Am I Black Enough For Ya?
Sep. 5th, 2008 10:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
waitingmanI don't often read (& agree even less with) Andrew Bolt, a columnist for the Herald Sun in Melbourne, as I find him only fractionally to the left of Piers Akerman, just as pig-headed, but more verbose. But I took a look today & found myself mostly agreeing with his point, if not his piledriving method of making it. His 'Hippie/Greenie/Leftie'-bashing predilection is in full effect, but...
Traditions embraced in a naive style
By Andrew Bolt
HOW easily are we fooled by people dreaming up oppressive new Aboriginal "traditions"?
Answer: even a sick young whale like Collette is more sceptical than the average reporter.
Collette is, or was, the abandoned calf found listlessly drifting among the boats of Pittwater last month.
Every New Age wailer in Sydney was soon by her sickly side, sobbing, holding out buckets of milk, or crooning odes to a mammal then known, confusingly, as Colin.
But Associated Press describes the undoubted star of this circus: "One effort came from Aboriginal whale whisperer Bunna Lawrie, who visited the calf Thursday afternoon. Adorned with feathers on his head and white paint markings on his face, Lawrie reached into the water to stroke Colin while singing a humming, tongue-rolling tune."
Wow. Reporters were impressed. What had the whale whispered back, they demanded to know?
Replied Lawrie solemnly: "He felt really lonely and he wanted to be with his mother and family."
Really? In fact, Collette gave Lawrie the back of her fin, not even bothering to set him right about her true sex, and spending less time yapping with him than did the journalists.
As AP conceded: "After a few minutes the whale swam away to nuzzle a nearby yacht."
If Aboriginal whale whisperers are traditional, someone forgot to tell the whale. But no one at all seems to dare tell the humans that some Aboriginal traditions are about as ancient as Pilates, and even less useful.
Take the "indigenous afternoon tea" that Melbourne's Bayside Council put on for Reconciliation Week. Asked by a ratepayer what was so Aboriginal about the tea, Bayside's chief executive indignantly replied: "Indigenous food was provided and included chicken and mushroom pies, kangaroo and burgundy pies, emu and vegetable pies."
Pardon? Oven-baked pies? Made with chicken? And vegetables? And flavoured with burgundy? This is as Aboriginal as Gordon Ramsay.
This is "indigenous" only to someone determined to imagine traditional Aboriginal society as an inner-urban Eden of people in deep communion with Nature, yet still supplied with the essential luxuries of cooked dinners, fine wine and hot-and-cold running sustainability experts.
And there's no shortage of people much like that. Take Melbourne University lecturer Wayne Atkinson, a Yorta Yorta "elder" on the grounds that his Mauritian great-grandfather married a part-Aboriginal woman.
Writes Atkinson: "One can reconstruct a rather idyllic picture of Yorta Yorta lifestyle. It is clear that the people did not want for anything in terms of food and security and their lifestyles fit nicely into the picture of affluence . . ."
How sweet. But it's a dream as tenuously linked to the harsh reality of tribal life as is Atkinson's own genealogy. Yet who dares challenge such dubious recreations of Aboriginality, even when they reinvent paralysing taboos and stereotypes?
Just this week, Dr Mark Rose, general manager of the Victorian Aboriginal Education Association, damned HarperCollins for planning to publish an Australian edition of the Daring Book for Girls with a chapter explaining how to play the didgeridoo.
Rose, billed as "a member of the western Victorian Gundjitamara Nation", said this betrayed a "mammoth ignorance" by encouraging girls to play an instrument that Aborigines had banned to women, knowing it would make them infertile.
"I wouldn't let my daughter touch one," he said. "I reckon it's the equivalent of encouraging someone to play with razor blades."
Oh, really? This university-educated academic with his pale skin and European looks seriously thinks his daughter would be rendered barren by touching a hollow piece of wood?
Or is he saying any backward taboo should be maintained, even if its only purpose is to limit women's freedoms?
