Coming up next...the Aboriginals

I just realized that it has been a week since we last updated this. We have been studying Australia's geography as we laid out in this entry. The topographical map is interesting. We had a harder time finding a map to copy from than I had anticipated, but finally settled for merging two maps we had found in books. She colored the Great Dividing Range brown (because they were mountains), colored in a couple of lakes, traced out the few major rivers, colored the rainforests green and most of Australia yellow since it is semi-arid.

Suddenly, it became obvious to my daughter just why most of the population is concentrated along the East Coast of Australia.

I have started looking to next week's focus which will be the Aboriginal people of Australia. I am having a difficult time determining just how I want to approach the topic. Just like in our own history, there are some difficult themes coming up. The main text I'm using at the moment is Among Cannibals by Carl Lumholz who spent four years among the Aboriginals in Queensland and wrote about his experiences back in 1889.

I won't be using this directly with my daughter, or if so only certain passages. There is significant author bias that she would need to be able to discern before I would give her a text like this. He makes several comments which are somewhat racist and I do not wish my daughter to determine that groups of people are of less value because of the color of their skin or other such determinations. At the same time, I believe this is the book I read which gives credence to the general philosophy that all cultures are equal.

That is a difficult and somewhat charged discussion to try to get into, and not really something I'm going to get into with an eight year old. Suffice it say that I do not think that the marriage customs of the aboriginals are "equal" to our own:

Near Herbert Vale I had the good fortune to be able to witness a marriage among the blacks. A camp of natives was just at the point of breaking up, when an old man suddenly approached a woman, seized her by the wrist of her left hand and shouted, Yongul ngipa!--that is, This one belongs to me (literally "one I"). She resisted with feet and hands, and cried, but he dragged her off, though she made resistance during the whole time and cried at the top of her voice. For a mile away we could hear her shrieks.

Nor am I about to condone cannibalism.

We are going to look at this in the light of scripture. I haven't read as much on how the aboriginals were treated by the British, but I know it wasn't pleasant. I viewed a re-enactment on a video in a museum in Melbourne that sickened me. Not even so much for what was done back in the 1800s but for what was done in the name of memorializing the event in the 20th century. This should provide a very nice opportunity to take a closer look at how the seeds of local self-government are planted. The British were somewhat appalled by what they saw in the Aboriginals and attempted to "civilize" them...or they would kill them.

Christianity, on the other hand, teaches that change comes from within. I am hoping to find at least some examples of missions evangelizing in this manner, but I'm guessing it will look much like our own history with a mixture of motives behind many of them. Christianity was widely accepted by the native people of Australia, and today approximately two thirds consider themselves Christians. I think this continues to be a relevant issue in Australia today as there has historically been a debate about how to best support Aboriginals (through assimilation or through supporting their native cultures on the various lands, I'm guessing something like our reservations). Of course, religion isn't a part of this debate, but how do you "assimilate" a culture?

These are some interesting topics to explore with older children, perhaps, but we will be taking a look at some of them, scaled down to the understanding of an eight year old.

Note: There is some debate about the term "Aboriginal." I'm not exactly one for political correctness, but I'm also not one for offending groups of people. It is a British term which was applied to the native peoples of Australia, New Zealand and New Guinea. There are a number of terms which the Aboriginal themselves prefer, many of them providing a sense of identity with their own unique communities.

Related Tags: homeschooling, Australia, Aborigine