Okay America, how did you manage it?

[JohnB]

I still think you are too optimistic. Simple exposure to other cultures in't enough, you have to absorb and internalise those experiences.

 

For example there is a big medicos meeting on at the moment and a major topic is Aboriginal access of healthcare services. In the backblocks we have some trouble getting services to people whether black, white or brindle. It's simply hard to get good medical services to people out in back of beyond. The "Royal Flying Doctor Service" does an amazing job flying Drs and acting as an air ambulance, but we still need to do more. So the only way to improve access is to get more services to the people.

 

However there is another part to the problem. All people in the cities have exactly the same access to healthcare. There is no discrimination, the hospitals are open to everyone, you just walk in. But for some reason, even though everybody has the same access, Aboriginals living in cities are less likely to actually use the services. Emergencies, yes but not for regular checkups or many more minor complaints. Without checkups, you don't catch problems early and of course minor things can become major.

 

It's about attitude. For all we complain about overworked health services because many whites at the first hint will run their child to the nearest medical facility. That is our cultural attitude, "Sick? Run to Doctor". For some reason, and I have no idea why unless it's a general mistrust thing, the Aboriginals don't have this attitude and therefore don't use the medical facilities as often. In the cities, it's not that they don't have access, they don't use them.

 

It's like choosing to dig a hole with your hands when there is a shovel beside you.

 

I add that beside the normal facilities that all Australians in a city have access to, we also have many services staffed by and exclusively for the Aboriginal community. Even these services are apparently finding it tough going to get people to use them.

 

Another point is why should the Aboriginals even believe that we whites give a damn? The fact of the matter is that for most of the history of this country we didn't. We did discriminate. In the 50s "cohabiting with an Aboriginal" was against the law. I don't know that many were prosecuted, but illegal it was. So with a long history of either uncaring or well intentioned stuff ups, why should they believe what the white gov says? We didn't care for so long and now they are supposed to believe that the whites care if a man beats his wife? For most of history we didn't care too much if a white did it, now they are supposed to believe that the attitude has changed? It has, but why should they believe it?

 

Family is very strong in the Aboriginal community, loyalty to family is very important. Which is why a battered wife is far less likely to report it or seek medical attention. They know the consequences to the family and don't want to risk the inevitable police intervention. Families are still important in Western culture, but we've decided that some prices for keeping the family together are simply too high to pay. This attitude is changing and we are seeing the women in communities being more assertive, which is a good thing.

 

Also note as I said earlier that some political forces in Australia are intentionally hindering and destroying the abilities of Aboriginal communities to develop. The Left loves supporting Stone Age cultures and their land rights and will do anything in it's power to ensure that they remain stone age or leave their land. If you haven't, listen to the Noel Pearson interview. The man talks sense. How can you tell people to send their kids to school to have a better future if any sort of economic development is denied them? The only "Land Rights" the Left wants is the right to say "No" to development, Aboriginal ability to say "Yes" to development must be fought at all costs. And it's the Aboriginal people who are left paying the price in lost hope and early deaths.

 

Maybe it's different elsewhere, but down here we have way too many ecofreaks in positions of power. They are the ones condemning Aboriginals to disease, poverty, despair and early deaths while at the same time acting morally superior because they "care about the environment". The true depth of my contempt for and disgust at these people cannot be described. I wouldn't p*ss on them if they were on fire. (So if I sometimes come across as hard anti Green, now you have some idea why. I can't abide self important, self obsessed idealogical murderers. And that is what they are. They know exactly what the result of their actions will be and they simply don't care, trees are more important.)

Edited October 9, 2010 by JohnB

[iNow]

I still think you are too optimistic. Simple exposure to other cultures in't enough, you have to absorb and internalise those experiences.

I guess, from my perspective anyway, your best chance at absorption and internalization of other cultures is first an exposure to them, and that exposure is best accommodated via the internet.

 

 

For some reason, and I have no idea why unless it's a general mistrust thing, the Aboriginals don't have this attitude and therefore don't use the medical facilities as often. In the cities, it's not that they don't have access, they don't use them.

 

It's like choosing to dig a hole with your hands when there is a shovel beside you.

 

I add that beside the normal facilities that all Australians in a city have access to, we also have many services staffed by and exclusively for the Aboriginal community. Even these services are apparently finding it tough going to get people to use them.

 

Another point is why should the Aboriginals even believe that we whites give a damn? The fact of the matter is that for most of the history of this country we didn't. We did discriminate.

 

<...>

 

Also note as I said earlier that some political forces in Australia are intentionally hindering and destroying the abilities of Aboriginal communities to develop.

