themselves by claiming a right to be gifted modern land in ‘compensation’ for their ‘loss’ of that land.
That’s what it is. A ploy.
Put aside the fallacious argument from general to specific: that ‘they’ (some abo tribe wandering over this area) lost that ability and therefore ‘I’ ( a specific non abo or part abo descendant ) am therefore entitled to compensation) we have a clear massive mismatch between values.
What value a part right to range over an area of hunter gatherer land has as against the value of the right to range freely over our society’s land? This land here today.
With its code of laws and customs and practices?
Put it this way: what matching value can be found between an individual’s rights as a hunter gatherer group member and an individual’s rights as member of today’s ‘group’ (i.e. the australian nation ) ?
We see the first had the right to search every day for food and fight to keep that right on a daily basis and that was it. That was all they had and it kept them fully occupied.
Today that individual is free from constant threat by adjoining tribes and is born into a right to basic income which will be handed to him if he cannot find employment or gain income elsewhere. i.e. a guaranteed minimum level of food and shelter.
And safety.
In an environment that if viewed from a ‘hunter gatherer’ perspective can be seen to be rich in potential beyond anything a stone age person could have dreamed of.
Far, far beyond.
It is a garden of eden in those terms.
You can possibly walk around a corner and find a job merely labouring which will bring in $1000 a week. Not at all unusual.
And $1000 a week enables the purchase of things that never ever existed in the stone age.
There was no such ‘hunting’ available back then. It just didn’t exist. No such ‘beast’ existed to be shot down, captured, ‘eaten’.
Ask yourself: where would you rather be a basic, bottom of society, ordinary hunter gatherer? Then, there, or here, now?
So we can see that these ‘descendants’ have been and are being more, more, more than fully ‘compensated’ for anything they notionally ‘lost’ as individuals when their supposed ancestral group lost what it supposedly had.
They have guarantees of health, wealth, freedom and security that simply did not exist in the stone age
And they enjoy it and take full advantage of it. To the max.
It’s all gammon and humbug.
They know that. And they’re delighted if you don’t.