There’s some truly fascinating about the low iq and helplessness of Australian aboriginals.
After all, the Australian government didn’t just have to change the entire way gasoline distribution works, because they couldn’t stop themselves from huffing it. In one state, the government basically had to step in, put them all on food stamps and remove most of the children/or put the families under close watch, because of the mass scale of sexual abuse among the aboriginals.
I can’t think of any human population anywhere so unfit for modern life. One gets the feeling, that if the Europeans had never come, there either wouldn’t be any aboriginals in the year 22000, or they’d look and operate in exactly the same way as 25.000 years ago, with zero major changes.
Surely not to the extent of Australian Aboriginals: A people so completely unfit for modern life, that the government in the NWT, had to move in 2007 with an army of police and social workers, and put them all under administration to prevent kids from getting raped.
The amount of child sexual abuse among aborigines was so high, that the government deemed a nanny state on steroids necessary, outlawing porn and alcohol, changing the way welfare worked so 50% HAD to be spent on food, and many other repressive measures THAT ARE STILL IN FORCE.
Yes, you read that right, Aboriginals are so unfit for modern life, that they need the government to tell them: “When we give you money, you need to spend it on food! No, you can not pimp out your 10 year daughter to truckers for a steak sandwich and a beer! That’s BAD!”
(And what do you know, many aboriginal rights activists also had to be put behind bars, because they couldn’t stop diddling kids!)
As for intermixing with white people, It certainly seems that the elite kind of abos who go on and get some kind of public sector position, work at universities, work as “public intellectuals” etc, all seem to be at least 1/4 or 1/2 white.
I'm also totally unfit for modern life. But of course you are very fit so have evolved far ahead of the woke people.
Seriously though, I do have an IQ over 2 standard deviations higher than the norm as tested by a registered neuropsychologist who was my PhD advisor when I was a candidate. But I must be quite stupid because you can see things so much more accurately than me.
So whats your point anyway? You say if we hadn't come, the aborigines would have died out or wouldn't have changed their culture? So what?
Why change if you are happy and dont see any reason to change. And surely after surviving through the climate disasters that happened during their long occupation of this country, why would they have died out?
I cant see any evidence for them being unfit for modern society. But I'm sure it makes sense to you.
So I'd like to clear this up, do you think that the half castes are smarter than full bloods? You know the white settlers were not shy about spreading their seed among the 'gins' and creating piccaninies.
But how many white genes does it take for low IQ aborigines to get enough smarts to live like we do in the modern world? Some do manage it dontcha know?
There are those white aborigines that some people who can't talk about it apparently, actually do say a lot about this progress that is apparently very unfair to the 'real' aborigines.
Some people say the white aborigines are taking all the money. Bloody greedy white genes must be behind this, surely? Or is it the aboriginal genes that make them unreliable?
And again in the context of IQ estimation, I,m asking about Bennelongs IQ and an explanation of how, if his IQ was so low how did he learn to speak English so quickly. Sounds pretty smart to me.
And if he was amazingly more intelligent than the rest of his people, how come he hadn't taken over as the boss?
So many questions, so few explanations apart from it is all just wokeness that ruined our white man truth.
“ I cant see any evidence for them being unfit for modern society. But I'm sure it makes sense to you.”
Government need to change how gasoline is produced, and our law additives because Abos can’t stop themselves from huffing it.
Government needs to go ultra nanny state, send in an army of social workers, and change how the welfare system works, to ensure that abos are feeding their kids and dont constantly rape them.
Why yes, clearly aboriginals are doing just amazing in a modern society, lmao!
I can’t think of any other group that apparently needs to nannied like this.
“And again in the context of IQ estimation, I,m asking about Bennelongs IQ and an explanation of how, if his IQ was so low how did he learn to speak English so quickly. Sounds pretty smart to me.”
And I’ve already explained that your example is dumb. Even in the dumbest groups of humans, even if they have an average IQ of 60-70, there will be the occasional very smart outlier. There’ll just be a lot fewer of them. That’s just how iq distribution works.
If we assume that the aboriginal population then was around a million, it’s hardly unusual that there’d be one, or even a few, smart enough to learn to speak English.
Ok does anyone see that this response that is so typical of the Australian 'racist' (what would you call it) argument, the lack of facts and reasoning, the lack of any interest in responding to my points in a fair and intelligent way is the reason why we can't talk about it.
The racists just shout you down and fail to answer the questions I ask.
I even asked a simple question, which you of course ignored: Can you cite any other communities so wholly incompetent and incapable of modern life, that mass action of this scale needed to be taken by the government?
I even answered your question about Bennelong, and pointed out that it’s hardly unusual for a low iq population to have an occasional genius. (Though very rare).
As for all your other “questions”, I ignored them because they were dumb attempts at rhetorical gotchas. “How much white DNA does it take to raise aboriginal IQ?!”
And now, unable to argue your point, and unable to answer or correct very concrete examples of aboriginal dysfunction (You’d think that ‘Fred your kids and don’t rape them!’ Would be very simple to follow, but I guess not!) you’re left seething and calling me racist.
Do you want to continue to tell me about the facts that are salient to you but not to me. Do you understand that the intervention is not proof of anything except how a very dysfunctional sub-cultures can develop among human beings living in poverty?
It was a horror story but proves nothing about the IQ of the Indigenous people, now or back during their long occupation.
If you worked in Child Services, you would know that white men are equally capable of horrible child abuse, so are Muslim Pakistanis, it's not IQ. There were white petrol sniffers back then, there is a FAS (fetal alcohol syndrome) child in my own very white high IQ family. Alcohol abuse creates low IQ.
The effect of alcohol on a people who never used it, is a significant factor in the story of how badly some have adapted to modern life.
And one last thing, you did not explain Bennelongs IQ and how such an outlier could have been just an ordinary tribe member until Phillip chose him. How fortuitous for us.
