30 August

‘Closing the gap’ for Aboriginal people. What we mean by that is a paternalistic attempt to have them ‘catch up’ with us. Us modern, ‘advanced’ Australians. But the gap is actually the other way around. Australia, the continent, is collapsing. And we did it, us ‘advanced’ Australians. And we don’t have a clue - not one idea - what to do about it. Most of us don’t even pay any attention to it, mostly huddled on the coast, or at best camping in the ‘great outdoors’. We think because we have ‘modern technology’, we’re more advanced, and we’ll technology our way out of it. We won’t, I’m an engineer and I love technology. But it’s simple stuff, next to doing things like keeping rivers running and ecosystems healthy. You can’t eat dirt. You can’t survive without water. All civilisations collapse in history when they stop being able to feed and water themselves. Aboriginal Australians found a way to make the landscape itself a central part of their culture. No other culture ever figured that out, or maintained it. 5000 years is about as well as any other civilisation managed. Aboriginal Australia is at least 60,000 years old. We have no idea how they did it, and they were doing it tens of thousands of years before Stonehenge, or the pyramids, right through to today. We’re so rednecked and stupid we think they were just hunter-gatherers, ‘living off the land’. Primitives. Bullshit. Some cultures may have tried that. They didn’t survive. What happened here over the past 100,000 years is the greatest mystery of all human existence. A genius that we don’t understand even the tiniest part of. That’s the ‘gap’ we need to close. Not getting Aboriginal Australians to imitate us, flying to Bali to get off our tits on booze, while taking selfies for the folk back home to say ‘here I am on holiday having the best time’.