The Sydney Morning Herald
Letters: No wheel, but also no smallpox, guns or world wars
Date: 07/10/2000
Nathan Zamprogno (Letters, October 5) is correct. There is a place to
evaluate the merits of differing societies without fear of causing
offence.
True, Western society does not have a monopoly on causing suffering but
can be proud in that it has advanced methods of mass
suffering to levels that Aboriginal cultures could not have
contemplated.
Similarly, Aborigines had no monopoly on starvation, warfare and
superstitious fear. The West excelled in all these (but preferred to
call
the latter "religion").
The benefits of Western medicine came to Aboriginal people with the
curse of Western disease, the gift of representative democracy was
delayed until 179 years after settlement, and impartial justice had
little chance when administering laws written by a parliament
unrepresentative of Aboriginal people.
With or without written language, the Aborigines handed down to the
modern world legends and myths that predate the Greeks by
millennia.
Finally, true, the Aboriginal people did not develop the wheel, but
developed advanced hunting tools and systems that left their
contemporaries in the West in the dark. Without the systematic
agriculture of the West, Aborigines managed an environmentally
sustainable food supply - something the West still hasn't achieved.
But none of this is cause for offence.
Richard O'Neill, Wollstonecraft, October 5.
The reconciliatory cauldron has only just been extinguished. Your
commentators are already abroad with the same old furphy about
Cathy Freeman's lot failing to invent wheels.
Actually, the wheels have fallen off that argument. Scientific debate
has moved on, courtesy of American author Jared Diamond in his
book Guns, Germs and Steel. Diamond's argument is that the Fertile
Crescent, and later Europe, took an early lead in the medal count
for "civilisation" because they had direct access to "founder packages"
of domesticable plants and animals - the same plants and animals
that dominate the global food larder of today. The crop breakthroughs
and resultant production surpluses kick-started the development of
"germs, literacy, technology (including wheels) and centralised
government".
Domesticable plants and animals were scarcely to be found in the
prehistoric Australian environment. The Aborigines had to be gold
medallists in seafaring to get here, but upon their arrival the
Australian environment was such that the society they created was not a
"literate, food-producing industrial democracy".
Nobody is saying that Diamond has it all figured out, but it is an
important advance and ought to be required reading for parliamentarians.
Stephen Saunders, Dickson (ACT), October 6.
There is no need of a wheel if there is no cart and no need of a cart.
The mind boggles at the thought of tame kangaroos pulling a cart
laden with tree bark to build the next gunyah.
Likewise, systematic agriculture is difficult when there is no seed to
sow.
Instead of farming, the Aborigines had efficient food gathering
techniques. They developed practical social systems and laws which were
of more use to them than the wheel. Eskimos also failed to invent the
wheel for the same reasons.
Patricia Lupton, Monterey, October 5.
Philip Ruddock's latest contribution to the reconciliation process
leaves me dumbfounded.
Thankfully the following words, delivered by David Byrne of the Cape
York Land Council in 1997, spring to mind: "When Europeans
first came to the country, they came with the makings of a space-age
technology but with a stone-age mentality. The Aboriginal people
operated with a stone-age technology but had a very human-age or
spiritual mentality. It enabled Aboriginal people to show themselves to
have been more civilised than the Europeans who came here, because they
could see humanity in the people who had come, whereas the
people who had come could not recognise the humanity in the people who
were here.
The presumption of its superiority over Aboriginal people that
white culture brought to this country was not only misplaced but also
mistaken. Unfortunately it is a premise which has continued
through the consciousness of non-Aboriginal people, or
a large number of them, right to the present."
Philippa Jacks, Randwick, October 5.
Did anyone else get the delicious irony in Philip Ruddock's statement
about Aboriginal lack of technology and the current state of funding
for scientific research and development?
Jonathon Wallen, Stanmore, October 5.
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