The pond's morning schedule means some splendid reptile outings get overlooked, but the pond just had to put in a kind word for the daubings of Dawber and the talk of the Donald writing like crazy.
Everyone knows that the Donald neither reads nor writes, as the real author of the Donald's The Art of the Deal and other Donald authors have explained at some length, and so at best, it should have been headlined that the Donald is talking like crazy, so that some money-hungry hack might take down the thoughts of the genius, put the words on a page, cobble them together in a book, and then stand back and let the Donald take all the credit ...
And so to the top of the page this day ...
Hmm, jab roll-out going splendidly, a defiant premier, and our Henry, with that talk of the barrister a hold over from yesterday ...
The pond was of course pleased to see our Henry on his usual Friday perch, but was disappointed, in the usual way, by the subject matter ...
You see the pond had really wanted to have a good old gnaw of the bone about the classics ... and had deliberately held over a reference to The Bulwark and a piece by G. Borden Flanagan concerning Thucydides on partisanship, insurrection and the risks of civil war ...
Yes, there was endless talk of the relevance of the classics, and the pond was hot to trot, only to be let down.
Never mind, the pond will leave it there, and head over to our Henry's classics-free zone ...
Sadly the pond has no dog in this fight, nor is there a chance for seemly references to the classics, or even the glories of western civilisation.
Besides, the pond had already read an extensive review of the controversy in The Conversation, by a certain Christine Judith Nicholls, with this sort of handy comparison ...
And so on, and yet the pond knew, with an inner groan, that our Henry wouldn't be up for a scholarly dissertation, but instead would offer ideological disputation and have a progressive axe to grind ... or at least an axe to plant in the head of secular progressives ...
Uh huh, but the pond has already been there, and there are any number of variant versions out and about, as in Tim Rowse's critique of the critique here, or Stuart Rintoul six days ago in the Nine papers ...
Well yes, but the pond suspects that our Henry isn't notably Aboriginal, and the pond can assert for a fact that it isn't indigenous, and yet here we are, back in white world again, with a not notably informed Henry scribbling away, and the pond inserting assorted gobbets ... and the reptiles keen to use video inserts just to keep the click bait turning over ...
Don't get excited, that's just a screen cap, and the pond has cut another video from the story, but more tragically, our Henry didn't even seize the chance to indulge in a classical reference ...
Well with the best will in the world, the pond doesn't see much reconciliation going on, or rapprochement or whatever, and anyone hunting around for a neanderthal to discuss reconciliation might have difficulty finding a representative to crank up a discussion ... and instead the pond is left with our Henry, as usual wanting to twist the knife on staunchly secular progressives ...
No doubt our Henry will reach for the most wretched and ideological explanation to hand to answer his question ...
And there you have it, in yet another moronic Henry nutshell. If only "telling the truth" were as simple and as easy and as black and white as our Henry maintains ... along with the simple-minded notion of "being right", when in fact there's much to be said for complexity and appreciation of ideas, arguments, and counter-arguments ...
And so on.
In due course, there will be other contributions and insights, and the only hope is that they won't come from our Henry, or whites arguing among themselves, nor, pausing to think about it for a nanosecond, from the Donald blathering away to anyone who will listen to him rant, and then scribble it down to help him out, convinced as he is that he's always right, and being right is the only thing that matters, and when it comes to the truth, only he knows the truth ...
And so to the other contributions this day ...
Slim pickings, all the more so that warning of AstraZeneca scaremongers, because the federal government has been the best and most confusing scaremonger of all.
The pond can also put aside Warren Mundine, who should present his case to the onion muncher, or perhaps the former residents of Redfern, though that'll mean a trip out to the boondocks, seeing as how they have been driven out by cynical commercial development ...
No, it had to be Dame Groan, at war with Tom Dusevic in the slot just below her. The pond could at least guarantee a decent serve of gloom, and a routine knocking of climate science ...
As usual, the pond must begin by noting the extraordinarily wretched state into which reptile illustrations have plunged.
Long gone are the days of the cult masters. The question is why anyone bothers to persist with this sort of visual stodge ... because it can only make getting through Dame Groan's relentless groaning all the harder ...
Ah climate change, the pond knew it would have to turn up, and just as surely dismissed out of hand ...
At this point, the pond knew what was missing ... a cartoon offering up complex economic issues for consideration...
And perhaps just to wrap things up, Dame Slap talking about migrants, and the onetime 300k a year woman moving from champers to beer ...
The pond knew that it was all the fault of migrants, though it being the fault of the migrants of the 1950s and 1960s is a novel twist. Oh sure, we laughed at They're a Weird Mob, little realising that indulging in a glass of wine would entirely fuck our future ...
And so to head back to where the pond started, thanks to a classical reference by the immortal Rowe, with more Rowe here ...
And as always, the original ...
Good to see that Holely Henry knows all there is to know about the history of Australian indigenes who have occupied a land (including Tasmania) of 7,656,127 square miles for up to 50,000 years at least. After all, they've been just like they were when the first fleet landed in Sydney Cove all that time - totally unchanged in extent and culture for the entire time. They came here 50,000 years ago with spears and boomerangs and lean-tos way back 48,000 years before Christ and that's the way they've been ever since.
