Indigenous Australia Paper 1
Choose one question from the list below, and write a 4-5-page double space paper. Focus your answers on two to three central issues raised by the prompt, and reference the readings with appropriate citations. You need to support your arguments with reference to specific materials in the readings or lectures. Please identify your choice of question/prompt (1-4) in your heading, along with your recitation section number and your name.
Cultures and Contexts: Indigenous Australia
Fall 2020
CORE-UA-0536
Professor Myers
Essay Topics First Paper, Due Monday Oct. 5
Choose one question from the list below, and write a 4-5-page double space paper. Focus your answers on two to three central issues raised by the prompt, and reference the readings with appropriate citations. You need to support your arguments with reference to specific materials in the readings or lectures. Please identify your choice of question/prompt (1-4) in your heading, along with your recitation section number and your name.
Your papers should be submitted electronically to your recitation section NYU Classes by 10 a.m. on Monday, October 5.
1. The very early explorer to Australia, William Dampier, described Aboriginal people as the miserablest people on earth a description to which Capt. James Cook seems to be responding in the excerpt from his journal. Others have imagined Indigenous life to be what the English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes described for pre-state societies as a war of all against all. Based on the readings (Stanner, Rose, Myers) and the films They Have Come to Stay, Babakiueria), how do you respond to such representations? How have Aboriginal people responded, Were their lives a war of all against all? If not, why not? Be specific about the institutions, customs and beliefs that relate to these representations.
2. Anthropologists (and theologians) have shown that cultures provide people with basic orientations to the world, with ways of defining their lives and their positions in the universe. We have read several anthropologists and others who wrote about the basic concepts of an Aboriginal world-view. In your essays please compare and contrast the way in which Stanner and Myers discuss “The Dreaming.” Consider the following:
How do they present this fundamental concept and its relationship to human life?
What existential questions does it answer?
What are the daily realities of the Dreaming?
How do the authors representations of this institution speak to Western perception of Aboriginal people and their culture?
3. T.G.H. Strehlow once described the traditional system of the Arrernte people and their totemic geography as a land-based form of religion. This suggests that The Dreaming is more than a philosophy of life and has an important practical dimension. Discuss this proposition with respect to the materials you have read for this class, especially about The Dreaming, place, and kinship. In which writings is there evidence for such a proposition, what is that evidence, and how, then, can one understand the significance of The Dreaming?
4. Many outside observers have insisted that Aboriginal people especially those who are involved with the classical traditions of Indigenous culture — are incapable of living with change or of engaging with change. On the basis of the readings (Stanner, Myers, Rose, Bell) and films (Remembering Yayayi), what positions do there seem to be about this question? What implications do the conceptions involved in The Dreaming have for Aboriginal peoples responses to change? Working with specific examples, consider:
How do the readings present change in Indigenous Australians lives?
How do you understand the relationship between Aboriginal conceptions of The Dreaming and ideas of history as a way of understanding time and change? r U , ( 4
The Dreaming (1953)
I
The Australian Aborigines outlook on the universe and man is shaped
by a remarkable conception, which Spencer and Gillen immortalised
as the dream time or alcheringa of the Arunta or Aranda tribe.
Comparable terms from other tribes are often almost untranslatable,
or mean literally something like men of old. Some anthropologists
have called it the Eternal Dream Time. I prefer to call it what many
Aborigines call it in English; The Dreaming, or just, Dreaming.
A central meaning of The Dreaming is that of a sacred, heroic time
long ago when man and nature came to be as they are; but neither time
nor history as we understand them is involved in this meaning. I have
never been able to discover any Aboriginal word for time as an abstract
concept. And the sense of history* is wholly alien here. W e shall not
understand The Dreaming fully except as a complex of meanings. A
blackfellow may call his totem, or the place from which his spirit came,
his Dreaming. H e may also explain the existence of a custom, or law
of life, as causally due to The Dreaming.
A concept so impalpable and subtle naturally suffers badly by
translation into our dry and abstract language. T he blacks sense this
difficulty. I can recall one intelligent old man who said to me, with a
cadence almost as though he had been speaking verse:
25
WHITE MAN
GOT NO
DREAMING
Essays 1938-1973
W. E. H. STANNER
Australian National University Press
White Man got no Dreaming
W hite man got no dreaming,
Him go nother way.
W hite man, him go different.
Him got road belong himself.
