{"id":3530,"date":"2023-07-02T06:58:26","date_gmt":"2023-07-02T06:58:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/regenesis.org.au\/?p=3530"},"modified":"2023-09-25T04:53:55","modified_gmt":"2023-09-25T04:53:55","slug":"settler-transplants-in-australias-ancient-soil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regenesis.org.au\/2023\/07\/02\/settler-transplants-in-australias-ancient-soil\/","title":{"rendered":"Settler Transplants in Australia’s Ancient Soil"},"content":{"rendered":"

Australia\u2019s Cultural Soil<\/strong><\/h1>\n

Indigenous people did not think of themselves as \u2018Australians\u2019 but as members of groups bound by a common language and shared cultural norms and values that prescribed their worldview and knowledges about their known \u2018world\u2019, including neighbouring language groups with whom they traded. Today they are recognised as members of the oldest living culture in the world, dating back at least 65,000 years, well into the last Ice Age. For this reason, the subterranean mycelium network of cultural roots was dense and strong, shaped across millennium.<\/p>\n

Despite the physical and epistemic brutality of \u2018white\u2019 colonial settlement that ensued after 1788, and the scientific and technological might of its transplanted cultural knowledge, this ancient cultural soil was not so easily vanquished as it holds the deepest truths of the nature of the actual ecological-systems structure by which the Earth functions as an interconnected bio-geological system. Under certain benign conditions during the Holocene geological era, humans and other lifeforms with which they co-evolved, have flourished.<\/p>\n

However, since the 19th<\/sup> century Industrial revolution, the impact of human activity on the Earth\u2019s geo-biological system has progressively altered some of its fundamental settings: radiation of the sun\u2019s rays, ocean and land temperatures and currents, wind systems, ice retention at the polar axes, rain and fresh water river and lake systems. Initially confined to local areas through intensive agriculture and mining, under the expanding forces of industrial globalisation in the 20th<\/sup> and 21st<\/sup> centuries, these impacts are now global, threatening the viability of human habitation in large parts of the Earth, the collapse of many local ecosystems and the extinction of many lifeforms.<\/p>\n

Competing Worldviews<\/strong><\/h1>\n

As I discuss in my book, The Regenesis Journey (2023), today the \u2018clash of civilisations\u2019 is not between the Christian and the Islamic world. Nor is it between the so-called liberal democracies of the West, with their post WWII \u2018International Rules-Based Order\u2019 and the autocracies of China, Russia and other nuclear-armed states such as India, Pakistan, and Israel following the collapse of the old contest between Capitalism and Communism. Instead the new \u2018clash of civilisations\u2019 is between globalised techno-capitalism in all its forms and the eco-spiritual knowledge systems of pockets of First Nations peoples: Australia\u2019s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, the Maori of New Zealand, the island Pacifika people, the Sami of Scandinavia, the Inuit and Amero-Indian people of North, Central and South America, and the San, the Bushman of the Kalahari in Africa. These are all people whose literacy was not based on human language texts, but on reading the ecology of the world around them across the interdependencies of different lifeforms, landscapes, waterways and oceans, across seasons and deep time.<\/p>\n

In Australia, Indigenous knowledge about local ecologies and creative forces are encoded in Songlines and transmitted as Ancestral Law across generations through complex kinship structures and a process of ceremonies using dance, song, painting and storytelling under the guidance and \u2018control\u2019 of Elders, the cultural custodians of knowledge who have themselves graduated through the ceremonial system. Such ceremonial knowledge transmission includes both men\u2019s \u2018business\u2019 and women\u2019s \u2018business\u2019 as separate but related systems of knowledge and cultural rights and obligations.<\/p>\n

It forms part of Ancestral Law\/Lore, which is outlined in Marcia Langton and Aaron Corn\u2019s book, The Way of the Ancestors <\/em>(2023), which is part of the First Knowledges series edited by Margo Neale, National Museum of Australia. The Custodians of this knowledge system are not politicians, academics or journalists.\u00a0 Instead, they are the Elders, those who have spent their life understanding cultural knowledge and providing love and support to their communities to uphold Ancestral Laws.\u00a0 Their demeanour is marked by the combination of courage and perseverance in the face of adversity and humility in the face fame.<\/p>\n

As Australian Senior of Year 2022, the Aboriginal educator from Daly River, Dr Miriam Rose Ungumerr-Bauman explained to ABC reporter Dan Bourchier, that while in Western culture as people get older they contemplate retirement, in her culture this is when the real work of the Elder begins as knowledge holders and transmitters.\u00a0 It is why in Indigenous Australian culture, Elders are revered and celebrated, as was the theme of the 2023 national NAIDOC celebrations. They acquire their wisdom through the practice of dadirri, inner deep listening and quiet still awareness\u2014tapping into the deep spring within us in communion with the wider natural world.<\/p>\n

Core to this knowledge system is the idea that human beings live in a world of pervasive animate intelligence which they share with all living forms and the earth itself, an intelligence they can communicate with through ceremony and related sacred geography, and through which the wellbeing of life can be sustained. Literacy in these knowledge systems is the ability to read specific local ecological systems and their life forms across the seasons and across time, supported by an eco-spiritual system expressed in mytho-poetic stories, glossed in the English language as The Dreaming. That this knowledge system is still alive, and now experiencing a cultural renaissance, is a miracle we should all treasure.<\/p>\n

