Quotes About Aborigines

Phyllis Kaberry's description of an aborigine camp in western Australia is typical: "The Aborigines continually craved for meat, and any man was apt to declare, 'me hungry alonga bingy,' though he had had a good meal of yams and damper a few minutes before. The camp on such occasions became glum, lethargic, and unenthusiastic about dancing.

Australia's arid western region, from the town of Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean coast, is a beautiful, haunting, but largely empty land. Dominated by the harsh, almost uninhabited Great Sandy and Gibson deserts, the region is known only to Australian Aborigines, a handful of white settlers, and the few travelers who motor across it.

Australian Aborigines slept with their dogs for warmth on cold nights, the coldest being a "three dog night." —WIKIPEDIA

The white explorers had been my heroes. The Aborigines, I thought they were real savages. That was what I'd been taught and that's what I believed.

To deprive the Aborigines of their territory, therefore, was to condemn them to spiritual death—a destruction of their past, their future and their opportunities of transcendence.

The Pilgrim Fathers landed on the shores of America and fell upon their knees. Then they fell upon the aborigines.

Obviously, the issue for the Left isn't aging white males; it is conservatives, whether they are young or old, white or nonwhite, male or female. If female aborigines were conservative, the Left would have a problem with female aborigines.

Australian Aborigines say that the big stories — the stories worth telling and retelling, the ones in which you may find the meaning of your life — are forever stalking the right teller, sniffing and tracking like predators hunting their prey in the bush.

I like that the Aborigines say dogs make people human. Also (though I can't remember who said it): The thing that keeps me from becoming a complete misanthrope is seeing how much dogs love men.

I think it'll be interesting. The Aborigines certainly are, Lizabeth said. They have a tradition called the walkabout. It's a challenge for boys when they come of age. I don't know about the girls-the book didn't say. And grown men walkabout, too, when they're troubled. What's a walkabout? The book said it's to find your true self, but I don't really know what that means Lizabeth said.

Aborigines have the oldest continuously maintained culture on earth, and their art goes back to the very roots of it. Imagine if there were some people in France who could take you to the caves at Lascaux and explain in detail the significance of the paintings—

The author says the earliest Australian aborigines devoted extraordinary amounts of energy to enterprises no one now can understand.

A]n increasing number of people around the world are seeing their place for the first time within this naturalistic worldview. This recognition represents for humanity a return to the cosmos, a more sophisticated integration of culture and cosmos that humans possessed when cultures began, ranging from Stonehenge and the ancient civilizations such as Sumer and Egypt to Native Americans and the Australian aborigines.

For ages the Aborigines had relied heavily on isolation. It was their asset and their liability, and gave them long-term control of the continent. But if their isolation were to end, as it ultimately had to end with a shrinking world, their whole way of life could be fractured. Even the arrival of a few thousand permanent settlers, whether from Europe or Asia, would be like the first tremors of an earthquake.

The argument by white and black Australians that the events of 1788 are primarily to blame for the plight of many Aborigines is far too negative. The solutions which have been proposed — massive land rights, white confessions of guilt and the granting of hereditary privileges to Aborigines — essentially look backwards. Moreover, the solutions are based on a version of history which is much less valid than its exponents believe.

Nothing in the traditional life of Aborigines was more impressive than their practical knowledge. They were masters of their environment even though they could do little to change it.

There is good evidence that Aborigines are genetically insulin resistant,94 so that some of their metabolic traits 'are associated with being Aboriginal (mild impairment of glucose tolerance, hyperinsulinemia and elevated total and VLDL [very low density lipoprotein] triglycerides)'.95 In such a population, replacing ancestral food choices with the 'displacing foods of modern commerce' must predictably lead to high rates of T2DM.

The red aborigines, Leaving natural breaths, sounds of rain and winds, calls as of birds and animals in the woods, syllabled to us for names, Okonee, Koosa, Ottawa, Monongahela, Sauk, Natchez, Chattahoochee, Kaqueta, Oronoco, Wabash, Miami, Saginaw, Chippewa, Oshkosh, Walla-Walla, Leaving such to the States, they melt, they depart, charging the water and the land with names. -from Starting from Paumanok

Unlike some mainland black groups, Tasmanian Aborigines now have no traditional tribal culture left. It was taken from them with great violence and great rapidity.

I have met Aborigines younger than me who used to hide every time anyone official came round their camp for fear of being taken away.

Aborigines are not just the oldest race in Australia; they are the oldest race on the planet. They look like dinosaurs.

Psychoanalysis overturned. Instead of the dream being the fulfilment of desires unsatisfied in real life, real life would be the site where desires born of dreams were fulfilled. Instead of being the dumping-ground of the unconscious, dreams would be the matrices of real events - thus becoming like the 'dream' of the Aborigines, for whom a child has to be dreamt before he can be begotten, 'real' paternity being merely the fulfilment of the dream.

Instead of dreams being the place where desires from real life are fulfilled, it would be the real that was the place where desires born of dreams would be fulfilled. Dreams would be a search engine. The Aborigines, for example, scorning biological paternity, give priority to begetting by dreams. Reality would gain by this in becoming much more mysterious and dreams would cease to be the dumping ground of the unconscious.

I suppose the difficulty about us is that so far as money and possessions are concerned, we're at a more primitive stage than the rest. We're not interested in surplus. It's like being aborigines or North American Indians after the colonists have arrived. When everyone else is busy accumulating, they get bothered about anyone who is quite happy with a modest sufficiency.