Me: “Can you come up with another group whose dysfunction resulted in a major change to national gasoline distribution?”
You: “Well… Sometimes white people also huff gasoline! Also it’s because aboriginals aren’t used to alcohol! It’s only two centuries ago their ancestors were introduced to it!”
Oh sweetheart… I DID explain Bennelong. You apparently don’t understand neither how IQ works, or what a bell curve is.
And isn’t it remarkable btw, that on one hand you can say that: “very dysfunctional sub-cultures can develop among human beings living in poverty” but simultaneously when I ask if you can come up with another group of people where the government had to come up with SUCH drastic measures, you can’t say anything?
So let’s have it. If it’s perfectly normal that such a dysfunctional sub culture can result from poverty, then surely other governments must have taken similar measures against an entire population?
If not, perhaps it’s not inconceivable to conclude that this particular group is unusually dysfunctional?
My father after finishing a fine Art degree in the late 1940's, went 'outback' which is what the inland of Australia is called.
He worked with Aboriginal stockmen driving cattle. Usually family groups still living somewhat traditional lives and he was a marxist, and very curious about their way of life and how they had managed to live without change for so long.
He told me he thought that they had a such a wonderfully satisfying life, so complex, with stories, art, learning how one is related to everything else in the land and every individual is valued from birth to death, the elders passed down the law and everybody obeyed because each child was woven into the fabric of the land through their own creation story and totemic identifiers that were intrically related to the land so the land owned them not the other way around.
There is a lot of literature that is available about all the new knowledge, that is less controversial than Dark Emu but the controversy with this book is political. Conservatives in Australia want people to believe they are stupid and lazy.
The best evidence that they are not stupid is Bennelong. Google Benelong and see how very intelligent he was.
They also are not lazy, or cannibals. I'm surprised people think that. There doesn't seem to be any reference you have listed that provides evidence for this.
Australian anthropologists have done a lot of work that can help you get more info anout these amazing people and their culture.
This reference is good for how they probably came here.
Of course its only those evil “conservatives” who publish stories of wide spread cannibalism and infanticide. Not so many anthropologists who were actually quite sympathetic to a aboriginals confirm this.
Their “wonderful stories” when compared with the complexity of myths from almost any other culture seem very shallow and simplistic. Might be something to do with the IQ levels noted in the article. I thought the “noble savage” Trope had died, good to see you are still a believer.
Evil? Who called these poor old conservatives evil? Not me. I totally explained why they won't consider all the other stories that confirm that our Australian aborigines had a far superior attitude to the country and the people. It's their lack of IQ.
And tell me who was too stupid to learn Bennelong's language and culture but Bennelong learned all he needed to know to hang out with the stupid whites who sent their criminals and the worst of their soldiers and administrators here.
Read The Fatal Shore for the story of how un civilised my ancestors were.
Every people, no matter how low their average IQ is, produced an occasional genius. That’s just statistics and genetics for you. Bennelong is totally irrelevant for the fact that Australian aboriginals have the lowest IQ on the planet.
The Australian government literally had to legislate about gasoline additives because aboriginals couldn’t stop themselves from sniffing it. Let’s not pretend that this is a particularly smart or competent group of people, occasional genius aside.
And no, the real anthropologists at the time did not accept the widespread stories of cannibalism. Watkins Tench said he didn't think it happened. Soyou name one creditible actual anthropologist who did say the Indigenous used cannibalism and/or infanticide for food or to keep the population low. Some say that ritual cannibalism was probably a thing but all the horror stories that Quadrant authors cite have been deconstructed considering the reliability of the storytellers, and are clearly not reliable.
Do you have any actually verified eyewitness statements? How come only a few dodgy characters like Daisy Bates knew about these things and so many other witnesses didn't see it?
Read the bennelong story years ago - one swallow does not a summer make , “… stupid whites , olds , blah blah “ , try not thinking in stereotypes - wokey wokey , not so blokey me thinks
Really, you seriously think the whites just happened to find the only intelligent aborigine? Lol not sure I understand the blokey words and obviously funny things you are saying to, what, trying to prove me wrong? But all good. I know how bereft you are of real facts and rational arguments.
Hussein, yes totally woke and proud of it but thing is, are you saying my dad who was out there in outback Queensland in the '40s was woke way back then because my ideas and knowledge is based on his understanding of their way of being.
The White wish to find something noble about other people is immeasurable and old as time, especially among those who are losers in their native societies (think of conquistadores, marxists, failed authors and artists and so on). They elevate the foreign to message the ingroup that rejected them how not special they are. They write back home things like "and this great city of (insert coloured people of choice) is so much bigger and better than you guys back home and I am actually really important here." And leftist scholars lap it up as it corresponds to their same desires of denigrating the society that doesn't value them.
'Guns, Germs, and Steel' answers the larger questions posed here. A chapter is devoted to Australia and New Guinea.
The main answer is 'food.'
Australia had no native plant or animal species that were domesticable for intensive food production. Other human populations either had native domesticable species or received them via migration and trade routes. The Australian continent became isolated from such routes. Without intensive food production, complex societies do not develop - no fixed settlements, written language, advanced technology, human specialists, political organisation, etc.
Just ask yourself what native Australian domesticated foods we eat today. Answer: macadamias. That's it. We had no native cereal grasses, pulses, or tubers suitable for intensive cropping. New Guinea at least had sugar cane, yams, and taro (and received imports of sweet potato, chickens and pigs). Australia did not have any of the main domesticable animals (sheep, goats, pigs, cows, horses) until European settlement.
Many of the 'mysteries' about native Australian development are resolved under consideration of food, isolation, and geographic and climatic factors.
Aquaculture developed in societies that did not then develop farming. Farming develops in high resource environments: nowhere in Australia were there the level of resources, even with fire-management of landscape, to produce the social crowding that leads to farming. (Harvesting of wild grains/seeds is not farming.)
