Hoax Springs Eternal

If you have wondered for the umpteenth time just who are the “elders, past, present and emerging” whom we all are meant to acknowledge, it might surprise you that Aboriginal Australians also ask themselves the same question. The earnest declarations issued at the commencement of every event by community leaders, corporate spokespeople and by concert hall voiceovers give no hint that “elder” is a highly contentious title. Conferred in a variety of ways by numerous indigenous groups, who do not recognise each other, they have no agreed-upon system or authority that recognises a legitimate “elder”. The definition of “elder” is itself subjective, making its practical force rather difficult to implement.

This was the finding of a 5000-word report by PwC, which was hired by the Victorian Treaty Advancement Commission in December 2019 to help them determine who was an elder. After consulting 201 elders in nineteen workshops, “80 per cent of those consulted wanted a way to challenge spurious elders”, which not only turned out to be impossible, it called into question just how reliable were the 201 elders consulted in the first place!

This is but one of the many Monty Python moments that jump off the page of William Lines’s Romancing the Primitive: The Myth of the Ecological Aborigine which can be ordered here).In penning this tour de force, Lines has launched a warts-and-all revelation of what lies beneath the public personae and the hollow orthodoxies that have moved from edgy continental philosophies into the mainstream of urban Australia. It is essential reading, for what is clear is that the elevation of indigeneity in the secular West has become an unquestionable public religion. Aided and abetted by an academic class of “scholars”, who differ enormously from the original anthropological observers who meticulously recorded Aboriginal life from the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries, the new breed is conspicuous for its embrace of myth and storytelling in place of objective scrutiny, description and analysis.

At the centre of this myth is the ecological Aborigine, a confected image of indigenous man who is at one with the environment, a secular equivalent to the biblical Adam in the Garden of Eden. The difference, and it is a big one, is that in place of the Western tradition’s Adam, who stood at the beginning of time and whose fate was to eat from the tree of knowledge and thereby lose his primordial innocence, the newly minted primitive signifies the opposite.

In contrast to Western man’s short-lived Edenic existence, which launched him on a curious and relentless search for knowledge, we are told Aboriginal culture is eons old, “the longest continuous culture in the world”, which had no need of a similar quest for scientific knowledge and technology. It was and is a culture sufficient in itself, and it still stands unchanged, in stark contrast to Western civilisation’s forward thrust. As environmentalists continually remind us, it is Western civilisation’s progress that has destroyed and depleted the world, and is in need of “the primitive”.

Lines, who is a conservationist, when he is not a writer, poet and carpenter, is a practical man. He sees through a great deal of the cultural fluff and nonsense that proffers “traditional knowledge”, couched in orally transmitted stories, in place of the hard sciences that conservation requires and indeed has benefited from for decades. Traditional knowledge is not only “sacred” and therefore unquestionable, untested and unproven, today it is also highly politicised. Perhaps most troublesome is its spurning of the concept of “wilderness” as a Western notion, sending the leading conservationist organisation, the Wilderness Society, into a spin as it attempts to embrace the new religion of aboriginality.

How we have landed in our current mythic universe, where the urge to merge with a simpler, pre-literate, pre-modern, pre-scientific culture, is not a story unique to Australia. It has a long history and its frequent recurrence makes it either inevitable or, at the very least, a challenge to be stared down.

Lines takes us back to ancient Greece, where, ironically, many modern-day secular rationalists like to anchor themselves.

Lines takes us back to ancient Greece, where, ironically, many modern-day secular rationalists like to anchor themselves. But the Greeks had their version of “romancing the primitive” in Diogenes, who rejected traditional social and political arrangements of his day, donned beggars’ rags, made a virtue of poverty and bedded down in rough conditions in the marketplace. His desire to be a thoroughly autonomous individual, however, made this prophet of the Cynics reliant on handouts.

There were other philosophical schools that rejected the powers of the day, and the allure of the natural state, as pure and self-sufficient, had many takers. The first-century Roman historian Pompeius Trogus thought the ideal resided in the Scythians, whom he believed were a golden race that “lived on milk and honey”, while Tacitus idealised the northern Europeans, the Germani, as a people who were unconcerned with valuable metals, uninterested in labour and, he concluded, “have no needs”.

The fourth-century Bishop of Milan, Ambrose, also imagined a state of purity which, after all, is the biblical hope in a messianic age or Jesus’s Kingdom of God. But in addition to this future fulfilment there was also the haunting image of the past, where a pre-lapsarian Adam in the paradisiacal garden just might still exist in distant lands. The age of exploration aroused many such hopes. Lines refers to Eldad the Danite, a Jewish traveller in the ninth century who believed he encountered remnants of the lost tribes of Israel. My favourite example, who escaped Lines’s gaze, is the Dutch Jewish publisher Menasseh ben Israel, who wrote The Hope of Israel (1652), convinced that the indigenous people of South America spoke Hebrew and were the lost ten tribes of Israel. It formed part of a long rumination from many scholars on just who were the indigenous people of the New World.

