Adventure Ausrama Blog

There is always conflict between industry and the natural ecosystem. With the arrival of extraction and even mass agriculture comes pollution detrimental to the flora and fauna. This is no different in Aboriginal regions as in urbanized cities. Dean Mathews is a Yawuru Aboriginal and Project Officer for the Nyamba Buru Yawuru Aboriginal Corporation. He monitors the impact on groundwater by agriculture and mining. He has made a video. It is significant that the location he tested did not have any visible industry there, so it would be expected that the water was still pure. Test the water adjacent to mining activity and the results would be quite different. Much has been made of Aboriginal cooperation with industry - too much for my liking. One has the feeling that local Aboriginal have been duped. The mining industry employs people whose sole motivation is to change public opinion to accept the "job-creating" mining companies. The problem is of course that f

Tony Abbott is planning to include Aboriginals in the Constitution as the original "owners" of the land of Australia. This is like like Kevin Rudd's speech apologizing for the lost generation of Aboriginals forcibly taken from their parents and put into institutions or brought up by White people. Talk is cheap. What Australia needs is a planned development program to make life better for Aboriginals. The right for men to receive unemployment payments was taken away by a still paternal federal government in the Northern Territory. It was taken on the premise of bad treatment of Aboriginal children. This was a blatant lie. No Aboriginal has ever been charged for ill treatment of children. Money is needed to spend on Aboriginal communities. Tony Abbott has no money to spare, particularly with his right-wing policy of reducing taxes for wealth whites. How is Australia going to decrease the deficit with such a policy? The only thing that government can do is r

When Captain Cook "discovered" Australia in 1770 it was known that Southeast Asians and even Chinese seafarers had landed in Australia. Portuguese and Dutch ships had also stopped to replenish water supplies. It was not considered possible that people had landed in Australia from another continent. In the 1940s mysterious coins were discovered. While some were coins used by the Dutch East India Company others were identified as coming from the Kilwas Sultanate of Tanzania in Africa. They were used in the prominent trading center 1,000 years ago. If Africa was trading using Australia as a location en route Aboriginals could have come into contact with African merchants. Though the coins were found on the fringe of the Australian north coast, getting fresh water would have been important for ships traveling through the waters of the Wessel Islands. Aboriginals would have been curious about any "strange" looking new people. Africans would certainly have been

Like the native Indians of North America, Australian Aboriginals have taken solace in alcohol. Since the Europeans arrived, discrimination has been part of their daily lives. Europeans immured in stratified society with strong class divisions treated Aboriginals as less than human. City white people have the same alcohol problems as Aboriginals, but society accepts this as normal. Many Australians of European descent believe that there is a genetics predisposition in Aboriginals. There is no foundation to this. When white people get drunk they fight, steal, and lose control. Aboriginal communities have alcohol prohibition supported by government legislation. If this was to be applied to white citizens there would be a public outcry. The current interference in unemployment payments to Aboriginals in the Northern Territory is definitely unlawful. This is why the board that polices human rights in Australia was suspended. Life is so frustrating for Australian Aboriginals that

Human impact on native flora and fauna is real. There seems to be no way the detrimental affects can be ameliorated. Aboriginals have been in Australia for 40,000 years. apart from the unanswered question about extinction of mega fauna Aboriginals did not alter the external environment at all. Sedentary agriculture is the major contributing factor to habitat damage. Planting mono-crops seriously changes land features. In Western Australia, for example, water points are located at 50 sq km on average. In its pre-European natural state water holes could be found 2.5 sq km apart. This is serious change with species of native birds declining. Unless we set areas aside as pristine, protected sectors only introduced pest species will remain. Even without the pest birds, the proportion of native birds is altered. Some die out while others increase in number. The ecosystem is no longer in balance. http://www.adventure--australia.blogspot.com/ http://www.tysaustralia.bl

Australia's physical connection with the mainland of Asia disappeared 4,000 years ago. It is assumed that people from India crossed into Australia before this time. There is little proof of this. Indians and Australian Aboriginals are distinctly different. Aboriginals are more like Africans, while Indians appear to be black Caucasians. DNA tests on both gene pools do show a link. However, this link could be directly from Africa 70,000 years ago. A similar thing could be said about Neanderthal genes being carried by some modern humans. The markers could have been there before both species split off from a common ancestor. The fact that Neanderthals have a different number of chromosomes is dismissed by some scientists when it is known that offspring of related species with differing chromosomes can have offspring but they are invariably "mules" who have infertile young. Australian Aboriginals are the earliest of Mankind to leave Africa. There were many wa

An outspoken man has died with little fanfare and hardly a report in the media. Yet this man spoke out about injustice in Australia all his life. His name was Arthur Murray. Australians once lived longer than people anywhere else  - the white people that is. "Blackfellas" died young and they could not even vote. Aboriginal men were hired at very low rates of pay in outback cotton fields. Arthur worked with them. Pesticides were dropped directly on top of them, planes flying so low the workers had to quickly lie face down in the mud. The white pilots didn't care. In 1973 thousands of dead fish floated in the Namoi River, killed by pesticides. Arthur had had enough. He went on strike with other Aboriginals. Five hundred disgruntled men marched through the center of Wee Waa. The local newspaper said they were radicals. They were called boongs and niggers, though many had vomited in the fields after spraying and some suffered from permanent coughing. Their tents we

The truth is out - Aboriginals studied the stars thousands of years before ancient Europeans. Stonehenge is not the oldest stone construction that marked the summer and winter solstice. The Wadda Wurrung Aboriginals Built an egg-shaped structure of standing basalt stones that marks the solstices and the equinox (when the day has equal hours of night and day). The design of the Aboriginal "stonehenge" is completely different from the stonehenge in England. tops of stones mark the sun's movement in Australia whereas gaps in stones mark the solstices in England. This indicates that Aboriginals who were the first people to leave Africa were much more advanced and knowledgeable than other groups in the world. This knowledge was passed on to the next generation verbally. Europeans when they first arrived branded the Aboriginals as stupid people who could only count up to six - how wrong they were! Though the traditions of the Wadda Wurrung Aboriginals has been lost, songs

Aboriginals had knowledge of movements of the Moon, Earth and Sun. This is not surprising. Ancient people had nothing better to do at night than to look up and note movements of those tiny spots of light. Apparently it was known that tides were linked to the moon and seasons came and went cyclically. Aboriginal culture revolved around movements in the heavens. They used it for guidance on long hunting expeditions, for marriage ceremonies, and knowing when types of fruit would appear. Eclipses were bad news. They believed something bad would soon happen. This is probably due to the moon turning red, like blood, during an eclipse. Like ancient religions Aboriginals saw the heavens as a canopy held up by spiritual pillars Human beings tend to interpret things in a similar way though they may be from different tribal groups or live in varied parts of the world. First there were many Gods, now there is one. This has happened as beliefs became factual knowledge over eons of time. h