Foraging populations are fairly harshly limited by technology and environment. They are subject to population crashes and replacement. Especially as they are at risk of falling below the level that sustains the technology and social connections needed to survive. A pattern of surges and crashes could easily result in a lack of sustained population growth.
The striking gerontocratic polygyny of Aboriginal cultures seems to have been a way to transfer knowledge across generations and to maximise social connections in a harsh environment with a lot of poisonous plants and animals. Especially the way there was a different group of eligible mates each generation. It also blocked inbreeding quite thoroughly.
Such polygyny seems to have been enforced by considerable violence against women. But marrying old men to young women, and their widows to young men, would have kept population growth down while providing some relief to the “randy young man with no wife” problem that polygyny generates.
Thanks for the Dark Emu critique and for sure, the author of Dark Emu is like me I assume, very motivated to see this quite unique culture as equally intelligent as other humans so I see these complaints as nitpicking and the argument in Dark Emu not the important thing to understand about their progress or lack of.
Their 'failure' to develop agriculture and technological 'progress' is not due to low IQ, it is due to something essential that they brought with them when they came here and it never changed. I think they had a understanding of human nature, a philosophy, the law, that guided their aims and actions.
The thing about IQ is the evidence from Bennelong. What IQ does one need to have, to at his age have so easily learned all the things he did learn? Is it possible for one individual to be so much more intelligent than everyone else. The IQ Nazis need to explain how that happens.
They came here with their law, a belief that they could raise adults who did not want to change things .... some people really don't like change and wonder if it is for the better. As you say, the old people ruled, absolutely. They are the wise ones so obvious that they should be the top of the very shallow heirachy.
If they came with the philosophy, a set of beliefs that noone owns the land, we are owned by the land. This is so different from any other 'philosophy' or religion in which people are told to do what you want with the land, it's yours.
Anyway, so to stop young men competing for status and power: and it is the young men who are always the drivers of disruption in a society, a hunter who brings back a carcass does not get to distribute the meat and favour particular people, thereby creating possible followers and allies for future rebellion. He hands it to a nominated properly approved person to do the distribution. All the hunter gets is the accolades for being a good bloke and we should all know that intrinsic self worth is the best thing for happy people.
And I think that rather than everybody being a jack of all trades, they specialised in a particular set of abilities and cooperation was the way to survive, people shared and used all the available abilities to survive and not change.
Something I noticed when working with urban aborigines is that the old women were always sizing up the children and looking for special abilities.
I dont know about schizophrenia but autistic people would have been valued in aboriginal culture for their ability to categorise things and events and perhaps this reliance on individual specialised intelligence lead to some crazy outcomes in some groups but because they did communicate, albeit very slowly through message sticks and the songlines, they came back to the basic law. You could think of this way of communicating and keeping the law, as a very slow internet.
One example of weirdness that surely would have been abandoned, I read about in an old anthropological journal back in Uni when I used to sit among the stacks reading everything written about the Aborigines, was a tribe who cut their penis along the urethra so they peed at the base of the penis. Various explanations were offered, like their special animal identifier was a marsupial and marsupials apparently have flat penises. It was also suggested that it might have been for birth control. But whatever....
So, I see the critiques of Dark Emu and other stories that perhaps exaggerate the achievements that wevwesternised people see as progress to be fair enough; not really evidence that he is wrong. After all, everyone is biased toward our own beliefs. That is an manifestation of the essential nature of humans.
Although according to a comment earlier, you can't talk about the Aborigines here in Australia, there is a recent documentary about the frontier years.
Although, is true that it is difficult to acknowledge that it was violent. But those who want to see the violence in Aboriginal culture as the reason for their problems, do not see the appalling violence of western cultures as a reason for our problems and unhappiness, despite all our progress.
Stone Age Herbalist is an archaeologist on Substack who has written some interesting articles about the mysteries in Australian archaeology about the sequence of settlement, external contacts, the timing of the introduction of the dingo and languages.
The higher rate of schizophrenia might be a dietary thing. As Lorenzo Warby has pointed out in some of his Notes and articles, they are going through the "agricultural food transition " and the current transition to industrial or processed food in a very short space of time compared to most other populations especially Europeans and other farming cultures. There is a suspected link between schizophrenia and diet. They also never had alcohol so that is another factor that they are not adapted to genetically or culturally.
I sometimes feel like us Westerners have dealt with too much too soon given the scale and pace of change from the late 19th century to now. But imagine the impact on populations that were up until 5 minutes ago (in evolutionary terms) still living in hunter-gatherer societies with no written language, etc.
Thanks David hopefully all your readers got it . It is a vanishing art , but useful in bypassing woke folk who as well as being completely humourless are incapable of understanding that words can have more than one meaning. Non wokes of course have no problems in getting the point.
Thats because all this stuff about widespread cannibalism, violence , warfare low IQ, etc is not true. They lived idyllic peaceful lives , while developing highly advanced agriculture and religious practices. All this is obvious to anyone courageous enough to visit one of their “traditional communities” (where there is absolutely no violence of any kind) or walk even around the streets of Alice Springs after dark.
David, this book is full of stories from early settlers in Australia about how wonderful aboriginal life was in direct contrast to the stories of infanticide and cannibalism that the Quadrant conservative opinion writers like to focus on. They do not cite any reputable contempory anthropologists and focus on the clearly exaggerated horror stories from the often very strange early colonists.
Conservatives in Australia want to blame the current terrible living conditions and rates of human misery in some indigenous communities on the Indigenous culture and absolve us white settlers from any need to make things better for them.
Bill Gammage's book tells the stories from the settlers who got on with the aborigines.
"Explodes the myth that pre-settlement Australia was an untamed wilderness revealing the complex, country-wide systems of land management used by Aboriginal people.
