Telling the Truth about Pre-Contact Aboriginal Society

The “Neolithic Revolution” is the name given to the transformation of humans from hunter-gatherers to farmers who grew crops and domesticated livestock for food. It dates to as far back as 8000 to 10,000 BC in the “Fertile Crescent” in the Middle East. By about 1000 BC, many areas of the world had experienced their own “Neolithic Revolutions”, among them China, much of Europe, parts of North and South America, and even sections of Africa and Papua New Guinea. This spread may have moved outward from the “Fertile Crescent”, but it is more likely to have developed independently throughout the world.

The total failure of pre-contact Aboriginal society to advance in nearly all significant areas of the economy and technology is indicative of what Aboriginal society was actually like. To put the matter bluntly, pre-contact Aboriginal society consisted of 65,000 years of murderous, barbaric savagery.

The “Neolithic Revolution” generally gave rise to settled communities and cities, often of considerable size. For instance, it is estimated that the population of the Nile Valley at the time that the Pyramids were built was between 1 million and 1.5 million. One continent, and only one, is entirely lacking in any evidence of a “Neolithic Revolution”: Australia, whose indigenous population continued very largely, if not entirely, as nomadic hunter-gatherers until Europeans arrived in 1788.

Ancient and non-Western peoples regularly built structures of enormous, even incredible, size, obviously without any mechanical equipment. The Great Pyramid and the other pyramids in the Geza Complex near Cairo, as well as the Sphinx, were constructed around 2600 to 2500 BC. When completed, the Great Pyramid was 147 metres high. It remained the tallest man-made structure in the world for over 3500 years, when—improbably—it was surpassed by Lincoln Cathedral in 1311, at 160 metres. Angkor Wat in Cambodia, completed around 1150 AD, occupying 163 hectares, is the largest religious structure ever built. Several of the pyramids in Mexico and Central America, erected by the Aztecs and other local peoples, are between sixty-six and seventy-five metres high. The little-known temple in Java known as Borobudur, the largest Buddhist temple in the world, completed around 833 AD, is 118 metres high. Even in the heart of the “Dark Continent”, Great Zimbabwe, built between 1100 and 1300 AD, was a gigantic royal palace, with walls 11 metres high. Impressive ancient structures like these, built entirely by non-Europeans, can be found in all parts of the world—with one striking exception. Pre-contact Australia was entirely devoid, not merely of impressive buildings, but of permanent structures of any kind.

The earliest known written language is generally believed to be Sumerian, whose oldest examples date to around 3400 BC. Egyptian hieroglyphics originated around 3200 BC. Most ancient cultures produced written languages, based on letters or pictograms. Once again, there is only one continent whose indigenous inhabitants never produced a written language of any kind: Australia.

The total failure of pre-contact Aboriginal society to advance in nearly all significant areas of the economy and technology is also indicative of what Aboriginal society was actually like. To put the matter bluntly, pre-contact Aboriginal society consisted of 65,000 years of murderous, barbaric savagery. However politically incorrect this description may seem, the truth must be told—in particular because several states are now sponsoring “truth telling” committees and bodies, whose sole purpose, it seems, is to find new ways of denouncing the white, British society which began in 1788; these committees and public meetings will, needless to say, ignore the truly horrifying record and realities of pre-contact Aboriginal society.

In essence, the appalling and murderous aspects of Aboriginal society all stem from the same cause: the failure of Australia’s indigenous peoples to experience a “Neolithic Revolution”, which, elsewhere, ensured that the lifestyle of hunter-gatherers was replaced by settled communities of farmers and others who could feed a vastly larger population through the planting of crops and the domestication of livestock. Owing to this failure, the central aim of all of Australia’s indigenous tribes was to keep the size of their population as low as possible consistent with the meagre amounts of food they were able to obtain, and, above all, to avoid the emergence of an excess number of mouths to feed. They did this by eliminating any excess mouths. This can be graphically seen by examining infanticide and cannibalism in Aboriginal society, as well as another closely related, ubiquitous feature, the endemic mistreatment of women.