Although, as I have said, T he Dreaming conjures up the notion of
a sacred, heroic time of the indefinitely remote past, such a time is also,
in a sense, still part of the present. One cannot fix The Dreaming in
time: it was, and is, everywhen. We should be very wrong to try to read
into it the idea of a Golden Age, or a Garden of Eden, though it was
an A ge of Heroes, when the ancestors did marvellous things that men
can no longer do. T he blacks are not at all insensitive to Mary Webb’s
wistfulness that is the past”, but they do not, in aversion from present
or future, look back on it with yearning and nostalgia. Yet it has for
them an unchallengeably sacred authority.
Clearly, T he Dreaming is many things in one. Among them, a kind
of narrative of things that once happened; a kind of charter of things
that still happen; and a kind of logos or principle of order transcending
everything significant for Aboriginal man. If I am correct in saying so,
it is much more complex philosophically than we have so far realised.
I greatly hope that artists and men of letters who (it seems increasingly)
find inspiration in Aboriginal Australia will use all their gifts of
empathy, but avoid banal projection and subjectivism, if they seek to
honour the notion.
Why the blackfellow thinks of dreaming as the nearest equivalent
in English is a puzzle. It may be because it is by the act of dreaming,
as reality and symbol, that the Aboriginal mind makes contactthinks
it makes contactwith whatever mystery it is that connects The
Dreaming and the Here-and-Now.
II
H ow shall one deal with so subtle a conception? One has two options:
educe its subjective logic and rationale from the elements which the
blackfellow stumblingly offers in trying to give an explanation; or relate
the objective figure it traces on their social life to things familiar in our
own intellectual history. There are dangers in both courses.
T he first is a m atter of learning to think black, not imposing
24
The Dreaming (1953)
Western categories of understanding, but seeking to conceive of things
as the blackfellow himself does.
In our modern understanding, we tend to see mind and body,
body’ and spirit, spirit and personality, personality and ‘name’ as
in some sense separate, even opposed, entities though we manage to
connect them up in some fashion into the unity or oneness of person
or individual. The blackfellow does not seem to think this way. The
distinctiveness we give to mind, spirit and body, and our contrast
of body versus spirit are not there, and the whole notion of the person
is enlarged. T o a blackfellow, a mans name, spirit, and shadow are him
in a sense which to us may seem passing strange. One should not ask
a blackfellow: What is your name? T o do so embarrasses and shames
him. The name is like an intimate part of the body, with which another
person does not take liberties. The blacks do not mind talking about
a dead person in an oblique way; but, for along time, they are extremely
reluctant even to breathe his name. In the same way, to threaten a mans
shadow is to threaten him. N or may one threaten lightly the physical
place from which his spirit came. By extension, his totem, which is also
associated with that place, and with his spirit, should not be lightly
treated.
In such a context one has not succeeded in thinking black until ones
mind can, without intellectual struggle, enfold into some kind of
oneness the notions of body, spirit, ghost, shadow, name, spirit-site,
and totem. T o say so may seem a contradiction, or suggest a paradox,
for the blackfellow can and does, on some occasions, conceptually
isolate the elements of the unity most distinctly. But his abstractions
do not put him at war with himself. The separable elements I have
mentioned are all present in the metaphysical heart of the idea of
person, but the overruling mood is one of belief, not of inquiry or
dissent. So long as the belief in The Dreaming lasts, there can be no
momentary flash of Athenian questioning’ to grow into a great
movement of sceptical unbelief which destroys the given unities.
There are many other such onenesses which I believe I could
substantiate. A blackfellow may see as a unity’ two persons, such as
two siblings or a grandparent and grandchild; or a living man and
something inanimate, as when he tells you that, say, the wollybutt tree,
a totem, is his wifes brother. (This is not quite as strange as it may seem.
Even modern psychologists tend to include part of environment in a
definition of ‘person’ or personality.) T here is also some kind of unity
25
/ ‘ *
Pandak, rij, as an old man. H e is a member of the D im tn in elan, and painted
the picture on which the endpapers are based as a g if t to the author, who has been a close
friend for over forty years.
The painting is an attempt by Pandak to depict all the world*, the totality of things
in the cosmos. It is a work of high imagination.
T he symbolism of the painting is somewhat obscure, and draws upon a mythology too
tenuous for a clear account. B ut it depicts five strata or bands of reality. The topmost
stratum is that of the four suns, which move clockwise. The first-appearing sun (or the
sun in its first ascension Stanner could not determine which) is both female and ophitic,
the second and third suns are male, but the fourth is again female, surrounded by clouds.