Among them was Michel de Montaigne, a magistrate and mayor, administrator of his Bordeaux estate, father to six daughters and traveller. Upon encountering three Brazilian Indians brought to France, Montaigne was so impressed by their demeanour that he wrote an encomium to their “natural virtues” in contrast to his own corrupt civilisation. Of Cannibals (c. 1580) excuses their barbarity, because they were happy with their lot, and although ignorant of letters, science, magistrates, politics, properties, clothing, agriculture, and metal, they were, asserted Montaigne, innocent of “lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy, detraction, pardon”. In other words, these primitives were saints.

Turning a blind eye to shocking practices was par for the course by the time Jean-Jacques Rousseau, citizen of Geneva, turned denizen of Paris and close friend of the encyclopaedist Denis Diderot, wrote treatises on education and more. Placing his children in an orphanage, for example, did not stop him pontificating on how to raise children. Rousseau became the arch-critic of “civilisation”, which he believed was the origin of all the vices known to man, at the foundation of which were laws that “irreversibly destroyed natural freedom” and “subjugated the whole of mankind to labour, servitude and misery”. There was much more besides, but Rousseau’s tirades spewed resentments that saw nothing in society to compare to the state of nature: “nothing is so gentle as man in his primitive state when placed by nature at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes and the fatal enlightenment of civil man”.

The “true believers” in the noble savage had one thing in common: they were rather distant from the reality they were describing. Enter Watkin Tench, well read in the Enlightenment philosophes, including Rousseau, a veteran of the American War of Independence, who arrived on the First Fleet in New South Wales as an officer of marines. He was a keen observer, describing in detail the indigenous people he met, as Lines notes, “admiring but not romanticising Aborigines”. Although he was well aware of his own English prejudices, he was frank and furious about “the brutal violence with which the women are treated”:

The women are in all respects treated with savage barbarity, condemned not only to carry the children but all other burthens, they meet in return for submission only with blows, kicks and every other mark of brutality. In beating a woman, a man generally aimed at the head using a hatchet, a club, or any other weapon which may chance to be in his hand.

Regardless of the barbarities, which included infanticide and reported acts of cannibalism and the rape and spearing of women, the idealisation of pre-contact life proceeded apace and was indirectly aided by the anti-Christian French philosophes as well as the utopianists, such as Henri Saint-Simon and August Comte. Karl Marx was close on their heels, imagining a communistic society that would favour collectivism against individualism and abolish capitalism and social-economic classes. Religion, which the Jewish-born Marx and all communists after him believed preserved the old regime, also had to go. Marx was yet another example of the continental European who benefited in every way from the privileged class into which he was born, but was determined to tear it down brick by brick.

There were many who simply wished to escape from the perceived injustices of Western civilisation into a primeval Eden. A few hundred Australians, including teacher and writer Mary Gilmore, followed William Lane to his commune in Paraguay in the 1890s. A disaster of puritanism, dictatorship and starvation under the autocratic leadership of Lane, it nonetheless did not diminish Gilmore’s longing for a tribal utopia on her return home. She eulogised Aborigines in her later books of poems, The Wild Swan (1930) and Under the Wilgas (1932), which Judith Wright would echo in her poetry and in her environmental activism. Lines sees in this unhealthy mix of poetry and perceived guilt a drive to assuage the sins of the past by elevating Aborigines as “exemplars of a spiritual, sacred attitude towards the land … with responsibilities towards all that surrounded them [living] in a primitive Garden of Eden”.

Poets gave way to professors of sociology and anthropology, who advanced the notion of “culture” as a blanket term that grew more capacious as it became less defined: “Culture became a hyper-referential word subsuming knowledge, belief, art, technology, tradition and ideology.” In the New Age thinking of the 1980s and 1990s, “culture” became a synonym for “wholeness” and “harmony”, and was eagerly adopted by conservationists, not least the Wilderness Society, which proclaimed:

Wilderness in Australia is a land of living culture. From the rock arrangements in Tasmania older than Stonehenge to the paintings replenished each year that tell stories of the north, this country is Aboriginal land.

Not only did culture assume the size of a giant cornucopia of endless treasures, so too the Aboriginal claim on the entire landmass of the southern continent became a theme advanced by the Australian historian Bill Gammage in The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia (2012). Lines takes particular issue with Gammage’s thesis that Aborigines had a unitary theology “mostly unknown to each other” of the dreaming, which commanded that “every inch of the land must be cared for”.

Not only do the widely spaced tribes, with different languages and “country” make complete knowledge of the continent unlikely, Gammage’s assertion that Aborigines “managed” the land imports a concept from contemporary boardroom parlance to hunter-gatherers, and ignores the recorded evidence of exploited resources, often wastefully, particularly after a period of drought and near-starvation. Even the environmentalist dogma that Aborigines used fire in a rational and systematic way is countered by a detailed factual analysis by Jenny Silcock and colleagues of 4500 records of early explorers who found no evidence of such a thing.

The most disturbing aspect of Gammage’s stated point of view is his rejection of science in favour of culture, which he claims “science has made a subjective decision to deny”.

