Indigenous Sovereignty Demands

[Marty_d]

24 minutes ago, old man emu said:

Does that mean if you suffer from incontinence, you'll go bald below?

If you're peeing on yourself you've got bigger (smaller?) problems than pubic deforestation.

[facthunter]

I'd question the validity of PEE removing HAIR. It's only UREA which is used to supply Nitrogen to aid Plant growth.  Nev

[pmccarthy]

It is supposed to toughen feet.

[old man emu]

25 minutes ago, pmccarthy said:

It is supposed to toughen feet.

Old brickies told the new lads to pee on their hands to toughen them so they could handle the drying effects of cement and the abrasion of the bricks.

[willedoo]

A pair of rubber coated brickie's gloves is better. That and hand moisturiser.

[onetrack]

I had an old RAN bloke tell me, with insistence that it worked, after I scoffed - that peeing on your feet in the shower cures tinea ("athletes foot"). I can honestly say I've never tried it as a specific tinea cure (I occasionally suffer from it) - but like many people, I occasionally relieve myself in the shower, so it should've shown up as a cure by now! - but I've never noticed any curative effect.

 

One product that I can mention, that DOES work very effectively on curing tinea is an anti-fungal product called Lamisil (cream). The stuff is brilliant, I used it as recommended, and I haven't had a bout of tinea, for maybe 3 years.

[red750]

From wikipedia:

 

The process of tanning was also used for boats and fishing vessels: ropes, nets, and sails were tanned using tree bark.

 

Formerly, tanning was considered a noxious or "odoriferous trade" and relegated to the outskirts of town, among the poor. Tanning by ancient methods is so foul-smelling that tanneries are still isolated from those towns today where the old methods are used. Skins typically arrived at the tannery dried stiff and dirty with soil and gore. First, the ancient tanners would soak the skins in water to clean and soften them. Then they would pound and scour the skin to remove any remaining flesh and fat. Hair was removed by soaking the skin in urine, painting it with an alkaline lime mixture, or simply allowing the skin to putrefy for several months then dipping it in a salt solution. After the hair was loosened, the tanners scraped it off with a knife. Once the hair was removed, the tanners would "bate" (soften) the material by pounding dung into the skin, or soaking the skin in a solution of animal brains. Bating was a fermentative process that relied on enzymes produced by bacteria found in the dung. Among the kinds of dung commonly used were those of dogs or pigeons.

[onetrack]

The Aborigines did have extensive knowledge of the physical properties of the plants and products they came into contact with, and which determined their use. The use of tannins in trees and tree bark  for treating animal skins, was obviously known to the Aboriginals. But this is still not farming, nor can it be classed as agrarian.

 

https://australiancurriculum.edu.au/TeacherBackgroundInfo?id=56645#:~:text=Tanning is the chemical process,durable and to prevent decomposition.

[pmccarthy]

They used to make us walk through a Condeys Crystal bath in the showers at boarding school.

[old man emu]

8 hours ago, pmccarthy said:

They used to make us walk through a Condeys Crystal bath in the showers at boarding school.

Purple Rain???

[Jerry_Atrick]

On 20/08/2024 at 7:07 AM, onetrack said:

Jerry, there's a major distinction between an agrarian society and a hunter-gatherer society - as the Aborigines were and are. One can easily make it look like the Aborigines were agrarian, by extrapolating some crude efforts at harvesting and replenshing naturally-growing plants.

 

But the true definition of an agrarian society is that they cultivate plants and crops to produce FOOD SURPLUSES, to either store for future use, or to trade. The Aborigines did nothing like this - they had, and still have, no thought for tomorrow and little forward planning skills.

Was in London when this came in.. Firstly, an agrarian society does not necessarily require cultivation in the sense of ploughing the land and plating seeds, for example. Even the word culltivation mean only really means preparing the land and not all forms of cultuvation mean digging. Permaculture, for example, is using natural habitats and the natural protections to provided by them, without ploughing (although planting of some seeds is required; others that germinate through scattering are scattereed).  Secondly, regardless how "crude" efforts or techniques are, if they are harvesting and replenishing, they are engaged in some form of agriculture.

 

By the way, I wasn't suggesting that Aboriginals were solely or pedominantly sustained through agriculture, but that not knowing it or using it was a myth. The adoption of different food production techniques based on the location of the mob/clan has been already discussed. So, I don't need to go there. The reality is Aboriginals were more hybrid than Europeans, although even in those days Europeans would have been hybrid as well. Fishing,hunting deer,

wild berry, mushrooming, wild herbs, grains, etc, were all quite prevalent in those times in Europe and there is still a strong, albeit cult rather than mass movement still doing it today.

 

I won't argue the validity of Bruce Pascoe's work, because I don't know it other than the Ted Talk and what is suggested here: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/jul/18/dark-emu-story-bruce-pascoe-controversy-legacy-abc.