ReplyDeleteAnd of course it's easy to find out what the Aboriginals did for that 50,000 years because they're obviously so primitive that nothing has changed in that time. Until we came, that is, with our guns and horses and taught them that it was us who would decide who lives here and under what circumstances.
But anyway, if you'd like an alternative point of view, try this;
"Dark Emu echoes historian Bill Gammage's 'The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia', published in 2011.
Gammage argues that early Australia was 'a farm without fences', and he too points to myriad early journal entries that reflect the fact that Indigenous Australians did cultivate the land."
Rethinking Indigenous Australia's agricultural past
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/archived/bushtelegraph/rethinking-indigenous-australias-agricultural-past/5452454
Note especially the bit about the Budj Bim eel farming, and consider this:
World heritage recommendation for ancient Aboriginal eel farming site at Budj Bim
https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/world-heritage-recommendation-for-ancient-aboriginal-eel-farming-site-at-budj-bim-20190522-p51q43.html
Quite unselfconsciously, the Henry invokes ‘trained readers’.
ReplyDeleteHe also cites Sutton and Walshe apparently maintaining that ‘making a living and obtaining materials for artefacts were inseparable from their commitment to a spiritual understanding of the origin of species, to conservative values in relation to change and to a cosmology in which economics had to be in conformity to ancestral authority.’
Note the ‘inseparable from’. From my minor involvement with the indigenous peoples of Arnhem Land, I would question the ‘inseparable’. For example - the coastal men were adept at making dugouts, to a high standard. There was good evidence that this technology transferred from Macassan trepang crews from around the 17th century (whitefella reckoning). I doubt that there was much ancestral authority in that technological transfer - they saw a good idea, appropriate to their activities, probably retained some as payment for their labour processing trepang - pretty much the story of most other smart communities. (Comparisons with the reaction of certain whitefellas now to the idea of generating that electricity stuff direct from the sun - would be quite odious, although it does suggest that we have some real primitives amongst us).
‘spiritual understanding of the origin of species’ - one of the then anthropologists was preparing a book - very much of the ‘coffee table’ genre - on the figures in cave paintings. He approached me to help identify the fishes. I took copies of his illustrations, and, within a few weeks, thought I had identified about two-thirds of the aquatic animals, at least to genus, and about half that number to species. It was quite likely that the remaining third had not been described in taxonomic publications.
We started to go through the illustrations. Up came a flounder - common food item - which I had named to species. Because? asked the anthropologist. See that spine they have drawn, so carefully, at the base of the gill of what is otherwise almost any flatfish - quite diagnostic of this species. Oh no, said the anthro-person. That is a totemic symbol of the - yadda yadda spiritual moiety, jargon jargon. Nothing to do with what species it is.
Not a lot one can say to that; but move on to the next illustration - same story.
Untrained reader that I was - I thought that if someone had caught lots of fishes (all of which were edible) and become familiar, particularly, with spines and tooth patterns and form of fins - that would transfer to the images going up on the rockface. Definitely so if the spines were particularly sharp, and inflicted pain on the unwary fisher, thus triggering acute memory.
If that animal happened to be totemic to some group of humans - yep, its diagnostic features could be important to how it was represented, but, to adapt from Mr Darwin - the unusual spine defined the species, the spine was not attached to the illustration because it was some kind of mystical figure.
After a couple of hours being patronised, I concluded there were more important things for me to do. I wished the anthro-person well in finding the answer he sought.
The book was published. It cost very serious money, would have covered a couple of coffee-tables, and instructed the buyers in how mystic symbols were attached, apparently at random, to totemic animals.
None of this detracts from spiritual attribution to knowledge of the life cycles of animals (and plants) taken for food, by men and women. I just feel that a lot of what indigenous people in Arnhem Land did to get food was done for eminently practical reasons. Many whitefellas pray ‘give us this day our daily bread’ - but recognise that these days they have to go to the office, or the factory, to get the means for their Imaginary Friend to put bread on the table.
And to insert a classical reference - Montesquieu’s ‘Persian Letters’ is a hugely entertaining take on the conclusions an anthropologist from another culture might draw from studying what was, to Monty’s readers - commonplace.
Nicely put, Chad. It's a pity Henry couldn't invoke 'trained writers' too. But then, imposing a self-satisfying "interpretation" onto other societies and cultures has been a staple of human "understanding" ever since many people realised that lies are easier to spread than truths.
DeleteJust a few choice words from The Groaning: "The word on the street us that this [forthcoming] IGR will contain rivers of red as far as the eye can see."
ReplyDeleteOh yeah, Australia will be totally bankrupt in just a year or so, won't it. The entire public service will have to be sacked to free up enough money to pay current politicians their salaries and retired politicians their pensions. Won't be enough money for anything else: Medibank will be closed and Age Pensions cancelled.
Well that's what we get for electing an LNP government led by ScottyfromMarketing and JoshfromToorak. Just absolutely no sense of fiscal responsibility at all.