25 June

I saw a candidate for election say this. "[Aborigines] were not an advanced civilisation and DEFINITELY would have had to have some form of colonisation by someone in the 18th century." I think many Australians probably even agree with it. As somebody highly trained in advanced science and technology, I think we use modern fancy gadgets as some sort of evidence of us being more advanced. But I can tell you, from inside the tent, that's not true. It takes a much more advanced knowledge to manage a civilisation in a landscape for tens of thousands of years. So much more advanced that we don't have a clue where to start. In 250 years of our 'advanced' civilisation, the landscape is in ruins. It won't sustain us for even 500 years. Let alone tens of thousands. It doesn't matter if you have planes and cars and computers and whatever else, if you can't sustain yourself, as a civilisation. All great empires forgot this, it's why they no longer exist. A single species is infinitely more complex than anything we've ever built, and we're destroying species at a frightening pace. We're living inside the world's greatest mystery. How Aborigines managed to sustain a civilisation for tens of thousands of years. No other culture is even within light years of that record. We're too vain and stupid to understand this.