Savaging a myth

THIS weird love our cultural elite has for the Noble Savage can, of course, be as innocent as Rebecca Hossackâs dream of being "buried like an Aboriginal" sic.

Hossack, who runs a swish art gallery in London and was the first cultural attache at our High Commission, has two Aboriginal burial poles in her basement: one for herself and one for her husband. As the glossy Melbourne Magazine ooh-ahhed this month: ãWhen she dies, Hossack says, her bones will be bleached on the roof of her London house, placed in her burial pole and sent back to Australia.ä

Like I say, itâs innocent. No one is inconvenienced, unless Hossackâs heirs get the creeps waiting for the skeleton on the roof to turn white. Or the neighbours take fright at the vultures suddenly settling on the gutters of Notting Hill, clutching looser bits of Hossackâs rotting remains.

You might think other signs of this new craze for the myth of deeply spiritual savages living in some Garden of eco-Eden÷with white capitalists cast as the snake÷are just as harmless.

Who cares if the ladies of Armadale decree that dot paintings by artists certified as genuinely Aboriginal and genuinely poor are a must for the well-dressed wall? At least some artists out bush will get a few honorably earned dollars out of it.

And the dry-cleaners of Melbourne could only have profited from the salvation seekers who queued at a phony Aboriginal ãsacred fireä at Kings Domain during the Commonwealth Games to get themselves ritually smoked.

But not all of this romanticising about the good old Stone Age is quite so cute.

Iâm thinking, for instance, of Tom Calmaâs attack on the Howard Governmentâs Bill to stop Aboriginal wife-bashers and child-abusers from using the excuse that their barbarity was permitted by ãtribal lawä.

(The Government had in mind the 55-year-old man who was initially jailed for just one month for anally raping a 14-year-old girl, the judge accepting that under tribal law the victim was his promised bride.)

Wrote Calma, paid big to be our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner: ãThe problem is that this Bill does not address family violence in the indigenous communities in any meaningful way.

ãRather, it will undermine attempts to solve the problem and perpetuate harmful stereotypes about Aboriginal customary law.ä

Hmm. Does Calma seems more worried by the damage done to the image of tribal law than by the damage such laws do to a 14-year-old girl?

But he is not alone in re-imagining tribal ways to be gentler÷and greener÷than they really were and are. Many others want to forget the truth÷that even an anthropologist as sympathetic to Aboriginal causes as Professor Peter Sutton says in his essay The Politics of Suffering that ãa manâs right to beat his wife without interferenceä can be described by Aborigines as the ãBlackfella wayä and ãhigh levels of interpersonal violenceä have long been ãsanctionedä by Aboriginal laws.

No, no, no. Our buttorted earth-worshippers, snowfield socialists and freedom-fearers donât want to hear that.

They prefer to hear High Priests of the primitive like . . . why, David Suzuki!

Suzuki, the famed green guru and broadcaster from Canada, is in Australia yet again, this time for a month-long ãfarewellä tour from Byron Bay to Broome.

I heard him recently at a government-sponsored conference in Ballarat as I waited my own turn to speak, and was astonished to find how crazed his hectoring had become÷yet how rapturously an audience of public servants cheered him.

The capitalist world was eating up the world and was ãon a suicidal pathä, I heard him cry. ãWe live in a world that is absolutely shattered.ä

How grimly pleased the audience was to hear it.

The ways of the West were rotten, he stormed. ãConventional economics is a form of brain damageä and science was just ãbulls--- to baffleä.

We needed no more scientific discoveries, or even research. ãThe last thing in the world people need is more information.ä (Except, of course, for the information in Suzukiâs book, which he duly plugged, sold and signed.)

And it was ãdisgustingä we lived in bigger houses than did our grandparents: ãWhat kind of a world is this that regards this as progress?ä

Oh, how the audience loved it all. For the culturally privileged, this is the anti-rational, back to womb-cave, message of our times.

So what was Suzuki offering in place of the reason that has made us so rich and free?

Indian ways. Aboriginal ways. Like those wise tribal folk, he said, we had to treat nature as ãsacredä and live ãin balanceä with it.

And then Suzuki, who boasts of being an honorary chief of the Cree Indians and an honorary ãMountain Manä of South Australiaâs Kaurna Aborigines, did a riff that borrowed from his book Wisdom of the Elders.

As he says there, ãThe Native Mind is imbued with a deep sense of reverence for natureä and ãNative wisdom . . . regards the human obligation to maintain the balance of the health of the natural world as a solemn spiritual dutyä.

On he went, urging us to worship the earth as Noble Savages allegedly did back when humans led ãmore stableä lives ãin a state of natureä. Think Eden.

Itâs all as Harvard anthropologist Steven A. LeBlanc says in his fine new book, Constant Battles÷not only is the myth of the Noble Savage back in fashion, ãit seems that the native people of North America, along with a few other social groups like the Australian Aborigines, have become the poster children for the Înoble savageâ concept todayä.

But the Noble Savage is a fraud. ãTo think that we have lost our Îrootsâ or are somehow out of touch with our ancient ancestors÷and have lost the ability to live in peace and in ecological balance÷is a myth and a dangerous oneä, LeBlanc says.

In fact, from the very first days humans emerged, they have constantly and bloodily fought for more to eat after first plundering the land they already have.

Forget any of that tribal looking-after-nature stuff. LeBlanc tells of Indians hunting buffalo by driving whole herds over cliffs. He shows how other tribal hunter-gathers tore down branches from fruit trees to make huts, hunted animals to extinction and didnât care if their animal prey were males or females pregnant with next yearâs dinner.

The story was no different here. LeBlanc could have quoted Edward Curr, a squatter from the Murray who saw how the Bangerang hunted in the 1840s:

ã(T)hey never spared a young animal with a view to its growing bigger. I have often seen them, at an instance, land large quanbreasties of fish with their nets and leave all small ones to die within a yard of the water.ä

Indeed, LeBlanc went through 30 years of issues of Human Ecology, a top journal of anthropology, looking for evidence of tribes living in harmony with nature in the way Suzuki claims, but concluded: ãThere are no clear examples of conservationist behaviour in any traditional societies reported during the last three decades.ä

Why is he so keen to finish off the Noble Savage? Because we wonât otherwise see what a great chance weâve been given by our Western ways÷our science, our technology and our reason.

ãFor the first time in history, technology and science enable us to understand Earthâs ecology and our impact on it, to control population growth, and to increase the carrying capacity in ways never before imagined. The opportunity for humans to live in long-term balance with nature is within our grasp if we do it right.ä

That means using our brains÷not some fake native ãwisdomä that never was÷to feed and house everyone without exhausting the land, so eliminating the greatest cause of wars.

Already we are less likely to die in battle than our tribal ancestors ever were. Kill off the Noble Savage for good, and we may yet live in that peace and ãbalanceä of which Suzuki dreams÷but with, and thanks to, the wealth he claims he spurns.

Herald-Sun