I think the greatest progress in knowledge comes from conceptual leaps, not from data or methodology. From…

I think the greatest progress in knowledge comes from conceptual leaps, not from data or methodology. From the framing. For Covid and now for the Voice, you see something entirely different if you use reality as the framing, rather than contest between human groups (teams). /1

For Covid, we continue to interpret what’s happening as a tug of war between public health and Covid minimisers. Teams. Reality pays no attention to any of that. For example the idea we can choose to have ‘lockdowns’, or not. But the spread of infection is a physical process. /2

You have to control it, or it controls you. We never got rid of lockdowns, we privatised them. We now ask individuals to do the isolation, to control spread, at their own expense. That’s the reality framing, the only one that will ever be real. Climate change the same. /3

What people and the teams/groups they align with think about it all will be irrelevant. The physical reality of climate change will determine the outcome, no matter what anybody thinks. And so to the Voice, for a very different reality-based conceptual framing. /4

Debates around the Voice, and around reconciliation and Indigenous politics in general, operate under a very common framing. That post-1788 Australia is the baseline, and we need to develop mechanisms to connect what’s left of pre-1788 Australia, into that baseline. /5

But Australia, the land and its people, is tens of thousands of years old. And you don’t have that unprecedented amount of time working a continent in history, without baking in a way of operating and thinking that 200 years of occupation can just shift. /6

What if that whole past 200-odd years was our European-based clumsy collision with that ancient operating system of people and land, with the latter shaping the former rather than the other way around, as is usually assumed? Even the famed Aussie accent bears almost zero…/7

…resemblance to any of the accents imported during the European occupation, but it sounds a LOT like Aboriginal English. Just one of so many ways that ancient Australia may have been shaping Europeans, rather than the other way around. And the land? /8

We have no idea what we’re doing. Most of the continent is classified as ‘outback’ or ‘bush’. We have to ‘hazard reduction burn’ much of it, because out own land is a ‘hazard’ to us. Imagine that. Our famous explorers often died ‘discovering’ an inland. /9 https://t.co/OFTq1kvKv2

An inland known intimately by First Australians for tens of thousands of years. We could have just asked them. Instead they often looked on bemused as people dehydrated and starved to death, with (in their eyes), plentiful food and water around them. And why did we explore? /10

Most Australians weren’t even looking to live anywhere inland. We tasted the inland, and rushed in fear back to the coasts, where we still huddle today. Meanwhile slaughtering First Australian inhabitants of that inland, and then leaving it empty and untended. /11

Where it now unsurprisingly then bursts into continent-sized fireballs. Reality-based framing. We arrogantly frame Australia in 2023 still with those European culture eyes. But the continent and its people have never paid any attention to that. The REALITY ignores it. /12

Stop and think that the entire history of what we call modern Australia is as a failed State. A desperate attempt to graft European culture onto far and away the world’s oldest land and culture, which just didn’t take. It’s failing in almost every way. /13

A collision of the (at the time) most advanced European culture, with the world most ancient culture, by tens of thousands of years. That had been shaping an entire continent. Why do we assume that collision is over? That it’s not us that is becoming more Aboriginal? /14

Rather than First Australians having to find a way to reconcile with European culture? That culture is failing, and has always failed in Australia. We don’t notice for the same reason we don’t notice Covid never ended. We focus only on the teams, and not the reality. /15

We have no idea how to ‘drive’ Australia, and as time goes on, that becomes more and more obvious. A continent and culture that evolved for aeons before times that the rest of the world even began to call ‘ancient’. It’s like one of those sci-fi movies where you find an…/16

…alien ship that’s incredibly advanced, that nobody knows how to do a thing with. Which button to press. Here at the relative bottom of the world, for tens of thousands of years before the pyramids, a civilisational experiment took place. An astonishing thing, a miracle. /17

No other culture has come within light years of the longevity. And we think just over 200 years of ham-fisted stumbling around in that ancient ship is the baseline for where to go next. We haven’t scratched the surface of our transformation into Aboriginal Australians. /18

But reality will keep being the arbiter. We won’t succeed on this continent until we understand it. And we may never understand it, at which point reality will caste us aside. /end

*cast Damn typos.