 

<...>

 

Maybe it's different elsewhere, but down here we have way too many ecofreaks in positions of power. They are the ones condemning Aboriginals to disease, poverty, despair and early deaths while at the same time acting morally superior because they "care about the environment".

 

 

Right. But you asked:

 

The Pintupi people, the last tribe to be contacted by white man in Australia were found in 1984, a mere 26 years ago. Any intelligent suggestions from the cheap seats about how to get them from "Stone Age Hunter Gatherer" to "21st Century citizen" in a generation or two?

 

... and I responded:

 

Free internet, cheap/free access to computers and solar to charge their batteries, and reliable food and water sources. That should do the trick in much less than a generation... more like a decade.

 

I stand by my response, with the caveat that my optimism was primarily on the timeline.

 

I stipulate that I could be painfully mistaken. After all, I was calling in that play from way up in the nose bleed section... the cheap seats, as it were.

[JohnB]

Fair enough. It wasn't your answer but more the optimistic timeline I was addressing. How do you expose children to the net if their parents won't even send them to school?

 

In many ways the answer you gave is what we're doing. But cultural inertia is a much stronger force that you think. Add to that the political complexities, and it just takes time.

 

BTW, did you listen to the Pearson interview?

Edited October 9, 2010 by JohnB

[padren]

Fair enough. It wasn't your answer but more the optimistic timeline I was addressing. How do you expose children to the net if their parents won't even send them to school?

 

In many ways the answer you gave is what we're doing. But cultural inertia is a much stronger force that you think. Add to that the political complexities, and it just takes time.

 

BTW, did you listen to the Pearson interview?

It's also worth noting that these societies probably survived by creating a strong importance tied to instilling these survival skills in the next generation, which is often done through teachings that involve an entire world view. If such a society went from stone age to information age in a single generation there wouldn't be enough time for that generation to learn much at all of their own culture, which would largely obliterate it. This would be imminently visible to the previous generation raising them and they would resist it since it would be antithetical to their world view. If the process was to occur less quickly then you'd have a generation or two that would learn a whole lot about both the modern world and their traditional culture, and still end up modernized eventually but with more of a unique cultural intact.

 

 

As an aside thought, the idea of a society feeling an urgent need to pass on hard earned stone age techniques to their children seems almost quaint by today's standards, but considering how things looked during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis it kinda makes one see the idea in doubling down on sticks and stones in a new light as a long game strategy.

Edited October 9, 2010 by padren

[iNow]

BTW, did you listen to the Pearson interview?

Yes. I simply don't know enough about the history or context to really validate his premises or the conclusions he's drawing from them.

[Moontanman]

Yes America treated their aboriginal population in much less paternalistic way, they just gave us blankets saturated with small pox virus.... I think our crazy slide into the politics of extremes and fear of any who can really think have been our undoing and will continue to be. As long as lies and fear will motivate the voters why bother to tell the truth?

 

BTW does everyone really think that an advanced culture automatically has the right to destroy a primitive culture and force them into the "modern" world? Are we so jealous of them we have to force our problems on them? If people want to live in their ancestral homes and eat grubs and live in camps in the wild this should be celebrated as just as viable an option as our own life of technology and expensive homes... at least...

Edited October 9, 2010 by Moontanman

[JohnB]

Moontanman, I'm reasonably sure that no Australian Aboriginal wants to live in a Gunya eating witchety grubs if it can be avoided. It's not about imposing our culture and destroying theirs, they want the advantages of modern society. Part of the problem is this fantasy of the "Noble Savage" that has infected Western thinking and a romanticisation of the past.

 

"Living close to nature, in harmony with the seasons. Providing from my own hand, understanding the ways of the animals." The whole box of crap. It was also a time of "Suffering dysentry, marrying women of 12 because they had a 1 in 3 chance of dying in childbirth. Having most of your teeth ground down or fallen out by 25. Managing to live to 40 and being considered "very old"".

 

How many Native Americans would really like to go back to the old ways? No cars, no guns, no horses, no medicine, no electricity?

 

When given the chance, historically all peoples have chosen to advance and adopt the ways of the more advanced society. So the bottom line is people don't "want" to live that way at all.

 

Padren, it might seem funny to try and preserve parts of the traditional Aboriginal society, but we like the US are a melting pot. There is no need for the Aboriginal Communities to discard any part of their traditional culture that doesn't conflict with modern ways. By keeping as much as possible as we attempt to fully integrate our peoples, we all become culturally richer. The fun starts because there isn't a single "Aboriginal Culture", there are dozens if not hundreds of Tribal cultures that have differnt rules even though they follow similar general rules. As none of this was ever written down, we don't know if something is compatible with the traditional culture until it rises up and slaps people in the face.