 

As I am a few weeks behind in my course, I will have to wait to the end of year break and I will take a further look.  But I noticed his book, at least on amazon.co.uk is published in 2018; and there are references at least to 2010 from Australian Science Magazine, a publication I would hope to have a decent modicum of integrity about it: https://rupertgerritsen.tripod.com/pdf/published/Evidence_for_Indigenous_Australian_Agriculture.pdf.

 

There was an article in The Age (so I assume the SMH, too) that discussed Aboriginals agriculture in, I think it was North East Victoria. Buggered if I can find it, though.

 

We also have to remember that it wasn't one big society of Aboriginals across Australia. There were over 240 differrent countries, each with different cultures, languages, and dare I say agricultural/sustainment methods. We should always remember that when talking about what Aboriginals historically did, because we are usually only referring to a subset of nations, or sterotypes..

 

 

 

 

 

Edited August 23 by Jerry_Atrick

[old man emu]

1 hour ago, Jerry_Atrick said:

I will have to wait to the end of year break and I will take a further look.

Don't waste your time reading his stuff. He's been shown to be a charlatan and has as much Aboriginal blood as King Charles. If you want to go a bit deeper into the subject, make sure that you conult peer-reviewed papers in reliable journals.

[Jerry_Atrick]

I meant mor about the integrity of it rather than the book itself.

[Bruce Tuncks]

Maybe I'm a grumpy old man, but I get annoyed at the term " first nations". how closely would the tribes have to cooperate to be part of a "nation?"

In fact, the opposite was true, and whites were seen at first as potential allies against the true enemies, that is the nearby tribes.

[facthunter]

A Nation is not the correct Notion. There's about 240 of them all with different languages and they couldn't understand each other. Part of their down fall I would suggest, WE ALL live it the BIG world these days whether we like it or not..  Nev

[Bruce Tuncks]

there is a story about stuart who was attacked near katherine by aborigines. They referred to stuart's rifles as "musquats" . This shows that there was indeed transfer of information between tribes, but it was very slow. "Muskets" were the firearms on the first fleet, but were well out of date by Stuart's time.

[Bruce Tuncks]

It was thought that trading routes ( ochre was one traded commodity) where tribes gathered once a year or so in relative peace for this purpose were also information routes.

Edited August 27 by Bruce Tuncks

[old man emu]

1 hour ago, Bruce Tuncks said:

They referred to stuart's rifles as "musquats"

It is most likely that the word travelled along trade routes from the indigenes of the coastal areas around the Gulf of Carpentaria and across to Darwin where those people had contact with the Asian fishermen. I believe that there are a few words in those coastal peoples' languages that are borrowings from Malay or the languages of Indonesia.

 

It's OK to use the term 'nation' with Australian indigenes.A 'nation' is a large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular country or territory. As Nev says, there are about 240 groups across the continent. Each group would meet the criteria to be called a nation. Going further, the use of the plural 'nations' is correct because the differences between them outweigh the similarities. There is not a single nation. We are happy to distinguish different nationalities on other continents, so why not in Australia?

[willedoo]

I think the term is used referring to the fact that each tribe had sole ownership of their tribal land and their own tribal law and often a different language, so in effect they were each like a sovereign nation separate from each other with no common laws binding tribes together. That was a big sentence.

[willedoo]

14 minutes ago, old man emu said:

It is most likely that the word travelled along trade routes from the indigenes of the coastal areas around the Gulf of Carpentaria and across to Darwin where those people had contact with the Asian fishermen. I believe that there are a few words in those coastal peoples' languages that are borrowings from Malay or the languages of Indonesia.

I think there's quite a few words they adopted from the neighbouring fishermen. The first I knew of it was quite a few years ago watching an old lady being interviewed on TV. I can't remember if she was speaking a tribal language or Kriol, but my ears pricked up when I heard her use the word Belanda which was a Malay word (now Bahasa Indonesian) for Dutch people. Apparently it derives from the Portugese word Hollanda for Holland. These days the Indonesians and some top end aboriginals use the word generally for all white people and not just the Dutch. I can't remember the other Indonesian words the old lady used in the TV interview but there were a few.

 

As far as I know, the Macassans had semi-permanent settlements in the coastal area of the Top End. A lot would come and go between there and their base in Macassar but a certain amount would stay and some had Aboriginal wives. There's a beach named Maccassan Beach just south of Yirrkala.

[willedoo]

I'd like to do some reading up on trade routes. I've always wondered whether the extensive fireplace site I saw in SW Qld. was a meeting and trading place for multiple tribes. I'd never seen so many fireplaces before; there were literally hundreds of them long a creek bank. It was a creek system feeding into the large section of Cooper's Creek near Durham Downs. The local tribe was one of the biggest, if not the biggest in Queensland, so it's possible all the tribal sub groups got together as one big mob there to have a bit of a shindig, and the number of fireplaces had built up over the years. It could only be that or a multi tribe meeting place.

