Whitefella Dreaming: Essays in Search of Blackfella Truths

By Mateo Jarquín

WHITEFELLA DREAMING: ESSAYS IN SEARCH OF BLACKFELLA TRUTHS is Dr Brian Roberts’ second collection of essays challenging Australia’s Indigenous policies. He sets the record straight on the evolution of intelligent species, Indian and Mungo ancestors, and the serious divide between Indigenous traditionalists and modernists, exemplifyin

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brian Ross Roberts
• Release date: Jul 4, 2017
• ISBN: 9780995382435

Mateo Jarquín

Mateo Jarquin is assistant professor of history at Chapman University.

Book preview

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I read Whitefella Dreaming with great interest, finding it exceptionally clear-minded and full of suggestive ideas and parallels. I fear the times are not welcoming towards free thought, and many of the notions Dr Roberts has advanced that seem most worthwhile to me, are in the category of present day Australian heresy. I am struck by the way that modern experts tend not to recognise the ways in which they re-enact colonial patterns of engagement.

Nicolas Rothwell, award-winning author

Dr Roberts’ views are very broadly balanced because he cares both professionally and personally. His concern for the realism of management of culture in the future to continue to be authentic is genuine; for people of all cultures to manage their issues and cultural knowledge in the way their profound learnings have taught them. True culture brings balance in a way that our children of the future can feel free, affected by their cultural learning in a positive way, with great pride and dignity, that will always have a ‘genuine fit within our changing world’ because as Australians we are one and, we are many. Thank you always for your genuine caring through the important and clear messages within your big picture presentations. It would be sad if Indigenous students and staff did not study your positive, balanced Indigenous texts.

Jeannie Aileen Little, Gaarkamunda OAM

Brian has done us a great favour with his latest offering of essays on Aboriginal affairs. It is refreshing to read writing straight from the heart, without any axe to grind or agenda to push. He not only gets you thinking, but thinking in new ways. And new ways of thinking on Aboriginal affairs is precisely what we need.

Dr Anthony Dillon, Australian Catholic University

Dr Roberts has an extraordinary capacity to grasp and hold onto the big picture while conducting a forensic examination of every facet of the Aboriginal debate. He writes with empathy to distinguish between the urban Aborigines and those who remain isolated and basically culturally unchanged, while highlighting the difficulties the Aboriginal cause has in speaking with one voice for Constitutional change, recognition, equity and advancement.

Alec Lucke, Road to Exploitation: Political Capture by Mining in Queensland

ABOUT THE BOOK

WHITEFELLA DREAMING: ESSAYS IN SEARCH OF BLACKFELLA TRUTHS is Dr Brian Roberts’ second collection of essays challenging Australia’s Indigenous policies. He sets the record straight on the evolution of intelligent species, Indian and Mungo ancestors, and the serious divide between Indigenous traditionalists and modernists, exemplifying Philip Roberts, a Northern Territory ambulance driver and Elder as an individual successfully integrating two worlds. Noel Pearson and Marcus Waters are compared as torchbearers for opposing worldviews on Aboriginal traditionalism. An in-depth study of Sovereignty, explores two very different scenarios of an ‘Aboriginalia’ nation north of latitude 16.

Dr Roberts’ long experience of academia shines through in the chapters on Indigenous Studies and the pitfalls of what Professor Marcia Langton sees as potential refuges from reality within Indigenous Centres. He acknowledges the dire need for health, education, housing and justice in Aboriginal communities, but recognises the far-reaching effects of fundamentalism on three neglected modern policy areas: Separatism, Tribal Identity and Elder Governance.

Raised alongside tribal people, and a refugee from apartheid, Dr Roberts’ writing might be considered offensive by some but is offered in the spirit of contributing a factual basis to the Australian racial non-debate.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Professor Emeritus Brian Roberts has lived half his life in South Africa and half in Australia. An agricultural ecologist by profession, he has a passion for sustainable land use while his highly developed social conscience has led to decades of research into tribal peoples rights and responsibilities. Recognised as ‘The Father of Landcare’ he was awarded the Order of Australia in 1998, having earlier won the South African Community Service Medal for his work in rural soil conservation. He was the founding president of the Soil and Water Conservation Association of Australia, Organising Chairman of the Ninth International Rangeland Congress and has held professorships at three universities.

Professor Roberts chaired the Lower Balonne Advisory Committee on water sharing, the Queensland Rural Fires Council, the Queensland Freshwater MAC and the Nathan Dam Community Committee on Dawson River Water Supplies. As a senior member of the Cape York Peninsula Land Use Strategy and convenor of CSIRO’s Water Quality Joint Venture team in North Queensland as Adjunct in Environmental Studies at James Cook University, he contributed to mainstream and Indigenous community conservation projects. He is a member of the National Conservation Advisory Committee and the Queensland Sheep and Wool Research Committee. Much of his recent writing has been published in Quadrant Online. He is the author of 13 books, many book chapters and numerous journal articles since 1956. As a member of ANU’s Fundamental Questions program he produced the seminal paper ‘Land Ethics: A necessary addition to Australian Values’ (1984).