But the real joke is that Aborigines far, far darker than Rose - and from parts of Australia that actually have didgeridoos - don't believe in the tradition he's defending.
Ethnomusicologist Linda Barwick, of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, has studied this very question on field trips in the Northern Territory, and writes: "In discussions with women in the Belyuen community near Darwin in 1995 I was told that there was no prohibition on women playing . . .
"In a discussion with men from Groote Eylandt, Numbulwar and Gunbalanya it was agreed that there was no explicit Dreaming Law that women should not play Didgeridoo . . ."
Didgfest Australia, an Aboriginal-backed festival of the didgeridoo, agrees, declaring: "It is not taboo for Aboriginal women to play the didge in most parts of Australia . . ."
But HarperCollins quickly caved into Rose and said the chapter would be removed. Who dares question an Aboriginal tradition? Or, rather, which inner-urban, book-publishing intellectual even wants to?
The fact is a certain class of sensitive white dreamers - not tribal blacks - actually wants to believe in this natural tribal paradise with its hot pies and cool magic.
Think, for instance, of all the whites who queued two years ago to be "purified" by the "sacred fire" lit illegally in our Botanic Gardens by activist Robbie Thorpe.
Thorpe, who has British ancestry as well as Aboriginal, also claimed be an "Aboriginal elder" - but of which tribe?
In 1991, he mounted a forest protest as an elder of the Barbuwooloong clan of central Gippsland. In 2000, he was protesting at Goolengook as an elder of the Krauatungalung clan. And five years ago he was "saving" the Strzelecki forest as an elder of western Victoria's "Gurnai Nation" clans.
Now he'd lit a sacred fire in Melbourne that Graham Atkinson, co-chair of the Victorian Traditional Owners Land Justice Group, thought was just a joke by a trouble-making blow-in. But could you tell that to the white callers who rang 774 ABC in ecstatic tears to tell of being "smoked".
Heavens no. Age columnist Tracee Hutchison instead wrote mystically of undergoing this "ancient and gentle healing ritual", and how "humbled" she'd been to be told "I've got some kind of blackfella spirit inside me".
You see how fiercely such whites want to reinvent the Noble Eco-Savage. It's a yearning we've seen since at least 1991, of course, when then prime minister Bob Hawke banned a new mine at Kakadu's Coronation Hill.
Aboriginal activists, backed by green groups, had convinced him that if the hill were disturbed, an angry Bula spirit would sicken the land - or at least kill Hawke's green vote.
Never mind that no one had ever linked Bula with the site until the 1970s, or that uranium had been mined there for almost 20 years without Bula giving anyone as much as a headache.
More critically, never mind that the Jawoyn leader, Andy Andrews, begged Hawke to ignore the Bula scare and sent a petition from 92 Jawoyn people asking that the mine and its royalties be allowed to go ahead.
Forget it. The white politicians and journalists decided that real Aborigines - the ones they'd listen to, anyway - had to be green pagans, not black rationalists.
Same story with the infamous bridge to Hindmarsh Island, blocked by claims by green-backed Aboriginal activists who claimed it would disturb "secret women's business" and make locals infertile.
Again, never mind that many Christian Aboriginal women said this "secret women's business" was not just absurd but clearly untrue. White politicians and journalists once more decided that real Aborigines had to be green pagans, not black rationalists.
And the big joke? Despite this reinvention of black traditions, from "welcomes to country" to smoking ceremonies, most Aborigines aren't remotely as superstitious and traditional as the white dreamers behind this push like to imagine.
The 2006 census, for instance, found barely 1 per cent of Aborigines followed traditional Aboriginal religions. Most were just boringly, conventionally Christian.
Even more bizarrely, the 2001 Census revealed that a quarter of the believers in Aboriginal faiths weren't even Aboriginal. Whites just really, really want to believe in black gods and black superstitions in ways that few Aborigines seem themselves inclined.
