Dark Emu

colonial settlers ignored the Aboriginal method, and that contemporary Australians still suffer from the result. The Aboriginal methods of land management were not just practical, but aesthetically pleasing.

If we are to attempt to understand Indigenous philosophy it has to begin with the profound obligation to land.

Isolation and depravation were considered the reason Aboriginal people did not 'advance' like Europeans, but it is also true the idea to pour boiling oil on enemies seems not to have occurred to anyone in Australia.

If we look at the evidence presented to us by the explorers, and explain to our children that Aboriginal people did build houses, did build dams, did sow, irrigate, and till the land, did alter the course of rivers, did sew their clothes, and did construct a system of pan-continental government that generated peace and prosperity, it is likely we will admire and love our land all the more. Admiration and love are not sufficient in themselves, but they are the foundation of a more productive interaction with the continent.

[A]rchaeologists and prehistorians constructed the archaeological record to scientifically vindicate the colonialist notions of savagery and staged progressivism to leave little doubt that Indigenous peoples, particularly ‘hunter-gatherers’, represented primordial man … [and that archaeology] has little to do with the rigors of science and all to do with a colonial ideology and a … public that wishes to find scientific support to legitimize colonial dispossession of Aboriginal lands and to delegitimize contemporary Aboriginal claims to Native Title rights.

The underestimation of Indigenous achievement was a deliberate tactic of British colonialism. Large structures of North American First Nations people were similarly ignored, or credited to earlier Europeans; and in South Africa, Cecil Rhodes made it illegal for anyone to mention the huge Shona structures found in what was once Rhodesia and is now Zimbabwe.

Any country will have naysayers among its citizenry, be it regarding climate change, birth control, taxation, gun control, or speed limits; however, if the general population persists in hiding from obvious facts of history, we are destined to repeat the selective opinions of the colonists.

Captain John Hunter, captain on the First Fleet, reported in 1788 that the people around Sydney were

These are not the same: one is an activity, the other a lifestyle. An estate may include a farm, but this does not make an estate manager a farmer … In 1788 similarly, people never depended on farming. Mobility was much more important.

Some say the idea that the world's trajectory is driven by conquest followed by innovation and intensification is satisfying to the Western mind because of our psychological dependence on our imperialist history. But if we give consideration to the idea that change can be generated by the spirit, and through that by political action, the stability of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures might be more readily explained.

Aboriginals engaged in seed propagation, irrigation, harvest, storage, and the trade of seed across the region.

Even though it was convenient for many European settlers not to acknowledge the evidence of an Aboriginal agricultural economy,

The yam was a crucial plant in the economy of pre-colonial Aboriginal Australia, but few have examined this productive tuber. Surely we can no longer ignore such a valuable plant or the commercial opportunities it offers.

One of these sketches shows a line of women digging for yam daisy, or murnong (Microseris lanceolata) tubers