16 June

I think we need a way to meet aboriginal culture somehow in the middle, halfway between our ideas and theirs. Generally we either dismiss them as primitive, or turn their ideas into New Age mumbo jumbo. I think they maybe had 2 defining things about their civilisation, that also led to it being far and away the most successful in human history: 1) they granted agency to all things, and 2) they seduced these things to create ongoing partnerships. Agency just means they recognised that all things, even ‘inanimate’ things, act in some way. We on the other hand grant agency only to humans. An example of their seduction - they had no fences. Instead they’d manipulate the landscape to make it into what they, animals and plants all desired. They engineered landscapes as a web of interacting agencies.