Winner of the Prize for Australian History in the Prime Minister's Literary Awards 2012; The History Book Award in the Queensland Literary Awards 2012; the Victorian Prize for Literature 2012; and the ACT Book of the Year 2012."
You note the conservative political view. I honestly don't understand why the situation of modern indigenous communities requires a purely political stance - either the conservative view that it is a flaw in indigenous culture or the left view that it is all due to malicious racism. It seems to be about cultural shock: Aboriginal people and society received a massive cultural shock after 1788 from which they cannot recover. Their whole way of life and their beliefs were effectively invalidated and overwhelmed by something utterly alien. I can't but feel that even if the early settlers had been utterly enlightened and tried to minimise contact with Aborigines and avoid all harm it would still have happenned, as long as the Europeans were there and building a European society. That is, that Aborigines would still have been reduced to fringe dwellers to the new society, caught between the parts of culture and belief they inherited and the vastly different settlers.
Gammage's book is fascinating. Not least that it suggests that the aesthetic outlook of Aborigines (at least in the SE) and Europeans was remarkably similar, both enjoyed looking at swathes of green grassy country, not scrub and untamed bush.
David, you asked for feedback or I wouldn’t say anything. Unfortunately, this reads like a 1980s school text book with skewed simplistic phraseology from a very colonialist perspective. And sadly, some of the commenters have fed off your words to push even further into the narrow racist tropes you flirt with. You are stuck because you haven’t begun.
> This is such an extremely low rate of reproduction that it requires a REALLY CONVINCING explanation that I lack.
Low rate of survival, not reproduction. That can be explained by their primitive technology, no?
There are similar issues with the Americas before Clovis culture 13kya. Apparently, people were there, but they left almost no tools, implying an extremely low population. This is related to the Sapient Paradox, where art and general Behavioral Modernity are not universal until the end of the Ice Age.
It's really quite simple, Australia is not very suitable for agriculture, due to the old soils, variable climate and lack of big rivers. New Guinea is volcanic with a mild tropical highland climate that has reliable rainfall.
Consistent yields from European style grain agriculture in Australia were also a pretty big fail until fossil fuels saved the day via imported fertility and enormous irrigation schemes. Pastoralism worked well, and this is the reason the Aus diet has always been meat heavy. But this pastoralism was an unsustainable pulse fueled by exploiting the grasses grown from aboriginal land management.
So therefore to reverse the question, modern Australia is only possible because a society that was already well on the way to industrialization (18th century British Empire) settled it. Without industrial inputs and globalisation it just wasn't possible to form big settled societies (at least not since the last ice age, who knows before then).
This probably bodes ill for Australias future, but the amount of phosphate that has been poured over the continent may somewhat help the soil issues.
"It has been a life’s work of growing increasingly aware of how other people were telling stories on behalf of Aboriginal people in Australia, and how stories are used in campaigns to achieve certain goals. I think it would be fair to say that we are the country’s troubling conscience and managed by its most powerful power brokers through a national narrative. I saw the fallout of this changing negative narrative in our communities, and in the lifetime of hard work our people do to fight against each political story-making trend."
I take your point, but I don't see how any contemporary Aboriginal person would have any better idea of pre-colonisation (or pre-invasion) Aboriginal life and society than a non-Aboriginal academic.
As previously mentioned I'm not good on my phone so I think I'm replying to the wrong reply sometimes James.
Anyway, I found this article about which I have no background but it seems interesting, that is it supports my story 🙂
Here is a few paragraphs.
"In the light of Rainforest Aborigines mortuary practices, Bolton's interpretation seems quite apt. Nevertheless, there appears to have been a form of non-gustatorial cannibalism, which when it did occur, involved the eating of a tiny portion of the thigh and kidneys. Typically, the portion was very small and enabled the deceased to share a part of his spirit and knowledge (as a medicine-man or well-known warrior). 7 The evidence is too contradictory to be very precise. Generally, it would appear that misunderstandings of Bama mortuary practices gave Europeans the impression that cannibalism was rife, when it was likely that was not. To what degree Europeans were capable of distinguishing between supposed human remains, preserved mummies or parts thereof, and local animals, such as the cassowary, merely adds to the uncertainty of the debate."
There’s some truly fascinating about the low iq and helplessness of Australian aboriginals.
After all, the Australian government didn’t just have to change the entire way gasoline distribution works, because they couldn’t stop themselves from huffing it. In one state, the government basically had to step in, put them all on food stamps and remove most of the children/or put the families under close watch, because of the mass scale of sexual abuse among the aboriginals.
I can’t think of any human population anywhere so unfit for modern life. One gets the feeling, that if the Europeans had never come, there either wouldn’t be any aboriginals in the year 22000, or they’d look and operate in exactly the same way as 25.000 years ago, with zero major changes.
Are you unfit for modern life?
Surely not to the extent of Australian Aboriginals: A people so completely unfit for modern life, that the government in the NWT, had to move in 2007 with an army of police and social workers, and put them all under administration to prevent kids from getting raped.
The amount of child sexual abuse among aborigines was so high, that the government deemed a nanny state on steroids necessary, outlawing porn and alcohol, changing the way welfare worked so 50% HAD to be spent on food, and many other repressive measures THAT ARE STILL IN FORCE.
Yes, you read that right, Aboriginals are so unfit for modern life, that they need the government to tell them: “When we give you money, you need to spend it on food! No, you can not pimp out your 10 year daughter to truckers for a steak sandwich and a beer! That’s BAD!”
(And what do you know, many aboriginal rights activists also had to be put behind bars, because they couldn’t stop diddling kids!)
As for intermixing with white people, It certainly seems that the elite kind of abos who go on and get some kind of public sector position, work at universities, work as “public intellectuals” etc, all seem to be at least 1/4 or 1/2 white.