The suns are depicted as nearer the earth than the remote stars, which again are female
(and unmarried). The second stratum is that of the M ilky W ay, the third that of the
moon (shown as a cluster of forms between new* and fu ll) , the planets, and the morning
star. T he planets are male, the morning star female, w ith children. The fourth stratum
is th a t of the earth itself, which is depicted as a steady platform of earth and trees and
places near and far, with a fa in t hint of perspective. The fifth stratum is the within’
or the underneath of the earth, through which great (male) stars pass nightly. Each
segment of the earth is depicted as a d is t in c t icountry
.
P a m h i as a young man w ith his w ift L itttha
between waking-life and dream-life: the means by which, in Aboriginal
understanding, a man fathers a child, is not by sexual intercourse, but
by the act of dreaming about a spirit-child. His own spirit, during a
dream, ‘finds* a child and directs it to his wife, who then conceives.
Physical congress between a man and a woman is contingent, not a
necessary prerequisite. Through the medium of dream-contact with
a spirit an artist is inspired to produce a new song. It is by dreaming
that a man divines the intention of someone to kill him by sorcery, or
of relatives to visit him. And, as I have suggested, it is by the act of
dreaming, in some way difficult for a European to grasp, because of the
force of our analytic abstraction, that a blackfellow conceives himself
to make touch with whatever it is that is continuous between The
Dreaming and the Here-and-Now.
The truth of it seems to be that man, society and nature, and past,
present and future, are at one together within a unitary system of such
a kind that its ontology cannot illumine minds too much under the
influence of humanism, rationalism and science. One cannot easily, in
the mobility of modern life and thought, grasp the vast intuitions of
27
White Man gat no Dreaming
stability and permanence, and of life and man, at the heart of Aboriginal
ontology.
It is fatally easy for Europeans, encountering such things for the first
time, to go on to suppose that mysticism of this kind rules all
Aboriginal thought. It is not so. Logicalthought and rational conduct
are about as widely present in Aboriginal life as they are on the simpler
levels of European life. Once one understands three thingsthe
primary intuitions which the blackfellow has formed about the nature
of the universe and man, those things in both which he thinks
interesting and significant, and the conceptual system from within
which he reasons about them, then the suppositions about prelogic-
alky, illogicality, and non-rationality can be seen to be merely absurd.
A nd if one wishes to see a really brilliant demonstration of deductive
thought, one has only to see a blackfellow tracking a wounded
kangaroo, and persuade him to say why he interprets given signs in a
certain way.
T h e second means of dealing with the notion of T he Dreaming K
as I said, to try to relate it to things familiar in our own intellects.!
history. From this viewpoint, it is a cosmogony, an account of the
begetting of the universe, a study about creation. It is also a cosmology,
an account or theory of how what was created became an ordered
system. T o be more precise, how the universe became a moral system.
II one analyses the hundreds of tales about The Dreaming, one can
see within them three elements. The first concerns the great awr-
vehhow all the fire and water in the world were stolen and recaptured ;
how men made a mistake over sorcery and now have to die from it; how
the hills, rivers, and waterholes were made; how the sun, moon, and
stars were set upon their courses; and many other dramas of this kind.
T h e second element tells how certain things were instituted for the first
timehow animals and men diverged from a joint stock that was
neither one nor the other; how the blacknosed kangaroo got his black
nose and the porcupine his quills; how such social divisions as tribes,
clans, and language groups were set up; how spirit-children were first
placed in the waterholes, the winds, and leaves of trees. A third
elem ent, if I am not mistaken, allows one to suppose that many of the
main institutions of present-day life were already ruling in The
Dream ing, e.g. marriage, exogamy, sister-exchange, and initiation, as
well as many of the well-known breaches of custom. The men of The
Dreaming committed adultery, betrayed and killed each other, were
28
The Dreaming (1953)
greedy, stole and committed the very wrongs committed by those now
alive.
Now, if one disregards the imagery in which the oral literature of
The Dreaming is cast, one may perhaps come to three conclusions.
The tales are a kind of commentary, or statement, on what is thought
to be permanent and ordained at the very basis of the world and life.
They are a way of stating the principle which animates things. I would
call them a poetic key to Reality. T he Aboriginal does not ask himself
the philosophical-type questions: What is real? How many kinds of
reality are there? What are the properties of reality? How are the
properties interconnected? This is the idiom of Western intellectual
discourse and the fruit of a certain social history. His tales are, however,
a kind of answer to such questions so far as they have been asked at all.