That's what makes us such suckers, able to swallow not just an Aboriginal chicken pie, but a whale of a wild story and the whisperer who told it, too.
That ought to open a can of Witchetty Grubs for the day...
Traditions embraced in a naive style
By Andrew Bolt
HOW easily are we fooled by people dreaming up oppressive new Aboriginal "traditions"?
Answer: even a sick young whale like Collette is more sceptical than the average reporter.
Collette is, or was, the abandoned calf found listlessly drifting among the boats of Pittwater last month.
Every New Age wailer in Sydney was soon by her sickly side, sobbing, holding out buckets of milk, or crooning odes to a mammal then known, confusingly, as Colin.
But Associated Press describes the undoubted star of this circus: "One effort came from Aboriginal whale whisperer Bunna Lawrie, who visited the calf Thursday afternoon. Adorned with feathers on his head and white paint markings on his face, Lawrie reached into the water to stroke Colin while singing a humming, tongue-rolling tune."
Wow. Reporters were impressed. What had the whale whispered back, they demanded to know?
Replied Lawrie solemnly: "He felt really lonely and he wanted to be with his mother and family."
Really? In fact, Collette gave Lawrie the back of her fin, not even bothering to set him right about her true sex, and spending less time yapping with him than did the journalists.
As AP conceded: "After a few minutes the whale swam away to nuzzle a nearby yacht."
If Aboriginal whale whisperers are traditional, someone forgot to tell the whale. But no one at all seems to dare tell the humans that some Aboriginal traditions are about as ancient as Pilates, and even less useful.
Take the "indigenous afternoon tea" that Melbourne's Bayside Council put on for Reconciliation Week. Asked by a ratepayer what was so Aboriginal about the tea, Bayside's chief executive indignantly replied: "Indigenous food was provided and included chicken and mushroom pies, kangaroo and burgundy pies, emu and vegetable pies."
Pardon? Oven-baked pies? Made with chicken? And vegetables? And flavoured with burgundy? This is as Aboriginal as Gordon Ramsay.
This is "indigenous" only to someone determined to imagine traditional Aboriginal society as an inner-urban Eden of people in deep communion with Nature, yet still supplied with the essential luxuries of cooked dinners, fine wine and hot-and-cold running sustainability experts.
And there's no shortage of people much like that. Take Melbourne University lecturer Wayne Atkinson, a Yorta Yorta "elder" on the grounds that his Mauritian great-grandfather married a part-Aboriginal woman.
Writes Atkinson: "One can reconstruct a rather idyllic picture of Yorta Yorta lifestyle. It is clear that the people did not want for anything in terms of food and security and their lifestyles fit nicely into the picture of affluence . . ."
How sweet. But it's a dream as tenuously linked to the harsh reality of tribal life as is Atkinson's own genealogy. Yet who dares challenge such dubious recreations of Aboriginality, even when they reinvent paralysing taboos and stereotypes?
Just this week, Dr Mark Rose, general manager of the Victorian Aboriginal Education Association, damned HarperCollins for planning to publish an Australian edition of the Daring Book for Girls with a chapter explaining how to play the didgeridoo.
Rose, billed as "a member of the western Victorian Gundjitamara Nation", said this betrayed a "mammoth ignorance" by encouraging girls to play an instrument that Aborigines had banned to women, knowing it would make them infertile.
"I wouldn't let my daughter touch one," he said. "I reckon it's the equivalent of encouraging someone to play with razor blades."
Oh, really? This university-educated academic with his pale skin and European looks seriously thinks his daughter would be rendered barren by touching a hollow piece of wood?
Or is he saying any backward taboo should be maintained, even if its only purpose is to limit women's freedoms?
But the real joke is that Aborigines far, far darker than Rose - and from parts of Australia that actually have didgeridoos - don't believe in the tradition he's defending.