WHITEFELLA DREAMING: ESSAYS IN SEARCH OF BLACKFELLA TRUTHS

DR BRIAN ROBERTS

Dedicated to Jean Little nee Ling who, despite the official buring down of her Mapoon home and church to allow mining to proceed, spreads unconditional love to all who know her.

PREFACE

The job of the writer is to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.

— Finley Dunn

The variable nature of individuals’ aspirations and experiences has led to a serious rift in aspirations and goals within the Aboriginal community of Australia. In essence the major divide centres on the role of culture and the implications of separatism for the future Aboriginal contribution to the Australian nation. The chapters of this compilation seek to compare values and facts in four broad spheres of Aboriginal studies: the contribution of Indigenous academics; clarification of origins as a factual base for identity; an analysis of present and future status and values of those who choose to self-identify as First People by whatever name; and the role of Spirituality in grounding, belonging and valuing life and Country.

Having examined many literature sources which are used in Indigenous studies at Australian universities, it became clear to the author that Aboriginal students were unlikely to develop an open and questioning approach to their ancestry and culture. This imbalance results from the tendency for teaching staff to be traditionalists rather than modernists. The former place high value on Indigenous identity, customs, ceremony and tradition. The latter place higher value on mainstream lifestyle, open-minded tolerance of cultural difference and universal humanitarian norms. The essential development of the intellectual contest of ideas has somehow gone missing in this cohort of students. As a result, healthy scepticism, enquiry and challenge to the received wisdom comes a very poor second to the narrower traditional view of the past and future. The readings in this compilation, written over a period of 10 years, will hopefully contribute to a more mature assessment of alternative futures for disadvantaged Indigenous Australians.

The contents of these writings are influenced by the author’s experience in several universities and his decades-long study of Aboriginal policy, notably in Cape York but also in northern Australia and southern cities. This work builds on three previous reports on ‘Overcoming Disadvantage’ and on ‘Jean’s Story’, a first-hand account of the challenges faced by Aboriginal post-graduates.

In recent years, non-Indigenous authors who challenge the received wisdom of Aboriginal history and custom, have often been at the receiving-end of irrational responses from traditionalists. This cultural oversensitivity has done nothing to enhance the intellectual reputation of these warriors. On the contrary, inability or unwillingness to engage in the mature contest of ideas has increasingly shifted the cultural debate from the sphere of reason to the mystique of belief, in which unquestioned faith is paramount for its adherents. In the process, an aggressive intolerance has characterised the ensuing non-debate on values.

Besides the obvious shortcomings in contemporary health, education, justice and housing, the author identifies three spheres of policy in need of serious review in policy formulation:

The appropriate role of culture

Evaluation of separatism

The functionality of alternative governance structures.

The absence of informed and rational debate and the resulting lack of clarity on these fundamental tenets of Aboriginal futures have resulted in these vital matters being relegated to the political ‘too hard basket’ for decades. In truth, such central issues warrant an early national and rational airing if the illogical intolerance to alternative views is to end.

Individualism is often identified as a constraint to acceptance of mainstream lifestyle. The observations presented here stress that for individuals, each must determine their own personal choice. The history of nations presents us with multiple examples of how minorities have gained independence and nationhood through their unshakeable ethnic identity. While the Jews may be the most well-known example of cultural persistence, Australian Aboriginals display some similarities with Holocaust survivors, but also some vital differences. In both cases, their peoples’ ultimate survival and prosperity as distinct peoples depends also upon their tolerance and acceptance of other peoples’ equally legitimate claims.

These writings attempt to promote a balance between pride in cultural identity and co-operation with neighbours. The following essays repeatedly stress that we as individuals must determine our own personal choice on the extent to which we allow our ancestry to define us and our values, and thus our offspring’s future.

Finally, readers are invited to ignore the intellectually lazy mindset which holds that if you’re not totally for us, you’re against us. This stance has plagued the Aboriginal debate for far too long and has excluded a modulated consideration of alternatives to the ‘all or nothing’ dichotomy of writers on Aboriginal matters. Australian leaders have matured to the extent that we can now participate in an adult contest of ideas. This collation is not expected to be welcomed with open arms by traditional purists, but it is hoped that these writings will at least help to open the public square to rational discussion. Moving the focus from grandparents’ experiences to grandchildrens’ aspirations will be key.

On the technical side, no attempt has been made to attain consistency of referencing across papers prepared for various publications.

The author would stress that the delay in publishing this work is due to uncertainty about amendments to the wording of section 18c of the Racial Discrimination Act, which presently makes it an offence to offend others on the basis of their ‘racial’ origins. We trust that this tiresome illogical debate will be positively finalised when this work, which may be regarded as mentioning the unmentionable, is published. Australian leaders need to appreciate that present wording of the Act invites pseudo-religious zealots to proclaim their offendedness in the public square, knowing that they have the legal backing of the pro-active Human Rights Commission, which encourages the offended. The effect of this crusading by the morally outraged has silenced the free speech of mature rationalists and in the process, has nullified any efforts of the offended minority to progress out of their untouchable stagnation.