They may not be a definition, but they are a key to reality, a key to
the singleness and the plurality of things set up once-for-all when, in
The Dreaming, the universe became mans universe. The active
philosophy of Aboriginal life transforms this key, which is expressed
in the idiom of poetry, drama, and symbolism, into a principle that The
Dreaming determines not only what life is but also what it can he. Life,
so to speak, is a one-possibility thing, and what this is, is the meaning
of The Dreaming.
The tales are also a collation of what is validly known about such
ordained permanencies. T he blacks cite The Dreaming as a chapter of
absolute validity in answer to all questions of why and haw. In this sense,
the tales can be regarded as being, perhaps not a definition, but a key
of Truth. ‘
They also state, by their constant recitation of what was done rightly
and wrongly in The Dreaming, the ways in which good men should,
and bad men will, act now. In this sense, they are a key or guide to
the norms of conduct, and a prediction of how men will err.
One may thus say that, after a fashiona cryptic, symbolic, and
poetic fashionthe tales are a philosophy in the garb of an oral
literature. T he European has a philosophic literature which expresses
a largely deductive understanding of reality, truth, goodness, and
beauty. The blackfellow has a mythology, a ritual, and an art which
express an intuitive, visionary, and poetic understanding of the same
ultimates. In following out The Dreaming, the blackfellow lives* this
philosophy. It is an implicit philosophy, but nevertheless a real one.
Whereas we hold (and may live) a philosophy of abstract propositions,
White Man got no Dreaming
attained by someone standing professionally outside life’ and treating
it as an object of contemplation and inquiry, the blackfellow holds his
philosophy in mythology, attained as the social product of an indefi
nitely ancient past, and proceeds to live it out in’ life, in part through
a ritual and an expressive art, and in part through non-sacred social
customs.
European minds are made uneasy by the facts that the stories are,
quite plainly, preposterous; are often a mass of internal contradictions;
are encrusted by superstitious fancies about magic, sorcery, hobgob
lins, and superhuman heroes; and lack the kind of theme and struc
tu rein other words, the story elementfor which we look. Many
of us cannot help feeling that such things can only be the products of
absurdly ignorant credulity and a lower order of mentality. This is to
fall victim to a facile fallacy. O ur own intellectual history is not an
absolute standard by which to judge others. T he worst imperialisms
are those of preconception.
Custom is the reality, beliefs but the shadows which custom makes
on the wall. Since the tales, in any case, are not really explanatory in
purpose or function, they naturally lack logic, system and complete
ness. It is simply pointless to look for such things within them. But we
are not entitled to suppose that, because the tales are fantastical, the
social life producting them is itself fantastical. T he shape of reality is
always distorted in the shadows it throws. O ne finds much logic, system
and rationality in the blacks’ actual scheme of life.
T hese tales are neither simply illustrative nor simply explanatory;
they are fanciful and poetic in content because they are based on
visionary and intuitive insights into mysteries; and, if we are ever to
understand them, we must always take them in their complex concent.
If, then, they make more sense to the poet, the artist, and the
philosopher than to the clinicians of human life, let us reflect on the
withering effect on sensibility of our pervasive rationalism, rather than
depreciate the gifts which produced the Aboriginal imaginings. And
in no case should we expect the tales, prima facie, to be even interesting
if studied out of context. Aboriginal mythology is quite unlike the
Scandinavian, Indian, or Polynesian mythologies.
JO
The Dreaming (1953)
I I I
In my own understanding, T he Dreaming is a proof that the black
fellow shares with us two abilities which have largely made human
history what it is.
The first of these we might call ‘the metaphysical gift’. I mean the
ability to transcend oneself, to make acts of imagination so that one can
stand outside or ‘away from oneself, and turn the universe, oneself
and one’s fellows into objects of contemplation. T he second ability is
a drive’ to try to make sense’ out of human experience and to find some
principle in the whole human situation. This ‘drive’ is, in some way,
built into the constitution of the human mind. N o one who has real
knowledge of Aboriginal life can have any doubt that they possess, and
use, both abilities very much as we do. They differ from us only in the
directions in which they turn their gifts, the idiom in which they express
them, and the principles of intellectual control.
T he Aborigines have no gods, just or unjust, to adjudicate the world.