I'm also totally unfit for modern life. But of course you are very fit so have evolved far ahead of the woke people.
Seriously though, I do have an IQ over 2 standard deviations higher than the norm as tested by a registered neuropsychologist who was my PhD advisor when I was a candidate. But I must be quite stupid because you can see things so much more accurately than me.
So whats your point anyway? You say if we hadn't come, the aborigines would have died out or wouldn't have changed their culture? So what?
Why change if you are happy and dont see any reason to change. And surely after surviving through the climate disasters that happened during their long occupation of this country, why would they have died out?
I cant see any evidence for them being unfit for modern society. But I'm sure it makes sense to you.
So I'd like to clear this up, do you think that the half castes are smarter than full bloods? You know the white settlers were not shy about spreading their seed among the 'gins' and creating piccaninies.
But how many white genes does it take for low IQ aborigines to get enough smarts to live like we do in the modern world? Some do manage it dontcha know?
There are those white aborigines that some people who can't talk about it apparently, actually do say a lot about this progress that is apparently very unfair to the 'real' aborigines.
Some people say the white aborigines are taking all the money. Bloody greedy white genes must be behind this, surely? Or is it the aboriginal genes that make them unreliable?
And again in the context of IQ estimation, I,m asking about Bennelongs IQ and an explanation of how, if his IQ was so low how did he learn to speak English so quickly. Sounds pretty smart to me.
And if he was amazingly more intelligent than the rest of his people, how come he hadn't taken over as the boss?
So many questions, so few explanations apart from it is all just wokeness that ruined our white man truth.
“ I cant see any evidence for them being unfit for modern society. But I'm sure it makes sense to you.”
Government need to change how gasoline is produced, and our law additives because Abos can’t stop themselves from huffing it.
Government needs to go ultra nanny state, send in an army of social workers, and change how the welfare system works, to ensure that abos are feeding their kids and dont constantly rape them.
Why yes, clearly aboriginals are doing just amazing in a modern society, lmao!
I can’t think of any other group that apparently needs to nannied like this.
“And again in the context of IQ estimation, I,m asking about Bennelongs IQ and an explanation of how, if his IQ was so low how did he learn to speak English so quickly. Sounds pretty smart to me.”
And I’ve already explained that your example is dumb. Even in the dumbest groups of humans, even if they have an average IQ of 60-70, there will be the occasional very smart outlier. There’ll just be a lot fewer of them. That’s just how iq distribution works.
If we assume that the aboriginal population then was around a million, it’s hardly unusual that there’d be one, or even a few, smart enough to learn to speak English.
Ok does anyone see that this response that is so typical of the Australian 'racist' (what would you call it) argument, the lack of facts and reasoning, the lack of any interest in responding to my points in a fair and intelligent way is the reason why we can't talk about it.
The racists just shout you down and fail to answer the questions I ask.
Lol!
I’ve merely responded with facts.
The Intervention in the NT in the mid 2000’s is a matter of record.
Likewise the special OPAL fuel that Australia had to introduce to prevent aboriginal gasoline huffing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opal_(fuel)
I even asked a simple question, which you of course ignored: Can you cite any other communities so wholly incompetent and incapable of modern life, that mass action of this scale needed to be taken by the government?
I even answered your question about Bennelong, and pointed out that it’s hardly unusual for a low iq population to have an occasional genius. (Though very rare).
As for all your other “questions”, I ignored them because they were dumb attempts at rhetorical gotchas. “How much white DNA does it take to raise aboriginal IQ?!”
And now, unable to argue your point, and unable to answer or correct very concrete examples of aboriginal dysfunction (You’d think that ‘Fred your kids and don’t rape them!’ Would be very simple to follow, but I guess not!) you’re left seething and calling me racist.
Sad! Pathetic even.
Do you want to continue to tell me about the facts that are salient to you but not to me. Do you understand that the intervention is not proof of anything except how a very dysfunctional sub-cultures can develop among human beings living in poverty?
It was a horror story but proves nothing about the IQ of the Indigenous people, now or back during their long occupation.
If you worked in Child Services, you would know that white men are equally capable of horrible child abuse, so are Muslim Pakistanis, it's not IQ. There were white petrol sniffers back then, there is a FAS (fetal alcohol syndrome) child in my own very white high IQ family. Alcohol abuse creates low IQ.
The effect of alcohol on a people who never used it, is a significant factor in the story of how badly some have adapted to modern life.
And one last thing, you did not explain Bennelongs IQ and how such an outlier could have been just an ordinary tribe member until Phillip chose him. How fortuitous for us.
Me: “Can you come up with another group whose dysfunction resulted in a major change to national gasoline distribution?”
You: “Well… Sometimes white people also huff gasoline! Also it’s because aboriginals aren’t used to alcohol! It’s only two centuries ago their ancestors were introduced to it!”
Alrighty then!
Oh sweetheart… I DID explain Bennelong. You apparently don’t understand neither how IQ works, or what a bell curve is.
And isn’t it remarkable btw, that on one hand you can say that: “very dysfunctional sub-cultures can develop among human beings living in poverty” but simultaneously when I ask if you can come up with another group of people where the government had to come up with SUCH drastic measures, you can’t say anything?
So let’s have it. If it’s perfectly normal that such a dysfunctional sub culture can result from poverty, then surely other governments must have taken similar measures against an entire population?
If not, perhaps it’s not inconceivable to conclude that this particular group is unusually dysfunctional?
Oops, not good at commenting on my phone.
My father after finishing a fine Art degree in the late 1940's, went 'outback' which is what the inland of Australia is called.
He worked with Aboriginal stockmen driving cattle. Usually family groups still living somewhat traditional lives and he was a marxist, and very curious about their way of life and how they had managed to live without change for so long.
