Aborigines Of Australia Quotes & Sayings

Even "meant to be" takes work. — Donna Lynn Hope

When you look at it objectively, that's what most colonists do - they land then find a way of wiping out their competition. In America is was blankets covered with smallpox and in Australia it was permits to hunt aborigines. If you wipe a whole people from the face of the earth, then there's no one to point fingers at you. It's just their spirits that haunt you and spirits can't do shit. — Alex Latimer

Where there is laughter there is always more health than sickness. — Phyllis Bottome

The burning off and the gathering together are one. — Billy Marshall Stoneking

The glass display cases had shown rock-throwers crafted by the Australian aborigines - like giant wooden shoehorns, they'd looked, but smoothed and carved and ornamented with the most painstaking care. In the 40,000 years since anatomically modern humans had migrated to Australia from Asia, nobody had invented the bow-and-arrow. It really made you appreciate how non-obvious was the idea of Progress. Why would you even think of Invention as something important, if all your history's heroic tales were of great warriors and defenders instead of Thomas Edison? How could anyone possibly have suspected, while carving a rock-thrower with painstaking care, that someday human beings would invent rocket ships and nuclear energy? — Eliezer Yudkowsky

In an earlier stage of our development most human groups held to a tribal ethic. Members of the tribe were protected, but people of other tribes could be robbed or killed as one pleased. Gradually the circle of protection expanded, but as recently as 150 years ago we did not include blacks. So African human beings could be captured, shipped to America, and sold. In Australia white settlers regarded Aborigines as a pest and hunted them down, much as kangaroos are hunted down today. Just as we have progressed beyond the blatantly racist ethic of the era of slavery and colonialism, so we must now progress beyond the speciesist ethic of the era of factory farming, of the use of animals as mere research tools, of whaling, seal hunting, kangaroo slaughter, and the destruction of wilderness. We must take the final step in expanding the circle of ethics. - — Peter Singer

As long as you have capital punishment there is no guarantee that innocent people won't be put to death. — Paul Simon

If Australia is The Lucky Country, the Aborigines must be the unluckiest people in the world. — Frank Hardy

The way we react to the Indian will always remain this nation's unique moral headache. It may seem a smaller problem than our Negro one, and less important, but many other sections of the world have had to grapple with slavery and its consequences. There's no parallel for our treatment of the Indian. In Tasmania the English settlers solved the matter neatly by killing off every single Tasmanian, bagging the last one as late as 1910. Australia had tried to keep its aborigines permanently debased - much crueler than anything we did with our Indians. Brazil, about the same. Only in America did we show total confusion. One day we treated Indians as sovereign nations. Did you know that my relative Lost Eagle and Lincoln were photographed together as two heads of state? The next year we treated him as an uncivilized brute to be exterminated. And this dreadful dichotomy continues. — James A. Michener

I lived for a couple of years when I was 9 years old on beautiful Aboriginal sacred land in a town of a thousand people in northwestern Australia. It's where the Aborigines are still very connected to their culture, the Dreamtime culture. It was really quite a special experience. — Isabel Lucas

Jonny has a theory that South Africa are doomed to choke in every major tournament for the next fifty years as payment for apartheid. He also believes that England will spend centuries working off their colonial sins by performing miserably at sport. I then ask him why Australia, who wiped out generations of Aborigines, win everything in every sport, and he shuts up. — Shehan Karunatilaka

No matter how hard you try to put everything neatly into shape, the context wanders this way and that, until finally the context isn't even there anymore. You're left with this pile of kittens lolling all over one another. — Haruki Murakami

The Australian Aboriginal cave paintings, from this period, are the first hints of religion that humans have as proof of religious behaviour. The caves in which the paintings are found date to 50,000 years ago through forensic geology and carbon dating. Most of the images found in their religious stories and ceremonies are depicted in these caves. We also have confirmation from the aborigines themselves that these images are their religious images. These paintings also are likely to be significant evidence for linking the use of Amanita Muscaria to its use 50,000 years ago. This is because 50,000 years ago was when humanity entered Australia and also because Amanita Muscaria produces religious like experiences. — Leviak B. Kelly

Women are considered deep - why? Because one can never discover any bottom to them. Women are not even shallow. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The aborigines in Australia, the way they dress is very honest; it's not about: "Oh, you wear a skirt, you're gay." — Riccardo Tisci

Phyllis Kaberry's description of an aborigine camp in western Australia is typical: "The Aborigines continually craved for meat, and any man was apt to declare, 'me hungry alonga bingy,' though he had had a good meal of yams and damper a few minutes before. The camp on such occasions became glum, lethargic, and unenthusiastic about dancing. — Richard W. Wrangham

Jesus' message of the Kingdom of God is the announcement by word and deed that God is acting and manifesting dynamically his redemptive will in history. God is seeking out sinners; he is inviting them to enter into the messianic blessing; he is demanding of them a favorable response to his gracious offer. God has again spoken. A new prophet has appeared, indeed one who is more than a prophet, one who bring to people the very blessings he promises. — George Eldon Ladd

The Yirkalla aborigines of Arnhem Land in Australia hear sacred song words in the babbling of babies. To them, songs are never composed but only discovered: all songs exist already. — Philip Ball

Australia's arid western region, from the town of Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean coast, is a beautiful, haunting, but largely empty land. Dominated by the harsh, almost uninhabited Great Sandy and Gibson deserts, the region is known only to Australian Aborigines, a handful of white settlers, and the few travelers who motor across it. — Robyn Davidson