N ot even by straining can one see in such culture-heroes as Baiame
and Darumulum the true hint of a Yahveh, jealous, omniscient, and
omnipotent. T he ethical insights are dim and somewhat coarse in
texture. One can find in them little trace, say, of the inverted pride, the
self-scrutiny, and the consciousness of favour and destiny which
characterised the early Jews. A glimpse, but no truly poignant sense,
of moral dualism; no notion of grace or redemption; no whisper of
inner peace and reconcilement; no problems of worldly life to be solved
only by a consummation of history; no heaven of reward or hell of
punishment. T he blackfellow’s after-life is but a shadowy replica of
worldly-life, so none flee to inner sanctuary to escape the world. T here
are no prophets, saints, or illuminati. There is a concept of goodness,
but it lacks true scruple. Men can become ritually unclean, but may be
cleansed by a simple mechanism. T here is a moral law but, as in the
beginning, men are both good and bad, and no one is racked by the
knowledge. I imagine there could never have been an Aboriginal
Ezekiel, any more than there could have been a Job. T he two sets of
insights cannot easily be compared, but it is plain that their underlying
moods are wholly unlike, and their store of meaningfulness very
uneven. In the one there seem an almost endless possibility of growth,
and a mood of censoriousness and pessimism. In the other, a kind of
standstill, and a mood which is neither tragic nor optimistic. T he
White Man got no Dreaming
Aborigines are not shamed or inspired by a religious thesis of what men
m ight become by faith and grace. Their metaphysic assents, without
brooding or challenge, to what men evidently have to be because the
term s of life are cast. Yet they have a kind of religiosity cryptically
displayed in their magical awareness of nature, in their complex
totemism, ritual and art, and pechaps too even in their intricately
ordered life.
T hey are, of course, nomadshunters and foragers who grow
nothing, build little, and stay nowhere long. They make almost no
physical mark on the environment. Even in areas which are still
inhabited, it takes a knowledgeable eye to detect their recent presence.
W ithin a m atter of weeks, the roughly cleared camp-sites may be erased
by sun, rain and wind. After a year or two there may be nothing to
suggest that the country was ever inhabited. Until one stumbles on a
few old flint-tools, a stone quarry, a shell-midden, a rock painting, or
something of the kind, one may think the land had never known the
touch of man.
They neither dominate their environment nor seek to change it.
Children of nature they are not, nor are they natures masters’. One
can only say they are at one with nature. T he whole ecological
principle of their life m ight be summed up in the Baconian aphor
ism natura non vincitur nisi parendo: nature is not to be conquered
except by obeying’. Naturally, one finds metaphysical and social
reflections of the fact.
They move about, carrying their scant possessions, in small bands
of anything from ten to sixty persons. Each band belongs to a given
locality. A number of bandsanything from three to four up to twelve
o r fifteen, depending on the fertility of the areamake up a tribe. A
tribe is usually a language or dialect group which thinks of itself as
having a certain unity of common speech and shared customs. The
tribes range in size from a few hundred to a few thousands souls.
O ne rarely sees a tribe as a formed entity. It comes together and lives
as a unit only for a great occasiona feast, a corroboree, a hunt, an
initiation, or a formal duel. After a few daysat the most weeksit
breaks up again into smaller bands or sections of bands: most com
monly into a group of brothers, with their wives, children, and
grandchildren, and perhaps a few close relatives. These parties rove
about their family locality or, by agreement, the territories of imme
diate neighbours. They do not wander aimlessly, but to a purpose, and
32
The Dreaming (1953)
in tune with the seasonal food supply. O ne can almost plot a year of
their life in terms of movement towards the places where honey, yams,
grass-seeds, eggs, or some other food staple, is in bearing and ready
for eating.
T he uncomplex visible routine, and the simple segmentation, are
very deceptive. It took well over half a century for Europeans to realise
that, behind the outward show, was an inward structure of surprising
complexity. It was a century before any real understanding of this
structure developed.
In one tribe with which I am familiar, a very representative tribe,
there are about 100 invisible divisions which have to be analysed
before one can claim even a serviceable understanding of the tribes
organisation. T he structure is much more complex than that of an
Australian village of the same size. T he complexity is in the most
striking contrast with the comparative simplicity which rules in the two
other departments of Aboriginal lifethe material culture, on the one
hand, and the ideational or metaphysical culture on the other. W e have,
I think, to try to account for this contrast in some way.