He told me he thought that they had a such a wonderfully satisfying life, so complex, with stories, art, learning how one is related to everything else in the land and every individual is valued from birth to death, the elders passed down the law and everybody obeyed because each child was woven into the fabric of the land through their own creation story and totemic identifiers that were intrically related to the land so the land owned them not the other way around.
There is a lot of literature that is available about all the new knowledge, that is less controversial than Dark Emu but the controversy with this book is political. Conservatives in Australia want people to believe they are stupid and lazy.
The best evidence that they are not stupid is Bennelong. Google Benelong and see how very intelligent he was.
They also are not lazy, or cannibals. I'm surprised people think that. There doesn't seem to be any reference you have listed that provides evidence for this.
Australian anthropologists have done a lot of work that can help you get more info anout these amazing people and their culture.
This reference is good for how they probably came here.
https://set.adelaide.edu.au/news/list/2019/06/26/an-incredible-journey-the-first-people-to-arrive-in-australia-came-in-large
Of course its only those evil “conservatives” who publish stories of wide spread cannibalism and infanticide. Not so many anthropologists who were actually quite sympathetic to a aboriginals confirm this.
Their “wonderful stories” when compared with the complexity of myths from almost any other culture seem very shallow and simplistic. Might be something to do with the IQ levels noted in the article. I thought the “noble savage” Trope had died, good to see you are still a believer.
Evil? Who called these poor old conservatives evil? Not me. I totally explained why they won't consider all the other stories that confirm that our Australian aborigines had a far superior attitude to the country and the people. It's their lack of IQ.
I ask you to look at the Bennelong story.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/dec/17/misunderstood-and-mis-remembered-what-is-the-real-story-of-bennelong-and-the-colonial-captain-phillip?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other
And tell me who was too stupid to learn Bennelong's language and culture but Bennelong learned all he needed to know to hang out with the stupid whites who sent their criminals and the worst of their soldiers and administrators here.
Read The Fatal Shore for the story of how un civilised my ancestors were.
https://www.google.com/search?gs_ssp=eJzj4tTP1TcwzrYoTjdg9OIvyUhVSEssScxRKM7IL0oFAHciCPM&q=the+fatal+shore&oq=the+fatal+shore&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqDQgBEC4YkQIYgAQYigUyEAgAEAAYkQIY4wIYgAQYigUyDQgBEC4YkQIYgAQYigUyDAgCEAAYFBiHAhiABDIHCAMQABiABDIHCAQQABiABDIHCAUQABiABDIHCAYQABiABDIHCAcQABiABDIHCAgQABiABDIMCAkQABgUGIcCGIAEMgcIChAAGIAEMgcICxAAGIAEMgcIDBAAGIAEMgcIDRAhGI8C0gEINjc5N2owajeoAhSwAgE&client=tablet-android-samsung-ss&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8#ebo=0
Every people, no matter how low their average IQ is, produced an occasional genius. That’s just statistics and genetics for you. Bennelong is totally irrelevant for the fact that Australian aboriginals have the lowest IQ on the planet.
The Australian government literally had to legislate about gasoline additives because aboriginals couldn’t stop themselves from sniffing it. Let’s not pretend that this is a particularly smart or competent group of people, occasional genius aside.
And no, the real anthropologists at the time did not accept the widespread stories of cannibalism. Watkins Tench said he didn't think it happened. Soyou name one creditible actual anthropologist who did say the Indigenous used cannibalism and/or infanticide for food or to keep the population low. Some say that ritual cannibalism was probably a thing but all the horror stories that Quadrant authors cite have been deconstructed considering the reliability of the storytellers, and are clearly not reliable.
Do you have any actually verified eyewitness statements? How come only a few dodgy characters like Daisy Bates knew about these things and so many other witnesses didn't see it?
Read the bennelong story years ago - one swallow does not a summer make , “… stupid whites , olds , blah blah “ , try not thinking in stereotypes - wokey wokey , not so blokey me thinks
Really, you seriously think the whites just happened to find the only intelligent aborigine? Lol not sure I understand the blokey words and obviously funny things you are saying to, what, trying to prove me wrong? But all good. I know how bereft you are of real facts and rational arguments.
Daisy Dodgy, Daddy woke , old bad ( unless old aboriginal elder = good )do try not to think in stereotypes, but alas not possible it seems
“Totally” wokesplain away
Hussein, yes totally woke and proud of it but thing is, are you saying my dad who was out there in outback Queensland in the '40s was woke way back then because my ideas and knowledge is based on his understanding of their way of being.
The White wish to find something noble about other people is immeasurable and old as time, especially among those who are losers in their native societies (think of conquistadores, marxists, failed authors and artists and so on). They elevate the foreign to message the ingroup that rejected them how not special they are. They write back home things like "and this great city of (insert coloured people of choice) is so much bigger and better than you guys back home and I am actually really important here." And leftist scholars lap it up as it corresponds to their same desires of denigrating the society that doesn't value them.
'Guns, Germs, and Steel' answers the larger questions posed here. A chapter is devoted to Australia and New Guinea.
The main answer is 'food.'
Australia had no native plant or animal species that were domesticable for intensive food production. Other human populations either had native domesticable species or received them via migration and trade routes. The Australian continent became isolated from such routes. Without intensive food production, complex societies do not develop - no fixed settlements, written language, advanced technology, human specialists, political organisation, etc.
Just ask yourself what native Australian domesticated foods we eat today. Answer: macadamias. That's it. We had no native cereal grasses, pulses, or tubers suitable for intensive cropping. New Guinea at least had sugar cane, yams, and taro (and received imports of sweet potato, chickens and pigs). Australia did not have any of the main domesticable animals (sheep, goats, pigs, cows, horses) until European settlement.
Many of the 'mysteries' about native Australian development are resolved under consideration of food, isolation, and geographic and climatic factors.
