Boris
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ANOTHER apparently ubiquitous feature of Aboriginal society was the striking majority of adult men compared with adult women:
According to [squatter Edward Micklethwaite] Curr, there was in every tribe when it first came into contact with the Whites “a permanent excess” of men over women, amounting to as much as two to one … [Squatter Peter] Beveridge, noting the preponderance of men over women, declares that this exists not because more boys were born than girls—the sexes equal each other at birth—but because the mortality among the women after the age of puberty is attained is far greater than among men: this is caused by many factors, the most important of which is early marriage (at eleven or twelve years of age) and the treatment of the wives by the men as if they were no more than cattle.12
Apart from infanticide and other factors occasioned by the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, another apparently important cause of death was tribal warfare. “Every tribe dreads a night attack from another tribe”.13
Amongst the whole of the tribes of Australia the cause not of fights, but of bloodshed, was, nine times out of ten, the belief that the deaths of persons, no matter from what apparent cause other than old age, was attributable to the spells and incantations of some of their enemies, their enemies including all Blacks not their intimate friends and neighbours … With the death of women and young children the Blacks generally did not concern themselves, but for every adult man who died from any cause save old age, a corresponding victim was anxiously desired … [This] systematized murder throughout the continent rendered the friendship of the tribes at large impossible, and was the great factor of savagery and degradation.14
That pre-literate societies were not the peaceful, idyllic Edens widely imagined today and depicted in the contemporary media, has been shown in many recent works by franker and more truthful anthropologists, such as Lawrence H. Keeley in his War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (1996). But “The Myth of the Noble Savage” is a powerful and persistent one, and the present tendency to whitewash and obfuscate the barbaric aspects of Aboriginal society—while depicting European settlement in Australia as genocidal—has only strengthened the force of this image.
A number of conclusions may be drawn from the facts presented here. First, 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. Any of our radicals who argues for its merits should be compelled to live in their manner: 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. Second, it is apparent that the 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. Finally, these concepts were brought to Australia, however imperfectly, by Europeans in 1788, but today our radicals are doing their best wholly to reverse the historical facts, branding the Aborigines as innocents and the Europeans as genocidal monsters. As always, it is up to the historian to, as von Ranke famously put it, set out “what actually happened”.
William D. Rubinstein taught at Deakin University and at the University of Wales, and now lives in Melbourne. He has often written for Quadrant.
The references in this article are taken from a remarkable anthropological study, Primitive Society and Its Vital Statistics (Macmillan, London, 1934) by Ludwik Krzywicki (1859–1941), who was Professor of Social History at Warsaw University. It should be said that while many will assume that he was a right-wing racist, the exact opposite was the case. He was a lifelong leftist who as a student was expelled from the Medical Faculty of Warsaw University for his radical activities. During the 1905 Russian Revolution (when Poland was part of Tsarist Russia) he was arrested by the Tsarist authorities for his radical views. He edited the newspaper of the Polish Socialist Party and was one of a group which translated Karl Marx’s Das Kapital into Polish. Krzywicki died in 1941 of injuries he received when his apartment in Warsaw was bombed by the Luftwaffe when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Also on the topic of this article, see Geoffrey Blainey, The Story of Australia’s People: The Rise and Fall of Ancient Australia (2015) and my Genocide: A History (2004). Krzywicki, p. 123. Each of these statements has a footnote reference, omitted here. Ibid., pp. 123-4 Ibid., p. 124 Ibid., citing A.W. Howitt. Ibid., p. 126, citing E. Stone Parker. Ibid., pp. 126-7 Ibid., p. 130 Ibid., p. 132 Ibid., p. 137 Ibid., p. 140 Ibid., p. 242. On p. 134 we read that, according to Curr, Aboriginal women ‘had, on average, six children, though they only reared three (two boys and a girl), the others dying a violent death’. Ibid., p. 115, citing J.T.H. Mitchell. Ibid., citing J.T.H. Mitchell and E.M. Curr.
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