Infanticide

Infanticide—the deliberate murder of newborn infants—was practised ubiquitously among Australia’s Aborigines. There were two reasons. The first, as noted, was the absolute necessity, in hunter-gatherer societies, to keep the size of the population as low as possible consistent with tribal survival. The second reason, in the absence of pack animals, wheeled vehicles, or the sharing of burdens between men and women, was that mothers could only carry, at most, two infants or small children, and could only suckle two newborn babies at a time. Any infants or small children in excess of this number were normally murdered. As the University of Michigan anthropology professor Aram Yengoyan put it:

Infanticide [in Aboriginal society] was the primary means of population control. In theory, infanticide could have been as high as 40% to 50% of all births, and the population would have survived. In actuality, infanticide rates were lower, and probably ranged from 15% to 30% of all births.¹

Contemporary European observers generally agreed that about 30 per cent of Aboriginal babies were murdered at birth. For instance, George Taplin (1831–79), a prominent Congregationalist missionary in the Murray Valley, stated that even in the early 1860s “one- third of the infants which were born were put to death. Every child which was born before the one which preceded it could walk was destroyed, because the mother was regarded as incapable of carrying two …”²

Ludwik Krzywicki, the great Polish anthropologist, summarised the role of infanticide throughout Aboriginal society, based on reports from explorers, settlers, and missionaries:

The intensity of infanticide was sometimes very great. R. Oberlander was shown a woman who had murdered ten children; Dieri old women admitted to S. Gason of having disposed in this manner of two to four of their offsprings: in this way, about 30% of the new-born infants perished at the hands of their mothers in the Lake Eyre district. Among the Narrinyeri, “more than half of the children fall victims to this atrocious custom.”—G. Taplin knew several women who had murdered two or three of their new-born children … W.H. Wilkinson says that in 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 broken English: “me bin keepem one boy and one girl, no good keepem mob, him too much wantem tuckout!” Therefore the women of the bush daily murder their children and do not wish to raise more than two … When Ph. Chauncey asked one woman how she could dare to do such a deed, the mother replied, pointing to the bag on her back that there was only room for one child, and she could not possibly carry another … 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.³

Most European observers noted that these killings were carried out without any guilt or sadness, being a necessity for the survival of the tribe. As in the appalling example above, the killings were often followed by eating the murdered baby. Most observers also agreed that more girl babies were murdered than boys. According to William Wyatt (1804–56), “female infants at birth were not infrequently put to death for the sake of the more valuable boys, who are still being suckled though three or four years old, or even more”.⁴

Aboriginal infanticide was invariably suppressed by the British settlers as firmly as they could, especially by Christian missionaries, but also by local officials.

Needless to say, today’s leftist critics of “British-Australian settler imperialism” fail to mention this practice by the indigenous population, or how it was suppressed. It might be worth considering how many Aboriginal babies were murdered in this way. If there were 350,000 Aborigines in Australia in 1788, and about 10,000 babies were born annually, this suggests that about 3000 infants were killed annually—300,000 per century, or three million per millennium. Over the 65,000 years of indigenous life here, this implies that 195 million Aboriginal babies were murdered by their parents or tribes—murders which came to an abrupt end with European settlement and the imposition of Western notions of human life and justice. Had Australia remained isolated from European rule, probably around 2,460,000 Aboriginal babies would have been murdered in the years from 1788 until today—some of whom continued to be killed in tribal areas before the British rule of law could be imposed.

Cannibalism

Unquestionably the most dramatically appalling aspect of pre-contact Aboriginal society was the widespread custom of eating human flesh. There are literally hundreds of accounts of Aboriginal cannibalism, dating from the earliest European settlements through to the 1930s or even later. These accounts came from every part of Australia with the possible exception of Tasmania; they were written by intelligent and honourable persons who were not in contact with each other, in writings often not meant for publication, by commentators who were often highly sympathetic to the Aborigines—for example Daisy Bates (1859–1951). Their many descriptions of Aboriginal cannibalism were made so often and so regularly as to seem ubiquitous. To take one example, here is the verbatim evidence given by James Davis (1808–1889) to a Queensland Parliamentary Committee. Davis, an escaped convict, had lived with the Aborigines in Queensland from 1829 until 1842:

Have you noticed that any of the blacks are cannibals? The whole of them are.

Without doubt? I believe so, but I should not like to say that they are all cannibals all over the interior. As far as I have been—and I think I have been six or seven hundred miles to the north —they are all cannibals.

You must have seen them eating the blacks?

I have seen them eat hundreds of them.

On what occasions do they generally eat them—do they eat their own comrades after a battle?

Yes, any young man or middle-aged men—men up to forty—all the men fit for fighting are eaten; they are all skinned first, and then roasted; their skins and bones are kept for remembrance.

The skin and bone of them that are killed?

Yes.

