If you’re not familiar with Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander cultures generally, the Deadly Stories history timeline and the rest of the site gives a good high level overview from an aboriginal perspective. Especially for the creation stories which is a core similarity between different groups. There’s some who claim elements in the stories go as far back as when there were still megafauna. True? No idea. But fun to consider.
Bruce Pascoe wrote Dark Emu in 2019 which is a very important book about agriculture and tech that upset a lot of people. I’ve linked you a page that contains a brief summary plus links to academic responses to it, because it did cause controversy. Apologies for the school-age-centric link, there’s a big push in education right now to teach kids about the aboriginal stuff they didn’t teach adults, so links to aboriginal science tend to be at this level or uni research papers.
The whole movie about the writing of that book, criticism and backlash is up on ABC iView - The Dark Emu Story if you’re keen for something more human that gets into the racism of erasing aboriginal science too. A shit VPN might be needed, but I doubt ABC has done much more to geoblock.
Older article on fire as land management by aboriginal peoples with a few pics is a good entry point for that topic. Fire is a huge part of many aboriginal groups, so the idea they didn’t have it is frankly ridiculous on the surface. Like they only ate raw food and huddled in caves for warmth for 60k years or something, i mean come on.
And just because I enjoy it, this map of the aboriginal groups in Australia. Also because people keep talking about Aboriginal Australians as though they are a monolith. There are at least 250 languages.
We have evidence of ovens from 4000 years ago, so very much yes. They always have, and it is baffling to me that anyone would say otherwise. Even 20 years ago nobody claimed bizarre things like that.
With much of it unsafe or unpalatable raw, a variety of methods were employed to render the various foods edible, such as cooking on open fires (meat) or boiling in bark containers. They would pound vegetables and seeds, or hang them in bags in running water.[
Many foods are also baked in the hot campfire coals, or baked for several hours in ground ovens. “Paperbark”, the bark of Melaleuca species, is widely used for wrapping food placed in ground ovens. Bush bread was made by women using many types of seeds, nuts and corns to process a flour or dough.
You bet!
If you’re not familiar with Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander cultures generally, the Deadly Stories history timeline and the rest of the site gives a good high level overview from an aboriginal perspective. Especially for the creation stories which is a core similarity between different groups. There’s some who claim elements in the stories go as far back as when there were still megafauna. True? No idea. But fun to consider.
Bruce Pascoe wrote Dark Emu in 2019 which is a very important book about agriculture and tech that upset a lot of people. I’ve linked you a page that contains a brief summary plus links to academic responses to it, because it did cause controversy. Apologies for the school-age-centric link, there’s a big push in education right now to teach kids about the aboriginal stuff they didn’t teach adults, so links to aboriginal science tend to be at this level or uni research papers.
The whole movie about the writing of that book, criticism and backlash is up on ABC iView - The Dark Emu Story if you’re keen for something more human that gets into the racism of erasing aboriginal science too. A shit VPN might be needed, but I doubt ABC has done much more to geoblock.
Short article on aboriginal engineering, from NITV who cover news from an aboriginal perspective.
Older article on fire as land management by aboriginal peoples with a few pics is a good entry point for that topic. Fire is a huge part of many aboriginal groups, so the idea they didn’t have it is frankly ridiculous on the surface. Like they only ate raw food and huddled in caves for warmth for 60k years or something, i mean come on.
And just because I enjoy it, this map of the aboriginal groups in Australia. Also because people keep talking about Aboriginal Australians as though they are a monolith. There are at least 250 languages.
Thank you very much for the information. I will check it out.
Did the aboriginals use fire to cook food?
We have evidence of ovens from 4000 years ago, so very much yes. They always have, and it is baffling to me that anyone would say otherwise. Even 20 years ago nobody claimed bizarre things like that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_tucker