QUERY: Cannibalism and Human Rights
Author: Trevor Daly <tdaly@MAIL.USYD.EDU.AU>
Date: Thu, 8 May 1997 16:49:39 +1000
Subject: REPLY: Cannibalism and Human Rights (WAS: Who wrote Pauline's History?)
Regarding the discussion about the claim by Pauline Hanson et. al. about cannibalism. So what if the Aborigines were cannibals? It's irrelevant to the Wik debate. It's well known that in pre-European times some Pacific Islanders (e.g. in Fiji, Solomon Islands etc.) practised cannibalism. No oneis claiming that because of this their descendants are now not entitled to their land.
The whole cannibalism issue is being deliberately used to stir up emotionalism and thereby divert attention away from the real issues involved - the validity of native title and Aboriginal rights to land. It seems many on this list are falling for this distracting tactic. Can we give the cannibalism garbage a rest?
Trevor Daly
c/ Department of History, University of Sydney
QUERY: Cannibalism and Human Rights
Author: joe@RMIT.EDU.AU
Date: Thu, 8 May 1997 18:37:48 +1000
Subject: QUERY: Cannibalism and Human Rights (WAS: Who wrote Pauline's history?)
I was under the impression that Aboriginal cannibalism was invoked by the Hansenites as a weapon with which to attack those straw persons who urge that Aborigines should be granted land rights as an act of repentance for the crimes committed against them by the ancestors of Australia's current ruling class. I thought that what Pauline's ghost writers were saying is that if we have thus inherited the guilt of our great grandparents, then today's Aborigines should be required to expiate similarly the cannibalism of theirs. I am not able to check this impression because I am not prepared to make a financial contribution to One Nation by purchasing its publications. Have I got it wrong?
It is, of course, a silly argument because, as Henry Reynolds points out, while guilt is not inherited, property is. If I steal your purse and then die, passing it on to my son, your daughter would (I presume) still have a legal claim to it when the police finally track it down, even if my son could not be charged with theft.
Joe Rich
Communication Studies Department
RMIT
REPLY: Cannibalism and Human Rights
Author: David Cameron <David.Cameron@MAILBOX.UQ.EDU.AU>
Date: Fri, 9 May 1997 19:52:04 +1000
Joe Rich asked about the issue of inherited guilt. I think he is right. This is exactly what Pauline Hanson and her backers are saying.
However, as has been mentioned here before, they are saying much more. They are pushing the old message that they are just savages who don't deserve to own anything and they should feel themselves lucky it was British civilisation that was bestowed upon them and not the uncivilised barbarity of the Asian hordes (or words to that effect). The implication of this thesis being that if the latter had ruled then Aboriginal genocide would have been total. Unfortunately there are plenty of good honest folk out there in the city, suburbs and the bush who feel a whole lot better about themselves when they can blame someone else for the perceived injustices heaped upon them by the machinations of the global economy. Which they all know is totally the fault of the bludgers and the blacks!
Just one more point on the cannabalism issue. I have been asked by many friends and family if it was true that Aborigines practiced cannabalism. I was quite confident in debunking the 'One Nation - Truth' myth that they ate their babies. However, not being an expert on our indigenous history I looked about for reliable secondary sources from which I might be able to assess the value of the primary sources from which perspectives on cannabalism are drawn. I'm still not sure about the evidence but I have told those who ask that it was probable that some canabalism (ritual and subsistence) occured but in a very limited way and probably restricted to Far North Queensland. One of the strongest sources was Eric Rolls', Sojourners (Brisbane: UQP, 1993 - paper back edit, see pp. 194, 196, 198, 205, 217) in which he is quite certain of cannabalism in NQ. Still I don't know enough about the sources he has used to agree with or refute his conclusions (Rolls has not used direct citations but lists the sources used for each chapter). I'd like to hear comments on this and the relative value or otherwise of the 'cannabalism' sources. Also can there be, or should there be, any consensus on this issue?
David Cameron
University of Queensland
David.Cameron@mailbox.uq.edu.au
REPLY: Cannibalism and Human Rights
Author: Jim Duffield <staffy@OMEN.NET.AU>
Date: Sun, 11 May 1997 14:43:56 +1000
The discussion of cannibalism and Aborgines has prompted me to resurrect Daisy Bates. She indexes 13 references to cannibalism over 19 pages in her _The passing of the Aborigines_ yet I do note that all references appear secondary.
Meggitt in _Desert People_ has three references and these mentions are circumstantial allegations made by one language group about another. The concept of the other was apparently alive and well amongst the groups he described in the 1950s. The stories related to and examined by him are analysed in an anthropological and scholarly manner and appear to have be related to him as a "target" to reinforce self and the home group. The "don't go over there, in their country they eat babies or old people's kidney fat" scare story to keep the young within dreaming country bounds until initiated into higher degrees of behaviour and knowledge. An interim intellectual boundary fence if you will, like Hansel & Gretel was used perhaps initially used to keep people out of the unknown and thus avoid (unnecessary) conflict, the European forest.
All that aside, the allegations by the Hansonesque putsch are at best a crude tool to deprecate the "other" in the same manner that Meggitt described in the 1950s between Territory mobs for their children. It worked for the uneducated in Europe and the NT, why not for the children that follow Hanson? It's that 'not so simple' eurocentrism that has seen Europe the home of too many wars over millennia, they were/are very good at it as a tool of population and wealth control/redistribution, just like the conversion of leasehold to freehold. Something that even William the Bastard was not wont wont to do in his papal invasion of Britain in 1066 may be achieved here, Magna Carta or no. So much for "British" law, whatever that means.
Regards,
Jim Duffield
P.S. I've just started using Netscape 4 Mailer, and it has a spelling checker, and I just love it when it comes across the the word "Hanson" because I have two options; "Ignore" or "Learn." Appropriate in either case.
