The claim that Aboriginal culture is the world’s oldest continuing culture through 65,000 years is constantly regurgitated in a supportive media and by the white reinvented Aboriginals who form a powerful political group.
‘Continuing’ in this sense means unchanged because the first settlers found Aboriginal society the most primitive that European explorers had found anywhere. They had not even invented the wheel. And like all native cultures, Aboriginal culture was extremely violent.
But regarding the 65,000 years, how do they know it was the same culture and the same people over 65,000 years? The earliest written records (Sumerian and Egyptian) go back no more than 3,400 years, and the first coherent records (Sumerian and Egyptian) are no more than 2,600 years old.
Of course, fossil traces of human existence go back thousands of years, but nothing specifically cultural. One can accept fossil traces of human existence have been found on the Australian continent, but that does not mean it was the same people or exactly the same culture. It does not assault reason to say Aboriginal culture, as found by the settlers in January 1788, may not have been more than a few thousand years old.
Let’s face it. The constantly regurgitated claim about Aboriginal culture is a political weapon. It is meant to demonstrate the alleged illegitimacy of European settlement and the superiority of the present indigenous community, a great deal of which is mixed blood.
It is ridiculous to behold flabby, painted, pale men trying to execute Aboriginal dances in the southern states. These reinvented ceremonies accompany just about every official occasion. We know they’re not genuine because we often see on television the same dances executed by full-blood Aboriginals in the Northern Territory and northern Queensland who are from traditional Aboriginal communities. The cultural reinventions of the southern states are a joke.
White Aboriginal leader Marcus Stewart, a main player in the Victorian ‘Treaty’ discussions.