I am to presume that they eat their comrades from choice and not from starvation?

It is not starvation—not at all; they just eat from fancy for the food; they are very fond of human flesh; the bodies are very fat—children of two years old are quite fat; and they are very fond of the fat.⁵

Despite what Davis testified, it is difficult to believe that humans were not eaten for their protein content and the status of human flesh as mammal meat, largely absent from the Aboriginal diet. As noted, babies were often deliberately killed and eaten, as were adults, as this stomach-churning account—of pure sadism—published in 1839, testifies:

Governor Wallen [Henry Wallen (1794–1856), a settler on Kangaroo Island, South Australia, known as “Governor Wallen”, although he held no official position] informed me of a singular ceremony he was once permitted to witness, and which consisted of the lying in state of a famous old warrior chief. He was slain in battle, but his body was rescued, and was placed in one of their huts, on a kind of bed, whilst some of the captured enemies were hung up by their heels over a slow fire, and as the fat melted from them, they sung [sic] and greased their waddies with it. Anticipating a cannibal banquet, he withdrew in disgust.⁶

Women were often preferred to men as a meal, as seen in the following account, given as late as 1926:

Mr M.P. Durack [(1865–1950), father of Dame Mary Durack (1913–94), the author and historian], a pastoralist and ex-member of Parliament … said that there was no question that cannibalism did exist. In the early days the natives openly admitted the fact. Cases generally occurred after a tribal fight, and usually the victim was a well-nurtured young girl.⁷

That cannibalism was widely practised by the Aborigines was a commonplace among all accounts of indigenous society down to the 1950s. As late as 1957, the eminent anthropologist F.D. McCarthy (1905–97), Foundation Principal of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, asserted as a matter of fact in his Australian Aborigines: Their Life and Culture: “cannibalism existed not only as a part of death and mourning rites, but also in the custom of infanticide”. Since the 1960s, claims such as that one, at the time made routinely as a matter of accepted fact, have become more taboo and heavily censored than a blueprint for the atom bomb, a victim of political correctness as comprehensive as any military secret.

One peculiarity of Aboriginal cannibalism is that, in remote areas in the nineteenth century, Aborigines preferred to kill, and cook, Chinese men rather than white men, claiming that the Chinese, apparently because of their diet of rice, were less salty than Europeans.

The mistreatment of women

The savage and brutal mistreatment of their women was endemic to Aboriginal society. In the words of the Congregationalist missionary George Taplin:

The treatment which women experience must be taken into account in considering the causes which lead to the destruction of native tribes. Amongst them the woman is an absolute slave. She is treated with the greatest cruelty and indignity, and has to do all laborious work, and to carry all the burthens. For the slightest offence or dereliction of duty, she is beaten with a waddy or yamstick and not infrequently speared. The records of the Supreme Court in Adelaide furnish numberless instances of blacks being tried for murdering lubras. The woman’s life is of no account if the husband wishes to destroy it, and no one ever attempts to protect or take her part under any circumstance.⁸

Women existed in Aboriginal society to carry the tribe’s goods on their nomadic wanderings.

A woman, because she was a woman, always carried the heaviest load. A man took his tomahawk, his spear, and waddy, and that sort of thing; a woman humped along with the weighty kangaroo and ’possum skin coverings, the dillies with eatables, and sometimes a little piece of goods in the form of a child. At times, too, she would carry tea-tree bark on her back for the humpies [makeshift tents], while ever and anon the men enjoyed themselves in hunting and looking for “sugar bags” [native bees’ nests], etc.⁹

Today, the rate of domestic violence perpetrated by Aboriginal men against Aboriginal women is significantly greater than the rate among non-Aborigines.

Given the appalling history of the mistreatment of Aboriginal women during the 65,000 years before the arrival of Europeans, it seems certain that their comprising a disproportionate percentage of domestic violence victims must be a continuation of this age-old pattern. In true woke fashion, however, government-sponsored bodies blame the white man for the criminality of Aboriginal men today. According to an online site, “Family, domestic, and sexual violence”, posted by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (an Australian government body with offices in Canberra and Sydney), dated April 12 this year:

Colonisation, which involved the removal from land and cultural dispersion has resulted in social, economic, physical, psychological, and emotional problems for First Nations peoples across generations … The ongoing impacts of colonisation for First Nations people include … the disruption of traditional cultures, relationships and community norms about violence.

In other words, the 65,000 years of the endemic and ubiquitous mistreatment of women has nothing to do with today’s domestic violence: it is all the fault of the white man.

