Aboriginal culture is not part of our common heritage and it does not enrich the life of our country. 

 

Culture is the values, beliefs, behaviour and practices and material objects that constitute a people’s way of life.  It is a bridge to the past as well as a guide to the future

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In this chapter I attempt to set out Cultural aspects of pre-contact Aboriginal life.

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Aboriginal cultural life involved limited human rights, religious intolerance, disease and absolute poverty. Other negative aspects include domestic oppression (usually of women and children), violence, clan/tribal warfare, poor care of the environment and considerable restriction on artistic freedom of expression

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The reader should note that the indigenous culture that developed on this continent long before the creation of the Australian nation and without any influence from it is now being endorsed as part of our common heritage.

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It is not part of our common heritage and it does not enrich the life of our country.  Australia did not incorporate any aspects of aboriginal law, religion or social relations into its institutional structures.  Those things that may be a precious part of the heritage of the people of Aboriginal descent but for most of the rest of us,  they are survivalist, primitive and often brutal and mysterious, especially those parts that are off limits to uninitiated men and women secret men's business

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LORE - NOT LAW

 

The law in Australia, which all Australian citizens are subject, is the system of rules which a particular

country or community recognizes as regulating the actions of its members and which it may enforce

by the imposition of penalties.

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Aboriginal lore is not be conflated with the operation of national Laws and their legal systems.

 

Aboriginal lore is the a body of traditions and knowledge on a subject or held by a particular group,

typically passed from person to person by word of mouth.  It is not be construed as Law.  

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Customary lore is immutable, unwritten and secret.

 

As it is unwritten, it is unverifiable.  It can only exist within the confines of a small clan and disputes over what

the law actually says are unresolvable.  The role of human beings in Aboriginal hordes was to obey the law not

make it. As one aboriginal put it “there is one law and he’s there forever”

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In traditional society elders kept the higher principles of their law and customs secret to themselves. Traditional

life as a male was a process of revelation in which elders gradually released through rituals that secret men's business that governed them. It would take an initiated man until middle age to gain full knowledge. Younger men and females had little say in how their society was managed and little opportunity to influence the course of their lives. There is even a sexual division within the secret laws

 

Aboriginal lore – which may have existed for thousands of years BEFORE Australia but we will never be able any of the history of the lore’s, how it was created and how it changed, if at all, over time.  South Australia circumscion included

 

The fact that the law was passed from generation to generation and was immutable and secret may have caused the Aboriginal peoples to be locked in a cultural system that simply did not allow change and to attempt change would result in your death or other brutalization.  This factor alone may have been the reason the Aboriginal peoples remained one of the least civilised races on earth, locked by the Elders in a Neolithic stone age culture.

 

Aboriginal lore was based on a system of fear and superstition, there was no commonality of lore across language groups, often involving brutal punishment, a system of widespread revenge killings – a process of bestowal of girls/children to older men along with the subjugation and subordination of women.  The lore’s were not a system of human rights as contrasted against the current day Laws of the Commonwealth of Australia. 

 

There was NO DECOMCRACY in Aboriginal tribal life in pre-Australia.

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Adjunct Professor William D Rubenstein wrote :

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"Pre-contact Aboriginal life resembled more closely than anything else Thomas Hobbes’s famous description of “life in the state of nature”: “brutal, nasty, and short”.

 

No one in their senses would voluntarily choose to live in the lifestyle of pre-contact Aborigines. It would mean that you would be typically stark naked, with no buildings or more than primitive shelter, permanently foraging for whatever food could be found, illiterate, and, if ill, treated by a tribal witch doctor with smoke or herbs and incantations which have no effect.  Life for the weak, enfeebled or disabled ended quickly and badly.   You would live in a life of constant fear of the unnatural and fear of attack from other tribes.  If you were a woman you were simply the property of a male which you were bestowed to at a very young age and could be treated as he wished.

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Aborigines had no concept of human rights of any kind, only collective tribal survival, and no notion of any of the aspects of justice which we take for granted, from the presumption of innocence to the sanctity of human life, especially of children and other innocents".

 

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