 

That was one of the more memorable sites I've seen. You see stuff all the time out there but some stand out and stick in your memory. Another memorable one was the biggest workshop I've seen, also in far SW Qld.. It was a significant site and covered a claypan probably about three acres in size. In that space you couldn't put a foot on the ground anywhere and not stand on stone chips. There was not much stone nearby and no obvious quarries so they must have carted the stone a fair way.

 

For those not familiar with it, a workshop is where they work the stone to make knife blades and spear tips. The stone is very hard duricrust silcrete and clinks like glass when you drop one on another. The broken shards are sharp and can cut you to the bone. They stand around busting rocks until they get the right shape for a tool or spear head, then they work that into the final product. It takes a lot of strikes to get a suitable shaped piece so there's a lot of unusable offcuts left lying on the ground. They quarry the rock by digging it up to get the better quality rock. The surface rock is too weathered and doesn't work well. I think it was about 12,000 years ago they developed stone spear heads instead of using the sharpened point of the timber spear.

 

Another memorable one I came across was a sad one being a massacre site. It was sandy country and I saw a circular low dune which would have been a typical campsite as the bowl shape inside a circular dune provides shelter from the wind in all directions. It was a campsite inside the bowl with fireplaces and grindstones and stone tools lying around. It was difficult to count the skeletons with the passage of time and impact of animals and cattle but there was at least twenty of them, possibly more. I'd say they were taken by surprise as they were all inside the circular dune.

 

Another one I'll never forget was not anything flash, just small and unusual. It was in sand and spinifex country interspersed with rock outcrops south of the Camballin / Mt. Hardman area. The sand was low and undulating and had small boulders sticking out of the ground here and there. One larger rock shaped and sized like a small Eskimo igloo caught my eye. It was about 200 metres off the track so I walked over to have a look. I guess it was about 8' diameter and about 4' high in the centre and was hollow inside. Being curious I thought I'd have a look inside as there was a hole at ground level just big enough to wriggle through. I knelt down and had a peek inside to first check for snakes then lay down and wriggled inside like a goanna. There wasn't enough height to sit up so you had to lie on your back. Lo and behold, the whole inside of the rock feature was covered in artwork. It was nice and cool in there so I guess it was a good place for the artist to escape the heat and whittle a few hours away.

[onetrack]

More rubbish about Aboriginal agricultural production in the article below. Bruce Pascoe has conned the ABC journos into writing up a big booming article about his major bush food production from the "Aboriginal" farm he's developed.

 

First off, the land Pascoe is operating from would have been cleared by whites (never seen any Aboriginal clearing efforts for agriculture) - and he's producing bush foods such as flour from wattle seeds and kangaroo grass.

 

Secondly, Pascoe and his operatives are letting the native plants regenerate naturally - meaning the farm is basically going back to native vegetation!

 

But get this - he and his operatives are producing just tiny amounts of these bush flours - to add to bulk grains produced by the white colonists! And their flours are running at $180 to $450 a kg!!!

 

I'm sure we could feed a lot of tribes cheaply, at that rate!!  😄

 

https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2024-08-27/native-superfoods-flour-grasses-seeds-kangaroo-grass-black-duck/104153962

[Bruce Tuncks]

I'm well aware of the danger of disagreeing with OME over the meaning of words, but the word "tribe" far better describes the aborigines than does the word "nation". Look them up like I did.

[spacesailor]

Australia is a " nation " of Alll colours.  Who don't discriminate by Religion,  colour,  or creed. 

So why change a good " nation " to a divided one .

Aboriginals can be anything they wish ! ,as told to All the other children of Australia .

When we have a Aboriginal prime minister. 

Will we have a catastrophe. 

spacesailor

 

[old man emu]

56 minutes ago, Bruce Tuncks said:

I'm well aware of the danger of disagreeing with OME

There's no danger if you can support your side of the argument, which you have done. 

 

I did look up a definition of "tribe", and here it is: a group of people, often of related families, who live together, sharing the same language, culture, and history, especially those who do not live in towns or cities. Ignoring the last phrase, that definition only differs from the one I posted by including "related families". 

 

That inclusion narrows down the definition of "nation" to a nation being a group of closely related family clans. The Native American groups are referred to as nations - Sioux, Cherokee, and the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations of the area around Chicago. 

 

I suppose the concept of "nation" carries with it an idea of population size. The more people who have things in common, the more we move from family to clan to nation to ethnic grouping.

 

It all boils down to this:  Either way we both end up with hot chips.