Silicon Emu

Industrialist Indigenous Australians? 

In Dark Emu, Bruce Pascoe portrays pre-contact Australian Aboriginals as agriculturalists rather than hunter-gatherers. 👨‍🌾

Why is this controversial?

Because it challenges the persistent founding myth that Australia was inhabited by literal nobodies; no one who could be considered civilised, and was therefore fair game for seizure.

It's never cool to kill people and take their stuff, regardless of their governmental system. However, the easier they are to dehumanise, the easier it is to claim we were saving them from themselves, or honestly mistaken.

There's a couple of ways to elevate the status of Indigenous Australians in the modern Australian mindset.

Pascoe is one of the first to propose that First Australians were closer to British invaders than previously thought. Intending that Indigenous Australians would be respected more as farmers, he does little to challenge the notion of a civilizational hierarchy, implicitly still placing agricultural societies above hunter-gatherer ones.

The other more commonplace direction is to assert that hunter-gatherer societies are not primitive and worthy of the label 'civilised'. However, not all Australians have been sold on this, and reactionaries have had plenty of time to lampoon this as a variation of the 'noble savage' trope.

Underlining both approaches is the grip that social evolutionism retains on academic and popular thought. Even to argue that a culture is not primitive is to accept on some level the primitive-modern scale.

So were they farmers or foragers? Recent criticism of Pascoe suggests that they were both, and that he, among other sins, hastily over-generalised.

⛺

For example, structures that were put forward as evidence of permanent settlements were in fact abandoned expendable buildings. Furthermore, not all indigenous groups engaged in construction. Some operated closer to the hunter-gatherer stereotype.

Minus ten points from House Villager. Plus ten points to House Nomad. A net slide down the civilizational scale.

(Side note: I dare you to go back in time and call the Mongols 'uncivilized'.) 

Academics may now eschew labels such as 'agriculturalist' or 'hunter-gatherer' but armchair experts want black and white categories, dammit, so they can get on with the more important business of rationalising or condemning genocide.

But what if Indigenous Australians were also neither, and also much more?

The trepang trade between Aboriginals in Australia's northwest and Makassans from Asia involved the seasonal establishment of smokehouses.

Let me put that in 2020s speak.

Indigenous Australians leveraged overseas capital flows to create commodity processing facilities for the Chinese pharmaceuticals and fine foods market. Without white intermediaries.

🏭

Imagine those Arnhem land factories making nutritional supplements or milk powder instead of dried sea cucumber. They had an A2 Milk or a Blackmores centuries before there was an Australian Stock Exchange. 📈 And they could relocate every year.

That mobility is inconceivable by today's standards, even as it hews closer to global capitalism's ideal of fluidity than what developed economies can manage.

Like, that's Shanghai Gigafactory speed on the regular. (Yeah, I know trepang aren't Teslas but during the reigns of Queen Anne and Emperor Kangxi they might as well have been.) In contrast, it took three years to turn Elizabeth's shuttered Holden factory into ... nothing! (slow clap) 👏 

Build disposable villages? In suburban Australia it might take eighteen months before shovel hits ground on that type of project. And when your residential property requires a thirty-year mortgage, you better pray it's not disposable. ⛏

The retort would be that contemporary Australian law has to consider the pantheon of property rights, and that it is quite easy for tribal societies to transgress boundaries if no concept of boundary exists. Absence is no evidence of advancement. ⚖

Well then, neither is presence. Property law has its roots in feudalism. 🏰 It wasn't intended to be emancipatory, but fixed serfs and nobles in place to maintain order. Yet this restrictive institution is cast as a marker of civilization for little reason other than its familiarity to those who designate such markers. A limitation marketed as a feature.

So you have this situation where one traditional marker (defined boundaries) is at odds with another (free movement) which is more contemporary.

Which goes to show how arbitrary social evolutionism and civilizational markers are. 🏲

Is this just build-up to another 'noble savage' argument?

It would be if it glorified exotic values instead of familiar ones.

The lack of reverence for fixed settlements positioned Indigenous Australians as backward from the perspective of colonial Britain.

But being unencumbered by the same fetishes position them as more modern than we are by our own standards of modernity, which value flexibility over rootedness.

They're not nobler than us. They're more us than us.

We can only wish our capital was as liquid as theirs. They can afford to move fast and break things. 

There we were, living in 1850, while they were living in 2050.

Paradoxically, the argument of similarity is also twisted to justify oppression. Indigenous Australians, some argue, hunted local megafauna to extinction. The implication being, "Whites suck at land management, but so do they. Savage rapaciousness is equivalent to sophisticated rapaciousness. However, someone has to run the place. Might as well be us." 🔥

It's an argument that devolves into 'might makes right' while undermining it at the same time. 🥊If we are all so similar, then power imbalances must be out of our control. Indeed, the lesson should be how contingent advantages are. One RNA strand out of place in the syphilis or smallpox genomes, and a Yolngu elder might be on the English throne. 🧬

It is a testament to the luck and adaptability of Indigenous Australians that over the millennia they were not only 'noble' hunter-gatherers, or merely fettered to farms, but also by our standards entrepreneurs and opportunists.

If we count ourselves as modern, we should admire how they moved fast and broke things.

Incidentally, characteristics shared with Emu.

Further Reading:

Dark Emu debate highlights problems with labels (Sydney Morning Herald - paywalled)

A Pictorial History of Elcho Island

Why didn't Aborigines build cities?

How our new archaeological research investigates Dark Emu’s idea of Aboriginal ‘agriculture’ and villages (The Conversation)