The debate has been raging on. The government has sent in its task force and all eyes are focused on this problem. The reports that come out are disturbing. An infant with its skull smashed in – her father was drunk and threw a bottle at his teenage wife, missed, and hit the baby. In WA six men (some teens) were arrested for systematic sexual abuse of girls. Too many cases to cite.
I said in a previous post (I’ll summarise) that the reasons are both simple and complex. 1. Aboriginal society is collapsing and all social norms are being ignored. 2. Traditional Aboriginal society was sexually liberal to begin with.
As academics and journalists investigate this issue more information comes out. The media has been coy in detailing just what pre-contact Aboriginal sexuality was like, but now I can share more detail.
1. Aboriginal children were allowed to play and faced little censure and discipline (one of the issues is the lack of discipline and poor school attendance).
2. Childhood ended around 10, after that they took on more adult roles.
3. Children were regularly exposed to adult sexuality.
4. Children were not censured for explicit sexual play.
5. Older boys would seduce pre-pubescent girls.
6. Girls got married and took on adult sexual responsibilities as young as 8-10.
7. Everyone was completely naked, so nudity was never an issue (and you can’t hide male arousal).
As I said, some of these remote communities lived a traditional lifestyle within living memory. The last family to be contacted was in the 1960’s, colour footage shows a group of around five naked children running into the bush, one teen girl with an infant on her back. She is still alive, in her sixties and fondly remembers her childhood.
My experience comes from the times between 1950-67 (since when I am an expatriate), belonging still to the era of the “white Australian policy”. By that time the Aboriginals were long decimated by being hunted down from horsebacks as a sporty entertainment. They had no Australian citizenship and were referred to as “bloody abos” in the better circles and as “bloody f… abos” between the Bluey-s and Curly-s of the pub society. They were not allowed to drink alcoholic beverages, and Albert Namajira, Australia’s greatest aquarellist, who painted the most fantastic landscapes from the Australian outback, was regularly jailed for drinking one peaceful glass of beer.
But those problems one can hear about lately, I haven’t heard about then. Neither have I heard during those times about sexual abuse of children by their fathers, their elder brothers and their priests in the affluent societies of Australia, America and Europe, nor about the extensive early teen-age drug and alcohol consume and pregnancy in the same societies, all very much in the vogue today.
The collapse of the Aboriginal society is not an isolated case; it is part of the syndrome of the age, a syndrome, the manifestation of which is temporarily suppressed by panem et circenses in the affluent societies. Anyway, a traditionally sexually liberal society should show less sexual aberration at further liberation than a traditionally suppressed one.
Ray’s first six points are valid for quasi any society nowadays, allowing for the difference in the age of sexual maturity of the various races. Regarding his seventh point, if it doesn’t show through the swimming trunk, then it is faked with a well-placed small towel, also in any society.
I consider it opportune to look at the Aboriginal tragedy as a minor symptom of the general human pathology, which would be truly fit for the honest investigation of academics and journalists.
Imre
Hi Imre,
What you say about Australia in the 50’s and 60’s is generally correct. Things have gotten both better and worse since then. There are now many prominent and celebrated Aborigines in all fields of society, at the same time many (but by no means all) remote communities are in a sad state of decline, with rampant alcohol and drug abuse.
Yes, I know, Ray. I am the only globe-trotting swagman (with a swagwife) in the family. My brother and his family live there, and so do the son and daughter (now with families) of my wife from her first marriage. So I am informed.
As I am never trying to repair effects but am windmill-fighting causes, and as no problem can be assessed and even less resolved as an isolated event, I have reacted to your story by drawing parallels with most other societies, where “things have [also] gotten both better and worse since then”. Drunkenness, drugs, aberrant sexuality, rape, incest happens between people who have lost their inner contact, values, sense and strength to life. And it does not happen only to remote communities; much to the contrary, it belongs to the pathology of affluent societies.
As far as trying to resolve the problem with education (which was my ideal without ever giving it up), here is a quotation from John Taylor Gatto’s prise-winning book, The Underground History of American Education:
“The secret of commerce, that kids drive purchases, meant that schools had to become psychological laboratories where training in consumerism was the central pursuit. . . The truth is that America’s unprecedented global power and spectacular material wealth are a direct product of a third-rate educational system, upon whose inefficiency in developing intellect and character they depend. If we educated better we could not sustain the corporate utopia we have made. Schools build national wealth by tearing down personal sovereignty, morality, and family life. It was a trade-off.”
Thus, as Lewis Mumford has expressed it, “We have created an industrial order geared to automatism, where feeblemindedness, native or acquired, is necessary for docile productivity in the factory; and where a pervasive neurosis is the final gift of the meaningless life that issues forth at the other end.” … “Today our best plans miscarry because they are in the hands of people who have undergone no inner growth. Most of these people have shrunk from facing the world crisis and they have no notion of the manner in which they themselves have helped to bring it about. Into every new situation they carry only a fossilized self.”
Every being has the natural, intrinsic necessity to have an underlying rational reason for existence, which is why philosophy and general culture has preceded science in the history of every human community. To satisfy the innate need, spirituality and from it organised religions have evolved. The latters are, however, not the further developments of spirituality, but branching offs, religions ending up being quasi antithetic to spirituality.
I have just read your essay “Christianity – the great lie”, finding it excellent for several reasons. I will comment on it, soon I hope.
Imre