Out of the land, our sounds become our words, our words become our stories, our stories become our songs, our songs become our ceremonies and ceremonies become our teachings, our teachings become our beliefs, our beliefs become our law, and through that we are strong and know who we are wherever and whatever we are doing\u2014<\/em>Wanta Pawu, the Walpiri artist who created the ceremonial mosaic in the Australian Parliament Forecourt.<\/p>\n

First Transplants<\/strong><\/h1>\n

The First Transplants, the British, arrived as 19th<\/sup> century colonial-settlers at a time when British culture had been radically transformed by the impact of the 17th<\/sup> century Scientific Revolution, the First Industrial Revolution, and the French Revolution which overthrew the French King and established a Republic based on three principles of Liberty, Fraternity and Independence. The demonstrated potential for populist rebellion became fundamental to the future development of the political idea of liberal democracy and rights of the individual. To avoid such an outcome the British Crown hastened its transition to parliamentary democracy based on constitutional monarchy and in 1832 extending voting rights to the \u2018common man\u2019 albeit only those who met property ownership qualifications.<\/p>\n

British people were convinced that \u2018white\u2019 British culture represented the apex of human civilisation,\u00a0 through the political and cultural evolution from primitive stone-age hunter gatherer societies to literate, techno-scientific, market economy societies of growing wealth and affluence.\u00a0 The British had established themselves as the world\u2019s greatest power, controlling vast areas of the world under the British Crown as the British Empire. Whether government Official, convict or free colonial settler, these British transplants were all influenced by the \u2018scientific ideas\u2019 of Social Darwinism and the exclusively redemptive power of the \u2018one true God\u2019 of Christianity, despite continuing contestation between various sects: Catholics, Anglicans and various Protestant denominations who claimed direct contact with God via his teachings in the bible, now available as a written text in the English language.<\/p>\n

In this way the British colonial settlement of \u2018terra Australis\u2019 first mapped by Captain James Cook in 1770, progressed from a series of penal settlements of British and Irish criminals to a free settler society organised as a number of States (NSW, Queensland, Tasmania, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia) under the direct authority of the British Crown, to in 1901 a national federation with its own Constitution as the Commonwealth of Australia. Not only was this Australian settler society based on the human transplanting of British and Irish people. It was also based on transplanting their animals, food crops and farming methods\u2014the hard hoofed sheep and cattle, wheat, rice and other grains, and vegetables along with their ultimately ruinous industrialised farming methods.<\/p>\n

The Indigenous knowledge system, which had successfully fire-farmed the landscape for millennia to create extensive grasslands to nurture kangaroos, creating the \u2018Biggest Estate on Earth’ (Bill Gammage, 2012), was invisible to the transplants.\u00a0 Under a worldview shaped by Social Darwinism, the Indigenous people were dismissed as primitive people of low intelligence who had not progressed beyond the Stone Age. Through its commitment to \u2018rule of law\u2019, to enable the Crown to allocate land, which was traditionally occupied by these primitive \u2018natives\u2019, in 1835 Governor Richard Bourke of NSW declared the whole of Australia \u2018terra nullius\u2019\u2014land over which no previous sovereignty had been exercised prior to British occupation.<\/p>\n

Henceforth the transplanting of more and more British settlers was speeded up by the granting of free land to such settlers, together with the promise of free convict labour. This could also include free native labour whence it was organised under various State based legal systems of Native Protection, whereby following their forced removal from their traditional lands to missions and reserves, their lives were directly controlled: movement, marriage, employment and money.<\/p>\n

Bouyed up by their membership of demonstrably the world\u2019s most powerful culture, and nurtured in a land that was densely populated, with a long history of intensive agriculture and progressive enclosure of shared commons to create more private property ownership, Australia appeared to their eyes as sparsely populated by an Indigenous people who showed none of the skills of intensive agriculture, animal husbandry or technology that marked a \u2018civilisation\u2019.<\/p>\n

One of the first pieces of legislation passed by the new Federal Government was the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 (the White Australia Policy) which sought to ensure that all future transplants (immigration) to Australia would be of Anglo-Celtic ancestry, guaranteeing that Australia would be a \u2018white nation of British culture\u2019. This was strongly endorsed by the trade unions,\u00a0 keen to protect white Australians from cheap non-white labour, establishing Australia as a \u2018working man\u2019s paradise\u2019, free of the entrenched British class system.\u00a0 Wages for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island labour were controlled by various State Aboriginal Protection Acts which frequently allocated such wages for the cost of their \u2018protection\u2019: hence they were not a threat to unionised labour conditions.<\/p>\n

The White Australia Policy was relaxed to allow non-British immigration from Europe after WWII and was repealed by the Hawke-Keating Labor Government in 1993 to allow a further wave of transplanting from the rest of the Non-European world as skilled migrants, business migrants and refugees. To accommodate the slow demographic transformation of Australia from being a ‘white’ outpost of British civilisation with a ‘native’ underbelly, Australian Governments began to embrace the new idea of Australia as a multicultural nation, underpinned by legislation to overcome racial and ethnic discrimination against non-Anglo-European citizen settlers. Today Australia proudly proclaims itself as the world’s most successful multicultural nation in the world. But our legal system and institutions are still anchored in the British heritage of the First Transplants.<\/p>\n

Clear Felling for Transplant Cultivation<\/strong><\/h1>\n

The process of establishing a colonial-settler society is captured by the feature image above – a clear felled native forest, ready for industrialised agriculture with introduced plants and animal husbandry. This process of clear felling proceeded apace like this:<\/p>\n