Aquaculture developed in societies that did not then develop farming. Farming develops in high resource environments: nowhere in Australia were there the level of resources, even with fire-management of landscape, to produce the social crowding that leads to farming. (Harvesting of wild grains/seeds is not farming.)
I discuss social crowding and farming here.
https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/social-crowding-drives-taking-up
Foraging populations are fairly harshly limited by technology and environment. They are subject to population crashes and replacement. Especially as they are at risk of falling below the level that sustains the technology and social connections needed to survive. A pattern of surges and crashes could easily result in a lack of sustained population growth.
The striking gerontocratic polygyny of Aboriginal cultures seems to have been a way to transfer knowledge across generations and to maximise social connections in a harsh environment with a lot of poisonous plants and animals. Especially the way there was a different group of eligible mates each generation. It also blocked inbreeding quite thoroughly.
Such polygyny seems to have been enforced by considerable violence against women. But marrying old men to young women, and their widows to young men, would have kept population growth down while providing some relief to the “randy young man with no wife” problem that polygyny generates.
An informative rebuttal to Dark Emu is here.
https://www.mup.com.au/books/farmers-or-hunter-gatherers-paperback-softback
Thanks for the Dark Emu critique and for sure, the author of Dark Emu is like me I assume, very motivated to see this quite unique culture as equally intelligent as other humans so I see these complaints as nitpicking and the argument in Dark Emu not the important thing to understand about their progress or lack of.
Their 'failure' to develop agriculture and technological 'progress' is not due to low IQ, it is due to something essential that they brought with them when they came here and it never changed. I think they had a understanding of human nature, a philosophy, the law, that guided their aims and actions.
The thing about IQ is the evidence from Bennelong. What IQ does one need to have, to at his age have so easily learned all the things he did learn? Is it possible for one individual to be so much more intelligent than everyone else. The IQ Nazis need to explain how that happens.
They came here with their law, a belief that they could raise adults who did not want to change things .... some people really don't like change and wonder if it is for the better. As you say, the old people ruled, absolutely. They are the wise ones so obvious that they should be the top of the very shallow heirachy.
If they came with the philosophy, a set of beliefs that noone owns the land, we are owned by the land. This is so different from any other 'philosophy' or religion in which people are told to do what you want with the land, it's yours.
Anyway, so to stop young men competing for status and power: and it is the young men who are always the drivers of disruption in a society, a hunter who brings back a carcass does not get to distribute the meat and favour particular people, thereby creating possible followers and allies for future rebellion. He hands it to a nominated properly approved person to do the distribution. All the hunter gets is the accolades for being a good bloke and we should all know that intrinsic self worth is the best thing for happy people.
And I think that rather than everybody being a jack of all trades, they specialised in a particular set of abilities and cooperation was the way to survive, people shared and used all the available abilities to survive and not change.
Something I noticed when working with urban aborigines is that the old women were always sizing up the children and looking for special abilities.
I dont know about schizophrenia but autistic people would have been valued in aboriginal culture for their ability to categorise things and events and perhaps this reliance on individual specialised intelligence lead to some crazy outcomes in some groups but because they did communicate, albeit very slowly through message sticks and the songlines, they came back to the basic law. You could think of this way of communicating and keeping the law, as a very slow internet.
One example of weirdness that surely would have been abandoned, I read about in an old anthropological journal back in Uni when I used to sit among the stacks reading everything written about the Aborigines, was a tribe who cut their penis along the urethra so they peed at the base of the penis. Various explanations were offered, like their special animal identifier was a marsupial and marsupials apparently have flat penises. It was also suggested that it might have been for birth control. But whatever....
So, I see the critiques of Dark Emu and other stories that perhaps exaggerate the achievements that wevwesternised people see as progress to be fair enough; not really evidence that he is wrong. After all, everyone is biased toward our own beliefs. That is an manifestation of the essential nature of humans.
Although according to a comment earlier, you can't talk about the Aborigines here in Australia, there is a recent documentary about the frontier years.
https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-series/the-australian-wars
Although, is true that it is difficult to acknowledge that it was violent. But those who want to see the violence in Aboriginal culture as the reason for their problems, do not see the appalling violence of western cultures as a reason for our problems and unhappiness, despite all our progress.
Stone Age Herbalist is an archaeologist on Substack who has written some interesting articles about the mysteries in Australian archaeology about the sequence of settlement, external contacts, the timing of the introduction of the dingo and languages.
The higher rate of schizophrenia might be a dietary thing. As Lorenzo Warby has pointed out in some of his Notes and articles, they are going through the "agricultural food transition " and the current transition to industrial or processed food in a very short space of time compared to most other populations especially Europeans and other farming cultures. There is a suspected link between schizophrenia and diet. They also never had alcohol so that is another factor that they are not adapted to genetically or culturally.
I sometimes feel like us Westerners have dealt with too much too soon given the scale and pace of change from the late 19th century to now. But imagine the impact on populations that were up until 5 minutes ago (in evolutionary terms) still living in hunter-gatherer societies with no written language, etc.
Australians can't answer these questions for you, because they can't even be asked in Australia.
True that.
Thanks David hopefully all your readers got it . It is a vanishing art , but useful in bypassing woke folk who as well as being completely humourless are incapable of understanding that words can have more than one meaning. Non wokes of course have no problems in getting the point.
Thats because all this stuff about widespread cannibalism, violence , warfare low IQ, etc is not true. They lived idyllic peaceful lives , while developing highly advanced agriculture and religious practices. All this is obvious to anyone courageous enough to visit one of their “traditional communities” (where there is absolutely no violence of any kind) or walk even around the streets of Alice Springs after dark.
People who never lived in Australia: Hussein is being ironic here!
Mungo Manic is a great source of interesting information about Aborigines. He is on X and has a substack
He doesn’t have a Substack but Stone Age Herbalist is a good Substack on these subjects.
