Roman cities are instantly recognisable. What isn’t is that they’re the blatant plagiarising homage the…

Roman cities are instantly recognisable. What isn’t is that they’re the blatant plagiarising homage the Romans paid to the Greeks, whom they invaded and sacked. The Romans wanted to be Greeks, the Roman empire like all empires first looted and sacked, and then hybridised. /1 https://t.co/USxw2ktUIl

Germaine Greer did a brilliantly Quarterly Essay on reconciliation that recognised this historical behaviour. How we emulate perceived golden ages or cultures. Humans copy. It’s everything they do. /2

Greer argued that instead of seeing reconciliation as a recognition of two parallel cultures, we should look instead to the ways our ‘modern’ Australian culture is already a hybrid of settler and Aboriginal culture. How what we pride ourselves on as ‘Australian’ is hybrid. /3

It’s well known that Aboriginal Australian culture is literally orders of magnitude older than any other culture in human history. And unlike other cultures or civilisations, it’s co-existent with the present day. We’re living inside humanity’s most precious opportunity. /4

People marvel over archaeology and history programs giving glimpses into ancient lives. But those lives never went away here, in Australia. And they’re far, far more ancient than the cultures whose docos we’re transfixed by. /5

I suspect reconciliation never progresses in Australia because the framing of it is wrong. It assumes either a ‘these people were hunter gathering primitives’ narrative, or we invest the culture with a paternalistic numinosity that prevents us understanding it. /6

From understanding how much modern Australian culture is deeply hybrid already. Empires always ignore this, the profound shift in their own culture by their plundering of another. We always forget we’re social beings first and foremost. /end