“The perception that Indigenous Australians were primitive hunters and gatherers who lived in a nomadic ‘Stone Age’ culture resonates through most narratives found on Indigenous people in pre-colonial times. This narrative is better placed in the realm of myth; I contest claims that the life expectancy of Indigenous Australians was only forty years in pre-colonial times, by providing suggestive evidence that there is a strong probability that longevity favoured Indigenous Australians in comparison to many poorer sectors of the European population living in slum habitats…”
This is from Healthier times?: revisiting Indigenous Australian health history
Health History. 2009;11(2):116-35.
Author
Affiliation
- 1 University of Newcastle.
- PMID: 20481119
Medieval & pre industrial Europe wasn’t a great place to be if you were poor & landless. Up to half the children died & the average life expectancy was about 35. Researchers have extrapolated (assumed) that life was pretty crap for Aboriginal people as well. This doesn’t take into account the differences in population density, diet & lifestyle and the isolation of an island continent. I’ve read that the Indonesians brought small pox into the top end occasionally when they visited but in general Australia was plague free. We didn’t have Genghis Khan, feudal warlords, potato famines or TB. Yes many babies would have died and children if they had infected wounds but if you survived into adulthood you had a good chance of making old bones the research shows.
Europeans had different ideas about civilization. William Dampier described the Bardi people north of Broome as “…. the miserabilist people in the world” in his book ‘A new voyage around the world’ in 1697. Daisy Bates also made extraordinary child cannibalism claims in her book ‘The passing of the Aborigines’ in 1938. It tells me nothing has changed over centuries re the old journalistic adage that sensationalism sells. The notion of ‘improving’ indigenous lives brought us the ongoing calamity of the stolen generation. Neglect is a cultural concept not an absolute one and the old saying cleanliness is next to Godliness must have been proudly sponsored by pears soap. So when I found this 2 in 1 combination tree in the sanctuary camp last week I sat down & cried. I cried for the ignorance & miseducation of generations of Australians who couldn’t see value in traditional tribal life. Not only did we fail to understand the horticultural skills of Aboriginal people but we couldn’t recognise the beauty of multigenerationally maintained CMTs. How did they persuade a Redgum to grow in the base of a that Bimblebox anyway? With centuries of care & a spirituality connection with their ancestors that goes unknown & unrecognized still.
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40 years ago when I was chipping cotton near Carinda in the uni holidays I learnt a very important lesson in the art of observing . When you look up your row & see a big Noogoora burr your brain will focus on that. You are going to walk past a dozen other burrs to get to it. This is the same out in the paddock when I started actively looking for scartrees and Ringtrees rather than stumbling upon them. The TinTs were there all the time but I walked past them as I was focusing on scars & rings. When Allan & I are out ‘on country’ he is the one to spot artefacts – that’s how he found all the megafauna bones on the dry Barwon river bed in 2019.
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Good eyes & experience help when finding Aboriginal camps but it’s more a holistic way of seeing. Don’t focus on what you expect but let your eyes drift over the whole landscape. Are the surrounding trees old enough? Is there good surface or underground water? Is there a protected sandy hollow? Are there CMTs? Is there a fine soft sedge or kidney weed carpet under the trees? Are there missing tree branches cut with a stone axe esp. supplejack? Are there medicinal trees and bushes – miljee, butter bush, yellow berry bush, emu bush, hop bush? Are there vines like gargaloo & the bush banana & native jasmine? Around here there is always the obligatory Peach bush – either growing conventionally or as TinTs inside the box trees. Finally is there a feeling of home, a lasting humanness about the place? I mean does that lovely lime coloured nutgrass make you want to lie down in the dappled shade & have a little kip?
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Now you’ve located the camp have a good look at the old eucalypts with the scrub trees growing around them like wilga, bumble, currant bush & boonery. Keeping my excitable nature under control I come at possible TinTs like an over cautious crab. 99.9% of the time the scrub tree will be growing trunk to trunk with the box tree but on those really good days you find them living inside. When I first noticed there were more TinTs than could be explained by chance I contacted the LLS ( local land services – NSW ). They said ‘ yeh nah happens all the time – bird shit ‘ I approached some Aboriginal organisations & politicians but no one bothered to reply. Luckily as well as being excitable Im also stubborn so I continued to look for & photograph these trees. My search for truth has led some of the local matrons to decide Im persona non grata socially now. They don’t think Allan & I should go ‘bushwalking’ all round the district but I find that a small price to pay for Indig. knowledge. I think life here pre 1788 was not “nasty, brutish & short” like the pre industrial europeans? I think we have been looking up rows for a long time – seeing what we want to see & missing the big picture. Now we have the internet & google earth – we can look sideways more often perhaps?