 

The very sad part of it all is that recently it's not white Australian culture that is destroying traditional Aboriginal culture, it's Black American culture. To see the young men junking their traditional ideals to wear their pants extra low and talk like "Gangstas" must be terribly disheartening for the Tribal Elders. Hell, it's hard for me to watch, and I'm white. I feel like shaking them and screaming "You have your own culture, you don't need to copy the dregs of the yanks". For this part of the problem, I don't think anybody has an answer.

 

iNow, fair enough.

Edited October 10, 2010 by JohnB

[padren]

Padren, it might seem funny to try and preserve parts of the traditional Aboriginal society, but we like the US are a melting pot. There is no need for the Aboriginal Communities to discard any part of their traditional culture that doesn't conflict with modern ways. By keeping as much as possible as we attempt to fully integrate our peoples, we all become culturally richer. The fun starts because there isn't a single "Aboriginal Culture", there are dozens if not hundreds of Tribal cultures that have differnt rules even though they follow similar general rules. As none of this was ever written down, we don't know if something is compatible with the traditional culture until it rises up and slaps people in the face.

 

The very sad part of it all is that recently it's not white Australian culture that is destroying traditional Aboriginal culture, it's Black American culture. To see the young men junking their traditional ideals to wear their pants extra low and talk like "Gangstas" must be terribly disheartening for the Tribal Elders. Hell, it's hard for me to watch, and I'm white. I feel like shaking them and screaming "You have your own culture, you don't need to copy the dregs of the yanks". For this part of the problem, I don't think anybody has an answer.

I wasn't suspect that Aboriginal Communities would be pressured to discard cultural traditions to fit in with modern society, I only mean that I am concerned that rapid integration (that fits with iNow's timeframe) could be too overwhelming to both assimilate so much new and appreciate the old. A slower pace may be far more healthy in the long run. If a child is trying to integrate something as vast as internet access and modern technology and their parents can't provide them with any world-view context with which to assimilate it the parents' world view is probably going to be rejected outright. Not only the grub eating and basket weaving skills, but teachings that pass on a sense of place, self identity and self worth in the world - aspects of character building that frankly are even more important when everything from Noble Prize caliber lectures to the most nasty pr0n are a keyboard away.

 

If there is one major risk in modern society, it's that it's easy for someone without a strong sense of self to get lost in it. It's one thing to reconsider your sense of place in the world as you are exposed to more of the world, but it's important that someone has one at all before diving into something so vast. Otherwise, you'll likely get more young men waddling in low pants drinking hennessy on the street corner.

[JohnB]

but teachings that pass on a sense of place, self identity and self worth in the world - aspects of character building that frankly are even more important when everything from Noble Prize caliber lectures to the most nasty pr0n are a keyboard away.

 

Which sort of encapsulates the "Catch 22" Australia is in. Modernise quckly and that very important "identity" is lost and we are accused of and pilloried for "cultural genocide", but without that modernisation we are pilloried for the very great and very deadly differences in life expectancy and living conditions.

 

This is why I support people like Noel Pearson. His ideas give the Aboriginal people an economic base and control over the modernisation. They will be the ones to choose how and when rather than it being imposed by the white gov.

 

A contributing factor to white gov stuff ups is distance and conditions. Our Capital Brisbane is in the very South East corner of the State in a quite temperate climate. Because most of the population is here most of the pollies are from here. The Gulf is 1700 km away and a totally different climate with totally different problems. (It's 2200 km to the tip of the Cape.) Frankly, the pollies (and a lot of people) just haven't got a clue about what it's like up there. It's like politicians from Indiana, who have lived all their lives in Indiana trying to plan for the economic development and infrastructure for Florida. Hopeless, they wouldn't have a clue.

 

I will add that we have similar problems between the States and the Federal gov. Most of our population is in the Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra triangle. Pollies from this area barely understand the concept of driving an hour between towns, they are lost at the idea of driving 2 hours between houses. In Victoria for example, you would be hard pressed to ever be more than 100 km from a medical facility with an MRI machine, so that is their mindet, their "reality". They simply cannot comprehend the idea of 2 or 3 hours flying time to get to an MRI. I remember some years ago being in Melbourne and talking to a nice couple who were coming to Queensland for a driving holiday. "We're going to Brisbane and if we like it we'll head up to Cairns for the weekend" they said. I couldn't make them understand that when they reached Brisbane, they were only half way to Cairns. From their POV it was all one state and in their experience you can drive anywhere in a State in one day.

 

I often think that our State gov is doing to the country communities what Canberra is doing to us. Taking advice about regional issues from overeducated dickheads who have never been there and have no real idea about the problem.