All of these people, black and white, had been faced with choices about what to do in situations they’d never encountered before. They’d made their choices under the influence of all sorts of factors: self-interest, morality, peer pressure, fear. They had made both good and terrible decisions. What choices had my great-great-great grandfather made?

What choices would I have made?

16. ABORIGINAL VOICES

16
Aboriginal Voices

Aboriginal people were quoted in the history books I was reading, but not very often. Even when they spoke English, the first Australians in those early days generally didn’t read or write it well enough to create a record. So finding out, for example, what might have been in the old man’s mind when Phillip gave him those three slight slaps was never going to be easy.

I ploughed through a couple of books by white anthropologists. They seemed obsessed with marriage rules—I read an awful lot about moieties and kin groups. It was like reading about insects or molecules: distant, unhuman. It was a long way from what was it really like?

But one book led to another, from specialised academic volumes to small-press local histories. I was starting to realise how wrong my preconceptions about Aboriginal life and culture were. That word ‘nomad’, for instance. Traditional Aboriginal people moved around, true, but within a precisely defined territory. Everyone knew exactly where the boundaries were. If strangers came onto your territory without asking permission, you were entitled to make them leave.

This wasn’t quite what I’d have called a ‘nomad’. It sounded more like the way I moved at home from the bedroom to the living room and out into the garden. I walked around, but I knew exactly where my place ended and the next-door place began, and so did everyone else.

Then there was the business of being a ‘hunter and gatherer’. Now I was learning about complicated stone fish-traps built on rivers to ensure a permanent supply of fish; about the way fruit seeds were spat into middens of shells and bones so that more trees would grow there; about breeding pairs of possums being carried to places where they were scarce. I read about how regular, systematic burning of the bush created pasture land for game.

This wasn’t quite my picture of ‘hunting and gathering’. In fact, some of it sounded very like farming.

Aboriginal culture was hard to get a clear look at. It took me a long time to work out that that was the point. In my culture, knowledge was public. Even sacred stuff was open to everyone. If you wanted to know what the Bible was about, you went along to a Bible class.