Why are they so special?

Life and Death in Pre-Contact Aboriginal Australia

When Europeans first settled in Australia in 1788, they encountered an Aboriginal society of almost incredible barbarism and violence. This was the reality of what they found. The reasons for the violence and barbarism of Aboriginal society derive entirely, or almost entirely, from one factor alone. All of the Aborigines of Australia were hunter-gatherers who had not domesticated livestock nor grown crops for food. As a result, the lives of the hundreds of small tribes that constituted Aboriginal society were engaged in a never-ending struggle to find what food they could from what little existed on this continent. Directly because of this central fact, it was absolutely necessary to keep the size of each tribe small enough for its members to be kept alive by what food and other sustenance they could find. It was therefore absolutely necessary for them to avoid adding any excess mouths to feed to the limited numbers who could be kept alive by the methods of hunter-gatherers in the Dry Continent. They did this by systematically eliminating the excess mouths.

Probably the most important method of eliminating these excess mouths was infanticide, as Ludwik Krzywicki detailed in his 1934 anthropological study Primitive Society and Its Vital Statistics.1 Deliberate infanticide existed throughout Aboriginal society, and it was practised by nearly all of the Aboriginal tribes in Australia. “Horrible tales were told about it. R. Oberlander was shown a woman who had murdered ten children.” Elderly women from the Dieri (Diyari) tribe admitted to South Australian mounted policeman Samuel Gason “of having disposed in this manner of two to four of their offspring: in this way, about 30% of new-born infants perished at the hands of their mothers in the Lake Eyre district”. Among the Narrinyeri (Ngarrindjeri) of the lower Murray district, “more than one half of the children fell victim to this atrocious custom”; the Congregationalist missionary George Taplin “knew several women who had murdered two or three of their new-born children”. Mounted policeman William Henry Willshire:

says of the parts of Central Australia known to him, that at least 60% of the women committed infanticide. He tells of one woman that she had five children, three of whom she murdered immediately after birth, and she explained in her broken English: “me bin keepem one boy and one girl, no good keepem mob, him to[o] much wantem tuckout!” Therefore the women of the bush daily murder their children and do not wish to raise more than two.2

The ostensible reasons for widespread infanticide varied. Victorian government surveyor Philip Chauncy saw a young woman, shortly after her child’s birth, scratch “a hole in the sand behind her hut and having given it a ‘little’ knock on the head, laid it in the hole and kept on crying, the child crying too, till she could bear it no longer, and she went out and gave it another little knock which killed it”. Asked by Chauncy how she could do such a thing, she “replied pointing to the bag on her back that there was room only for one child, and she could not possibly carry another”. When Albert Alexander Le Souef, son of the protector of Aborigines in the Goulburn district, asked a young woman “why she had dashed her infant’s brains out against a tree” she “replied coolly: ‘Oh! too much cry that fellow’”.3

Frail and malformed children were murdered, among other reasons, just because they were frail. A twin was killed (and sometimes both) because the mother could not suckle it … When a mother died while suckling a child, the infant was buried with her, and death often awaited the babe when its father, who as a hunter maintained the family, departed this life.4

Moreover, “sometimes an infant was murdered and cooked for its elder brother or sister to eat, in order to make him or her strong by feeding on the muscle of the baby”. Superstitions regarding twins often resulted in the murder of one or both. There were occasional cases of infants being killed to enable their mothers to suckle orphaned dingo pups instead.5

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/10/life-and-death-in-pre-contact-aborigina...

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.

Boris wrote on Jun 23^rd, 2022 at 11:09am:


Anyone who writes for Quadrant is scum

Boris wrote on Jun 23^rd, 2022 at 11:29am:


Credible historical reports dispute every lie you're telling LOL!!

I worked in the health department and saw an aboriginal woman who was a victim of DV, ergo all Aboriginals are violent!!!

F&ck off

Frank wrote on Jun 23^rd, 2022 at 11:39am:


Was he your dad? LOL!!

Read Dark Emu

Boris wrote on Jun 23^rd, 2022 at 11:49am:


Of course it is, Nazi.  Of course anything you don't like is a lie

Boris wrote on Jun 23^rd, 2022 at 12:20pm:


I expected you to be this old.  And to not see that agreeing with Nazi ideology makes you a Nazi

Dark Emu is all BS

So there you have it - the ‘professors’ who rejected Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu manuscript were none other than some of Australia’s most qualified scholars on Indigenous Knowledge at the AIATSIS and its publishing arm, Aboriginal Studies Press. These professors are the curators and custodians of the world’s largest single repository of artifacts, writings, research reports, films and audio of the Australian Aboriginal peoples. But according to Bruce they are wrong and he is right - after all he bought a second-hand copy of the journal of Thomas Mitchell for 8 bucks that he says turned out to be some sort of Holy Book of Revelations on Aboriginal agriculture.

So we wondered what these professors actual said to Bruce about his Dark Emu manuscript?

Now, we all whinge and moan from time to time about how the public is kept in the dark by the government, its departments and the raft of statutory bodies that govern our lives, but in this great country of ours there is actually a hard-fought for right which us ‘little people’ can utilize to find out the truth. It does take a lot of effort and time and sometimes considerable expense, but there is actually a system that works - it is called FOI - Freedom of Information.

So one of our contributors, Mia (Note 1), lodged her application and surprise, surprise we got to the bottom of this story, a story in which Bruce Pascoe is confirmed as an excellent writer of fiction.

Mia’s FOI correspondence with the AIATSIS is shown below chronologically - and we have to admit that the disclosure that Mia was able to achieve shows the AIATSIS, and their publishing arm ASP, in a very good light. They did a very professional job when considering Pascoe’s manuscript. Now, financially is was a loss to them - Dark Emu with the free promotion of the ABC/SBS/NTIV media complex went on to achieve some of the biggest book sales ever seen in Australia. But the AIATSIS was able to maintain its principled reputation - AIATSIS and ASP  were correct in their decision that the Dark Emu manuscript, in the form in which it was offered to them, just wasn’t worthy of their endorsement as a work of non-fiction.

Fiction maybe, but a scholarly book on Aboriginal society? No.

https://www.dark-emu-exposed.org/home/how-low-can-bruce-pascoe-go