David, this book is full of stories from early settlers in Australia about how wonderful aboriginal life was in direct contrast to the stories of infanticide and cannibalism that the Quadrant conservative opinion writers like to focus on. They do not cite any reputable contempory anthropologists and focus on the clearly exaggerated horror stories from the often very strange early colonists.
Conservatives in Australia want to blame the current terrible living conditions and rates of human misery in some indigenous communities on the Indigenous culture and absolve us white settlers from any need to make things better for them.
Bill Gammage's book tells the stories from the settlers who got on with the aborigines.
"Explodes the myth that pre-settlement Australia was an untamed wilderness revealing the complex, country-wide systems of land management used by Aboriginal people.
Winner of the Prize for Australian History in the Prime Minister's Literary Awards 2012; The History Book Award in the Queensland Literary Awards 2012; the Victorian Prize for Literature 2012; and the ACT Book of the Year 2012."
https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Bill-Gammage-Biggest-Estate-on-Earth-9781743311325
You note the conservative political view. I honestly don't understand why the situation of modern indigenous communities requires a purely political stance - either the conservative view that it is a flaw in indigenous culture or the left view that it is all due to malicious racism. It seems to be about cultural shock: Aboriginal people and society received a massive cultural shock after 1788 from which they cannot recover. Their whole way of life and their beliefs were effectively invalidated and overwhelmed by something utterly alien. I can't but feel that even if the early settlers had been utterly enlightened and tried to minimise contact with Aborigines and avoid all harm it would still have happenned, as long as the Europeans were there and building a European society. That is, that Aborigines would still have been reduced to fringe dwellers to the new society, caught between the parts of culture and belief they inherited and the vastly different settlers.
Gammage's book is fascinating. Not least that it suggests that the aesthetic outlook of Aborigines (at least in the SE) and Europeans was remarkably similar, both enjoyed looking at swathes of green grassy country, not scrub and untamed bush.
Foraging cultures are not adapted to industrialised societies. I strongly agree that there is no need to moralise that.
https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/worldbuilding-101
I live in Tasmania.
David, you asked for feedback or I wouldn’t say anything. Unfortunately, this reads like a 1980s school text book with skewed simplistic phraseology from a very colonialist perspective. And sadly, some of the commenters have fed off your words to push even further into the narrow racist tropes you flirt with. You are stuck because you haven’t begun.
https://paulfinchauthor.com/20-best-books-on-aboriginal-history-2023-reading-list-recommendations/
I did ask for feedback! Thank you, Darryl.
> This is such an extremely low rate of reproduction that it requires a REALLY CONVINCING explanation that I lack.
Low rate of survival, not reproduction. That can be explained by their primitive technology, no?
There are similar issues with the Americas before Clovis culture 13kya. Apparently, people were there, but they left almost no tools, implying an extremely low population. This is related to the Sapient Paradox, where art and general Behavioral Modernity are not universal until the end of the Ice Age.
Thanks. The enigmatic history of the Australian Aborigines makes them an intriguing subject.
It's really quite simple, Australia is not very suitable for agriculture, due to the old soils, variable climate and lack of big rivers. New Guinea is volcanic with a mild tropical highland climate that has reliable rainfall.
Consistent yields from European style grain agriculture in Australia were also a pretty big fail until fossil fuels saved the day via imported fertility and enormous irrigation schemes. Pastoralism worked well, and this is the reason the Aus diet has always been meat heavy. But this pastoralism was an unsustainable pulse fueled by exploiting the grasses grown from aboriginal land management.
So therefore to reverse the question, modern Australia is only possible because a society that was already well on the way to industrialization (18th century British Empire) settled it. Without industrial inputs and globalisation it just wasn't possible to form big settled societies (at least not since the last ice age, who knows before then).
This probably bodes ill for Australias future, but the amount of phosphate that has been poured over the continent may somewhat help the soil issues.
One more thing David and I'll stop spamming you. 😀
Aboriginal people are able to speak for themselves now.
https://meanjin.com.au/essays/what-happens-when-you-tell-somebody-elses-story/
"It has been a life’s work of growing increasingly aware of how other people were telling stories on behalf of Aboriginal people in Australia, and how stories are used in campaigns to achieve certain goals. I think it would be fair to say that we are the country’s troubling conscience and managed by its most powerful power brokers through a national narrative. I saw the fallout of this changing negative narrative in our communities, and in the lifetime of hard work our people do to fight against each political story-making trend."
Happy to be spammed! Thanks again
I take your point, but I don't see how any contemporary Aboriginal person would have any better idea of pre-colonisation (or pre-invasion) Aboriginal life and society than a non-Aboriginal academic.
As previously mentioned I'm not good on my phone so I think I'm replying to the wrong reply sometimes James.
Anyway, I found this article about which I have no background but it seems interesting, that is it supports my story 🙂
Here is a few paragraphs.
"In the light of Rainforest Aborigines mortuary practices, Bolton's interpretation seems quite apt. Nevertheless, there appears to have been a form of non-gustatorial cannibalism, which when it did occur, involved the eating of a tiny portion of the thigh and kidneys. Typically, the portion was very small and enabled the deceased to share a part of his spirit and knowledge (as a medicine-man or well-known warrior). 7 The evidence is too contradictory to be very precise. Generally, it would appear that misunderstandings of Bama mortuary practices gave Europeans the impression that cannibalism was rife, when it was likely that was not. To what degree Europeans were capable of distinguishing between supposed human remains, preserved mummies or parts thereof, and local animals, such as the cassowary, merely adds to the uncertainty of the debate."
https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:AP:4b5c2e6a-2491-49a1-9d97-9b59cbddff96
Quick note. Marsupials are a kind of mammals. In your text you can say "marsupials dominate Austrial instead of placentals" and you'll be all right.
Thanks!
Population growth in mankind doesn't just happen. It needs build up. If they could somehow have learnt to write, it would be quite different