A clever turn of phrase turns scientists into deniers, the morally blind, if you will. But for Lines, the shoe is on the other foot, as he recalls how people who deny the Holocaust, for example, are incapable of accepting the facts of history. Denying factual truth is the issue, and using the term in any other way, such as in “my truth”, is deceitful.

By now Lines is nearly apoplectic with rage, which is thoroughly understandable after delving into publications that purport to be scholarly but have abandoned scientific standards, and yet continue to receive accolades.

By now Lines is nearly apoplectic with rage, which is thoroughly understandable after delving into publications that purport to be scholarly but have abandoned scientific standards, and yet continue to receive accolades. None more so than Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu (2014), which not only received the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award, but prompted ABC presenter Annabel Crabb to proclaim, “So many examples of jaw dropping achievements on this continent which occurred pre-1788 and are under-lionised. Read and exult.” Although most serious scholars do not accept Pascoe’s suggestions that Aborigines were architects, engineers and farmers, even Peter Sutton, who refuted Pascoe’s claims in Farmers or Hunter Gatherers? has idealised Aboriginal life, disregarding the frequent bloody quarrels, battles and tribal warfare that marked its pre-contact history. Instead he focused on “the evils of colonialism”.

Chief among these evils is the claim that the English colonised Australia believing it was terra nullius, a view that Noel Pearson and Marcia Langton have argued falsifies Aboriginal history. But their claim itself is false. Lines points out that the term was foreign to Captain Cook, appeared in no dictionaries, and was invented in the 1970s. It referred to a territory inhabited by people without recognised social or political organisation. Terra nullius was used by Paul Coe of the Redfern Legal Service, who found the term in a 1975 dispute between Algeria and Morocco over Western Sahara. He deployed it in 1977 and lost his case, but when he appealed to the High Court, Justice Lionel Murphy in a dissenting opinion cited terra nullius as the accepted legal and historical explanation of Australian sovereignty.

Judges can change the course of history, and Murphy had a reputation for doing so. In my own area of expertise—cults in the 1980s and 1990s—I witnessed many academic colleagues who ignored the evidence of abuse on a massive scale and leapt to defend a plethora of cults. Rejecting out of hand the accounts of ex-members as “tainted”, they naively believed the leaders’ accounts. “They drank the Kool-aid”, in other words, which is ironic given that in 1978 Jonestown cult leader Jim Jones killed more than 900 followers in their Guyana jungle compound with Kool-aid laced with cyanide. Murphy, in a judgment that would be bemoaned around the globe by many ex-members of Scientology, gave the cult founded by L. Ron Hubbard the legitimate status of religion it sought.

During the early days of “California dreaming” which saw the rise of hundreds of cults and charismatic leaders, “the religion of indigeneity” also had a big role to play. Sweat lodges, peyote rituals and beaded headbands were the rage, and one mysterious anthropology student rode the crest of the wave with his account of his induction into the Yaqui way of mystical knowledge. The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda became a best-seller, and was the basis of his being awarded a PhD by the University of California. After it was revealed that the account was largely fiction, it did not seem to matter, least of all to the publisher, who sold millions of copies as an authentic guide to spiritual realisation.

Born Carlos César Salvador Arana, Castaneda is considered one of the fathers of the New Age. Today, that part of the world and its penchant for new religious movements still holds sway, and Australia has adopted from Canada official terms with legal force like “First Nations” and “traditional knowledge”. Indigenous wannabes are still emerging, and sometimes they are exposed, as was recently the case with the popular folk singer Buffy Saint Marie. Feather in her hair and possessed of an unusual vibrato voice that sounded like the Cree Indian she imagined herself to be, Buffy dismissed all evidence to the contrary, saying it is “my truth”.

So here we are in what could be called the “My Truth Age”, where the advent of primitivism uses spurious arguments and imagined “facts” to tear down all the great and good achievements of the West. And that includes the settlement of Australia by the English, who brought a way of life that many indigenous people quickly embraced as more comfortable, bountiful and peaceful than they had known. While no serious historian would whitewash the past, Lines is not prepared to erase it in favour of the new religion of the “ecological Aborigine” which serves neither the environment nor the Aboriginal people.

A final word about Lines’s turn of phrase, which is refreshingly frank and often sent me into paroxysms of laughter, with its unvarnished observations which we often see but dare not name in polite society, let alone in print. Lines is a poet so his economy of style cuts through the jargon-laden obfuscations of the academic class with its neologisms which few understand but which allow for endless declarations of “my truth”. Imagine how the latter will run riot in the forthcoming “truth commissions”. For as Lines has so thoroughly demonstrated, we will not be able to rely on the academic class to challenge a jot or tittle of it.

Romancing the Primitive: The Myth of the Ecological Aborigine
by William J. Lines
Quadrant Books, 2023, 239 pages, $39.95

From 1992 to 2018 Rachael Kohn produced and presented programs on religion and spirituality for ABC Radio National including The Religion Report, Religion Today, The Ark and, principally, The Spirit of Things from 1997 to December 2018. She wrote on Jacinta Nampijinpa Price in the January-February issue.