“Aboriginal science”

Not only, during the past fifty or sixty years, have the enormities and the grotesque, ubiquitous inhumanity of pre-contact Aboriginal society been erased from the history books as comprehensively as any praise of American capitalism was erased from Stalinist textbooks, but an accurate depiction of Aboriginal society has been replaced by the glorification of the genius and greatness of Aboriginal society. Good examples of this are the accolades to “Aboriginal science” now found on many websites. To take one example, Joe Sambono, “a Jingili man and a zoologist” and a “Curriculum Specialist in Science and in Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Education”, states, in an online posting by the Australian Museum, that, apart from praise by some educators:

unfortunately there have been some who do not understand and appreciate the amazing scientific achievements of indigenous peoples … Indigenous science was critical for Indigenous people in solving any number of problems they faced and to capitalise on beneficial and sustainable opportunities presented by their environments and circumstances … It is simply a matter of understanding that all groups of humans around the world have hypothesised, experimented, made empirical observations, gathered evidence, recognised patterns, verified through repetition, made inference and predictions, and developed branches of knowledge that helped them to make sense of the world around them and their place within it.

Leaving aside the fact that there is a categorical difference between the “indigenous” people who built the Pyramids and the indigenous people of Australia, the problem here is that this is not what we mean by “science”, a minor fact disguised by the passage’s rhetoric. “Science” entails the discovery of new facts and theories about the world and the universe, facts and theories which are continually updated by new evidence and new discoveries. Thus, the Ptolemaic theory, that the sun and the planets revolved around the Earth, was replaced by the Copernican theory that the sun is the centre of our solar system; Newtonian physics was in part replaced by the insights provided by Relativity and Quantum theory; the belief that infectious diseases were caused by “bad air” was replaced by the germ theory of contagious diseases; many diseases, it was found, could be successfully treated by a range of new discoveries such as antibiotics. All of this is precisely what Aboriginal society never did in 65,000 years: almost uniquely among the social groups of the world, it never advanced beyond the understanding of the world held 10,000 years ago—in contrast, most strikingly, to European society. There was, indeed, a long period in European history when scientific knowledge failed to advance, from roughly 476 AD to either 1100 or 1450 or so, depending upon the historian commenting. This period is known as the “Dark Ages” precisely because Europeans failed to acquire new scientific knowledge; it lasted less than one millennium, not sixty-five millennia.

Why has this total reversal of the facts, bizarrely transforming a nightmarishly barbaric society into not merely a rival to the modern West, but, to many, one superior to it, become entirely dominant in the public presentation of the Aboriginal world? Some might well point to the “myth of the noble savage”, a familiar leitmotif for 300 years or so. But in my view perhaps the key explanation is that the contemporary Left has replaced class war with race war as its latest means of destroying Western democracy and its legitimacy, inventing an Aboriginal utopia to obscure a society which was not only not utopian, but bore a close resemblance to hell on earth. When mumbling the disingenuous claptrap in the “Welcome to country” about “paying our respects” to the “elders” of the past, you are “paying your respects” to sixty-five millennia of baby-killers, cannibals, and those who chronically mistreated women, among many other crimes, and who do not deserve our “respect” but our contempt.

William D. Rubinstein (1946–2024) died suddenly in Melbourne in July. He held Chairs of History at Deakin University and at the University of Wales.

Endnotes

1. Aram Yengoyan, “Biological and Demographic Components in Aboriginal Socio-Economic Organization,” Oceania Vol. 43 (2), December 1972, p. 88.

2. Cited in Robert Braugh Smyth, The Aboriginals of Victoria, Vol. I (London, 1878), p. 52.

3. Ludwik Krzywicki, Primitive Society and Its Vital Statistics (London, 1934), pp. 123–125 (his footnotes omitted).

4. William Wyatt, J.P., Manners and Superstitions of the Adelaide and Encounter Bay Tribes (Adelaide,1879), p. 162.

5. From J.J. Knight, In the Early Days: History and Incidents of Pioneer Queensland (Brisbane, 1895), pp. 102–103.

6. W.H. Leigh, Reconnoitering Voyages and Travels, With Adventures in the New Colony of South Australia (London, 1839).

7. Adelaide Register, 13 November 1926.

8. George Taplin, The Native Tribes of South Australia (Adelaide, 1878), pp. xvii–xviii.

9. Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences of Early Queensland (Brisbane, 1904), p. 61.