16 August

Most of the early settlers to Australia were from the UK. So here’s a mystery. The famous Australian accent doesn’t sound like *any* of the UK accents. Not even blended in some way. Know what it sounds just like? Aboriginal English. So much so that when a couple of Aboriginal guys mime a Carl Barron skit, you can be forgiven for thinking this is an Aboriginal comedian‘s routine. And it’s not just the accent, the ‘smart-arse’ behaviour that makes the skit funny is classic Aboriginal humour as well. This is the greatest untold story of Australia. Much of what we pride ourselves on as Australians, we got from Aboriginal Australians. The history says we settled here just over 200 years ago, and since then we created a new Australia, the Aboriginal one was left behind. We talk about ‘reconciliation’ with that old Australia, but we think it’s long gone. In reality the process was the other way around. That older Australia created us, it took that hybrid convict and British culture and shaped it like plasticine, into a hybrid that is much more strongly Aboriginal than it is British. And that process still has a long way to run, because as the landscape collapses, we‘re going to need to learn a helluva lot more from that old Australia, if we’re going to survive. It’s a little like we pretend Covid is over, just because we ignore it. It isn’t over, and we’ll need to respond to survive. It’s leading us, not the other way around. The same with Aboriginal Australia, people and landscape. We never left it behind, it’s still in the driving seat. We just don’t see it. It takes generations for these changes.