REPLY: Cannibalism and Human Rights
Author: Richard Davis <Richard.Davis@HISTORY.UTAS.EDU.AU>
Date: Sun, 11 May 1997 14:44:01 +1000
The cannibal account may perhaps be traced to Henry Mayhew, _London Labour and the London Poor_, Vol. 4, London (1861), p. 70. In a section on prostitution Mayhew and his collaborator Bracebridge Hemyng discussed the position of women in different parts of the world. The Australian Aboriginal women they depicted as 'second only to the lowest tribes of Africa in barbarity and degradation.' Aboriginal polygamy was traced to infanticide:
Child killing is indeed among the social institutions of that
poor and barbarous race. Women have been known to kill and eat
their offspring, and men to swing them by the legs and dash out
their brains against a tree. The custom is becoming more rare
among those tribes in constant intercourse with Europeans.
Mayhew cites a variety of sources for the section on Aboriginal women: Sturt, Westgarth, Leichardt, Hodgson, Haydon, Angas, Grey, Eyre, Pridden, Earl, Mackenzie, Mitchell, Howitt, Mudie, Macconochie, Oxley, Henserson, Cunningham, and other unnamed travellers and residents.
Not having been able to find the original reference to cannibalism in the Pauline Hanson extracts on the net, I'm not sure what source she gives. I agree with the New Zealand contributors who pointed out that early Maori cannibalism has never been denied, and has not been used to deny the treaty of Waitangi. Maori cannibalism was apparently in the context of battle. Mayhew, for example, also accuses the Maori of practising infanticide, but does not apparently suggest that Maori mothers ate their own babies.
Mayhew is an excellent example of mid-19th century British attitudes to indigenous people but hardly an authority for the present.
Richard Davis
University of Tasmania
REPLY: Cannibalism and Human Rights
Author: John Morris <jfmorris@MAIL.CC.TOHOKU.AC.JP>
Date: Sun, 11 May 1997 19:44:14 +1000
David Cameron's posting on the cannibalism/Hanson issue has got my fingers moving to add my two cents worth.
The Japanese parliament (usually translated as Diet) passed a law on 8th May, 1997, which recognised in law for the first time the existence of the Ainu, the Aboriginal inhabitants of Hokkaido (the northermost island of Japan). At the same time this law repealed the former laws passed in 1899 governing the Ainu. The former laws did not use the term _Ainu_, but used a politically incorrect term for the _former native inhabitants_ of Hokkaido. These former laws denied the Ainu their ethnic and cultural identity, and effectively forced them to adopt Japanese language, culture, and lifestyles (redundant, I know; I'm trying to say that it forced them to take up Japanese-style agriculture and abandon the remants of their former hunting-gathering economy). What is important, however, is that although the laws of 1899 were a disaster for the Ainu, compared to the Aboriginal policies adopted in the majority of England's colonies (and former colonies), the Japanese laws were extremely enlightened and liberal. Apart from being denied their own culture, the Ainu were given full rights as Japanese subjects, and the laws did not include any form of institutional discrimination at all. I do not think that I need to elaborate on the significance of this for the Australian context on this list.
I do not have the book at hand, but Jan Critchett, in her book _A Distant Field of Murder_ dealing with the Western Districts of Victoria , 1838-1848, somewhere makes reference to the custom of ritual eating of part of one's enemies' innards or body fat (I think), and she also infers that the Aborigines of western Victoria may have had the custom of eating children. Or to make a reference from the reference that she makes, Aborigines either ate children captured from alien tribes, OR ELSE from their observations of white settlers, they were pretty convinced that this is what white settlers would do with any captured Aboriginal children...
John Morris
Miyagi Gakuin Women's College,
Sendai, Japan
REPLY: Cannibalism and Human Rights
Author: Michelle Watson <mgmw@CC.NEWCASTLE.EDU.AU>
Date: Sun, 11 May 1997 19:44:19 +1000
David Cameron should have a look at "The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy" by W. Arens (New York: Oxford UP, 1979).
Arens's basic thrust is that there is no real evidence on the type of cannibalism that is assumed to have taken place in most "primitive" societies.
The book also looks at the reasons for the development of cannibalism myths in both the ancient and modern worlds, including how the development of modern academic techniques and disciplines (such as anthropology) have continued to influence the support of the ideas around cannibalism.
The book is also a great read!
Michelle Watson
Uni of Newcastle
REPLY: Cannibalism and Human Rights
Author: Janice Wegner <Janice.Wegner@JCU.EDU.AU>
Date: Fri, 16 May 1997 13:31:08 +1000
David Cameron asks about Eric Rolls' _Sojourners_ and its treatment of cannibalism. Peter Bell has written a review highly critical of Rolls' sources in _Australasian Historical Archaeology_ vol. 10 pp. 94-95. As most of Rolls' Far North Queensland material is based on Hector Holthouse's _River of Gold_, I would disregard suggestions that FNQ was a hotbed of cannibalism.
Peter Bell has also chased up one of the more lurid Holthouse cannibalism stories in his "What Happened to the Macquarie Brothers?", _Cairns Historical Society Bulletin_ nos. 276 and 277. He demonstrates how the disappearance of a couple of packers on the Palmer Goldfield, leaving only a few traces of ambiguous evidence, has been constructed into a story of particularly cruel barbarism by Aborigines. (The article may be difficult to access. Oxley Library will have it or it can be obtained from the Cairns Historical Society, P.O. Box 319 Cairns 4870.)
As for my own wanderings through the primary sources of FNQ, I have found that evidence for cannibalism is based on hearsay or circumstantial evidence. I am still awaiting that reliable primary source eyewitness account.
Jan Wegner
History,
James Cook University, Cairns Campus
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