Brian Roberts

Cairns 2017

PART ONE: REAL ORIGINS AND ADAPTATIONS

WHY FACTUAL HISTORY MATTERS

Part One seeks to clarify the evidence on early migrations and origins of Aboriginal DNA. This search brings little-used information on migration routes and relations, and ends with a well-documented case of adaptation to modernity in the Northern Territory. The function of remedial belief is recognised as a driver of eternal story-telling.

SORTING THE AVIAN DREAMTIME

Background

Public claims of Aboriginal land management reaching back to antiquity often make implicit assumptions about unbroken food gathering and mosaic burning for anywhere between 50,000 and 100,000 years. The age of the dreamtime stories and songlines is difficult to estimate but is probably as old as human speech itself. Such speech was probably less complex than the contemporary Aboriginal languages. Early human constructions, such as the Murray River stone fish traps at Brewarrina, are claimed to be over 100,000 years old, as such they may well be the oldest human constructions on earth.

If Indigenous scholars are to understand their origins as they really were, they will need to de-mythologise their dreamtime stories in the same way as the whitefella has sorted myth from fact in his own Genesis story.

What follows in this essay is largely taken from the unique writing of Tim Low in ‘Where Song Began’ (2014) as he brings a new perspective to evolution in Australia. Despite the comprehensive treatment of many elements of the development of this continent’s biota, there remain many significant gaps in the story of the road travelled by Aboriginal people.

Australian Pre-history

The Glacial maxima (peak of the ice age) were very dry times, when sea levels dropped by more than 100 metres as a result of vast ice formation. The past 2.6 million years have been a continuous ice age, interrupted by relatively warm periods such as the interglacial we’re experiencing currently.

For human evolutionary purposes we can concentrate largely on the Pleistocene which lasted two and a half million years, and the recent Holocene which covers the past 10,000 years during which humans moved from ‘primitive’ to ‘modern’.

In tracking human development, it is useful to start with the ancient biota of this continent. The feathered bird fossils from Victoria are dated at over 100 million years. The famous Lyrebird of Victoria had long been recognised (at least since 1893) as one of a few very ancient survivors of a biota destined for extinction. Whether its survival is mirrored by local Homo species is currently under debate. Tim Low goes as far as to claim that all songbirds (perching birds or Passerines) ‘have their roots in Australia’. This claim is no longer in doubt and reflects on the possible age of local humans.

In relating human evolution to other biota, biogeographers generally agree that, while politically uncomfortable, there are many more good reasons to combine Australia and New Guinea, than to combine Australia with Tasmania. Ecologically, the Torres Strait is much less of a barrier to bird distribution than is the Savannah separating rainforests from the hinterland.

Before Homo sapiens arrived (60-120,000 years ago) this continent had experienced a continental drying out some 40 million years ago, leaving the rainforest surviving only along the moister coastal belt. Then about 20,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age, the continental rainforest reduced even further to form isolated patches, mostly on the coast, east of the Dividing Range.

The most recent Ice Age was unusually cold and eliminated the more sensitive tree species. Based on the similarity of the biota, Australia was divided into three major sub-regions by Baldwin Spencer in 1896. His map shows New Guinea, the Top End and coastal Queensland as a single Torresian Subregion, the inland as the Eyrean Subregion and the NSW coast plus Tasmania as the Bassian Subregion.

The geography of human movement in the southern hemisphere is still not fully understood. Alfred Wallace (of Wallace Line fame) was the first to document the division of Asian islands between those with squirrels or monkeys and those with parrots, both groups using a gnawing and chewing action in their search for food: New Guinea has over 50 species of parrot but no monkeys or squirrels, while the Malaysian Peninsula has only 5 parrots but 25 squirrels and 7 monkeys. The parrots’ large head, thick skull, strong flexible jaws, a tool-like tongue and unique feet with two claws forward and two back, competed with humans as agile tool-makers of high intelligence. As nut crackers, seed huskers, fruit pulpers, wood-choppers and tree climbers, the big parrots, possess what Tim Low calls ’Swiss Army Knife’ mouths and feet, perhaps surpassing early man’s dexterity in obtaining some bush tucker.

Without putting too fine a point on dismissing the ’bird-brain’ epithet, the smartest parrots, lyrebirds, magpies and mynas have been shown to outsmart dolphins, apes and elephants at tasks such as intergenerational transmission of tool design. Remember that the time lag between the appearance of birds and humans is over 300 million years, i.e. when we last had a common ancestor way back in the Carboniferous epoch. While parrots evolved into the most intelligent avian, humans started to dominate the mammals. So when man arrived with his stone tools, he may have picked up a few tips from his intelligent neighbour, the Queensland Palm Cockatoo, who produced a hardwood drumstick with which he pounded out messages up to 100 beats long on hollow logs. His combined good brain, sophisticated mandibles, large head and dexterous feet made him a close second to man among the intelligentsia of the day.

Tim Low tells us that talking parrots have been known from before Aristotle’s time and that they came closer to talking to us than any other animal. Today they outperform dogs and cats in problem-solving tests. Contemporary anthropologists are debating whether Australia gave the world not only its first parrots, but also