T heir creative drive to make sense and order out of things has
concentrated on the social rather than on the metaphysical or the
materials side. Consequently, there has been an unusually rich deve
lopment of what the anthropologist calls social structure, the network
of enduring relations recognised between people. This very intricate
system is an intellectual and social achievement of a high order. It is
not, like an instinctual response, a phenom enon of nature; it is not,
like art or ritual, a complex type of behaviour passionately added to
nature, in keeping with metaphysical insight but without rational and
intelligible purposes which can be clearly stated; it has to be compared,
I think, with such a secular achievement as, say, parliamentary
government in a European society. It is truly positive knowledge.
One may see within it three things: given customs, ‘of which the
memory of man runneth not to the contrary; a vast body of cumulative
knowledge about the effects of these customs on a society in given
circumstances; and the use of the power of abstract reason to rationalise
the resultant relations into a system.
But it is something much more; their social organisation has become
the source of the dominant mode of Aboriginal thinking. T he blacks use social
organisation to give a bony structure to parts of the world-outlook
suggested by intuitive speculation. I mean by this that they have taken
White Man got no Dreaming
som e of its fundamental principles and relations and have applied them
to very much wider sets of phenomena. This tends to happen if any type
of system of thought becomes truly dominant. It is, broadly, what
Europeans did with ‘religion’ and ‘science’ as systems: extended their
principles and categories to fields far beyond the contexts in which the
systems grew.
T hus, the blacks have taken the male-female social principle and
have extended it to the non-human world. In one tribe I have studied,
all women, without exception, call particular birds or trees by the same
kinship terms which they apply to actual relatives. In the same way, all
me n without exception use comparable terms for a different set of trees
or birds. From this results what the anthropologist calls ‘sex totemism’.
T h e use of other principles results in other types of totemism. An
understanding of this simple fact removes much of the social, if not the
ritual, mystery of totemism. Again, the principle of relatedness itself,
relatedness between known people by known descent through known
marriages, is extended over the whole face of human society. The same
term s of kinship which are used for close agnatic and affinal relatives
are used for every other person an Aboriginal meets in the course of
his life: strangers, friends, enemies, and known kin may all be called
by the same terms as one uses for brother, father, mother’s sister,
father’s m other’s brother, and so on. This is what an anthropologist
means when he says ‘Aboriginal society is a society of kinship’.
I t might even be argued that the blacks have done much the same
thing with ‘time’. T im e as a continuum is a concept only hazily present
in the Aboriginal mind. What might be called social time is, in a sense,
‘bent’ into cycles or circles. The most controlled understanding of it
is by reckoning in terms of generation-classes, which are arranged into
named and recurring cycles. As far as the blackfellow thinks about time
at all, his interest lies in the cycles rather than in the continuum, and
each cycle is in essence a principle for dealing with social
inter-relatedness.
IV
O ut of all this may come for some an understanding of the blackfellow
very different from that which has passed into the ignorance and
vulgarity of popular opinion.
The Dreaming (1953)
One may see that, like all men, he is a metaphysician in being able
to transcend himself. With the metaphysic goes a mood and spirit,
which I can only call a mood and spirit of ‘assent’; neither despair nor
resignation, optimism nor pessimism, quietism nor indifference. T he
mood, and the outlook beneath it, make him hopelessly out of place
in a world in which the Renaissance has triumphed only to be
perverted, and in which the products of secular humanism, rationalism,
and science challenge their own hopes, indeed, their beginnings.
Much association with the blackfellow makes me feel I may not be
far wrong in saying that, unlike us, he seems to see ‘life’ as a
one-possibility thing. This may be why he seems to have almost no
sense of tragedy. If ‘tragedy is a looking at fate for a lesson in
deportment on life’s scaffold’, the Aboriginal seems to me to have read
the lesson and to have written it into the very conception of how men
should live, or else to have stopped short of the insight that there are
gods either just or unjust. N or have 1 found in him much self-pity.
These sentiments can develop only if life presents real alternatives, or
if it denies an alternative that one feels should be there. A philosophy
of assent fits only a life of unvarying constancy. I do not at all say that
pain, sorrow, and sadness have no place in Aboriginal life, for I have
seen them all too widely. All I mean is that the blacks seem to have gone
beyond, or not quite attained, the human quarrel with such things.
Their rituals of sorrow, their fortitude in pain, and their undemon
strative sadness seem to imply a reconciliation with the terms of life
such that ‘peace is the understanding of tragedy and at the same time
its preservation, or else that they have not sensed life as baffled by
either fate or wisdom.
Like all men, he is also a philosopher in being able to use his power
of abstract reason. His genius, his mitier, andin some sensehis fate,
is that because of endowment and circumstance this power