Ethnomusicologist Linda Barwick, of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, has studied this very question on field trips in the Northern Territory, and writes: "In discussions with women in the Belyuen community near Darwin in 1995 I was told that there was no prohibition on women playing . . .
"In a discussion with men from Groote Eylandt, Numbulwar and Gunbalanya it was agreed that there was no explicit Dreaming Law that women should not play Didgeridoo . . ."
Didgfest Australia, an Aboriginal-backed festival of the didgeridoo, agrees, declaring: "It is not taboo for Aboriginal women to play the didge in most parts of Australia . . ."
But HarperCollins quickly caved into Rose and said the chapter would be removed. Who dares question an Aboriginal tradition? Or, rather, which inner-urban, book-publishing intellectual even wants to?
The fact is a certain class of sensitive white dreamers - not tribal blacks - actually wants to believe in this natural tribal paradise with its hot pies and cool magic.
Think, for instance, of all the whites who queued two years ago to be "purified" by the "sacred fire" lit illegally in our Botanic Gardens by activist Robbie Thorpe.
Thorpe, who has British ancestry as well as Aboriginal, also claimed be an "Aboriginal elder" - but of which tribe?
In 1991, he mounted a forest protest as an elder of the Barbuwooloong clan of central Gippsland. In 2000, he was protesting at Goolengook as an elder of the Krauatungalung clan. And five years ago he was "saving" the Strzelecki forest as an elder of western Victoria's "Gurnai Nation" clans.
Now he'd lit a sacred fire in Melbourne that Graham Atkinson, co-chair of the Victorian Traditional Owners Land Justice Group, thought was just a joke by a trouble-making blow-in. But could you tell that to the white callers who rang 774 ABC in ecstatic tears to tell of being "smoked".
Heavens no. Age columnist Tracee Hutchison instead wrote mystically of undergoing this "ancient and gentle healing ritual", and how "humbled" she'd been to be told "I've got some kind of blackfella spirit inside me".
You see how fiercely such whites want to reinvent the Noble Eco-Savage. It's a yearning we've seen since at least 1991, of course, when then prime minister Bob Hawke banned a new mine at Kakadu's Coronation Hill.
Aboriginal activists, backed by green groups, had convinced him that if the hill were disturbed, an angry Bula spirit would sicken the land - or at least kill Hawke's green vote.
Never mind that no one had ever linked Bula with the site until the 1970s, or that uranium had been mined there for almost 20 years without Bula giving anyone as much as a headache.
More critically, never mind that the Jawoyn leader, Andy Andrews, begged Hawke to ignore the Bula scare and sent a petition from 92 Jawoyn people asking that the mine and its royalties be allowed to go ahead.
Forget it. The white politicians and journalists decided that real Aborigines - the ones they'd listen to, anyway - had to be green pagans, not black rationalists.
Same story with the infamous bridge to Hindmarsh Island, blocked by claims by green-backed Aboriginal activists who claimed it would disturb "secret women's business" and make locals infertile.
Again, never mind that many Christian Aboriginal women said this "secret women's business" was not just absurd but clearly untrue. White politicians and journalists once more decided that real Aborigines had to be green pagans, not black rationalists.
And the big joke? Despite this reinvention of black traditions, from "welcomes to country" to smoking ceremonies, most Aborigines aren't remotely as superstitious and traditional as the white dreamers behind this push like to imagine.
The 2006 census, for instance, found barely 1 per cent of Aborigines followed traditional Aboriginal religions. Most were just boringly, conventionally Christian.
Even more bizarrely, the 2001 Census revealed that a quarter of the believers in Aboriginal faiths weren't even Aboriginal. Whites just really, really want to believe in black gods and black superstitions in ways that few Aborigines seem themselves inclined.
That's what makes us such suckers, able to swallow not just an Aboriginal chicken pie, but a whale of a wild story and the whisperer who told it, too.
That ought to open a can of Witchetty Grubs for the day...
