Overview of agriculture – Agricultural History Report
Aboriginal Practices
For¬ the many millenniums prior to the arrival of Europeans, Aboriginals in Australia effectively managed the land with complex systems of techniques. These Indigenous Australians have developed their unique land, water and animal managements, along with strategies, in order to survive in both resource-rich and harsh environments.
Land management was one of the most crucial factors of Indigenous Australian’s survival. Before European landing, Aboriginals were hardworking farmers, growing crops that range from yams and wheat to fruits and berries. Hunting and food collecting also contributed to Aboriginal’s diet.
Fire was a large part of the land management of Aboriginals. The Indigenous Australians often burnt large areas of vegetation as fire triggers flowering and seed germination. This practice, now termed as “firestick farming”, shaped Australia’s environment. Fire with low intensity was used in alternating blocks of land across farms, providing constant vegetation over the years. The use of fire also influenced Australia’s flora and fauna, forcing species to generate unique techniques to adapt to fire. Examples include certain plants’ ability to release seeds after severe burning,
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A typical strategy was the formation of dams and trenches. This storage of rainwater allowed excess water for people, plants and marine animals, which successfully preserved the ecosystem during dry seasons.4 The increase of fish population also provided Aboriginals with more food.
Apart from the land and water managements, Aboriginals also developed a wide variety of other strategies. An example may be the designing of intricate nets to trap fish and birds, a technique used for hunting.5 Through the eras of development, Aboriginals have successfully managed the land prior to the arrival of Europeans with their unique
There are various Aboriginal tribes throughout Australia. The Yolngu, a north eastern Australian Aboriginal tribe, will be the the primary focus of this paper as they are also the primary
Australia is a land of rather extreme weather conditions and widely diverse climates that force the vegetation living there to adapt in many interesting ways. Australia is the driest continent, and biomes such as grasslands and savannas are prime sources of widespread catastrophic fires. The plants that grow in the vast arid and semi-arid regions of Australia are prone to fires simply because of the desert climates that they grow in. High temperatures combined with low fuel moisture contents, little humidity and drying winds that sweep across the landscape encourage many of the plants living in these areas to burst into flames at fairly frequent intervals. Serotinous cones, protective bark, intricate underground recovery systems, unique seed distributions and even the necessity of fire for reproduction are just some of the amazing ways that the major plant families which grow in these fire-prone areas have learned to adapt to their environments.
The over-representation of Aboriginal children in the Canadian Child Welfare system is a growing and multifaceted issue rooted in a pervasive history of racism and colonization in Canada. Residential schools were established with the intent to force assimilation of Aboriginal people in Canada into European-Canadian society (Reimer, 2010, p. 22). Many Aboriginal children’s lives have been changed adversely by the development of residential schools, even for those who did not attend them. It is estimated that Aboriginal children “are 6-8 times more likely to be placed in foster care than non-Aboriginal children (Saskatchewan Child Welfare Review Panel, 2010, p. 2).” Reports have also indicated that First Nations registered Indian children make up the largest proportion of Aboriginal children entering child welfare care across Canada (Saskatchewan Child Welfare Review Panel, p. 2). Consequently, this has negatively impacted Aboriginal communities experience of and relationship with child welfare services across the country. It is visible that the over-representation of Aboriginal children in the child welfare system in Canada lies in the impact of the Canadian policy for Indian residential schools, which will be described throughout this paper.
The Aboriginal people of Australia were here thousands of years before European settlement and we forced them to adapt to the changes of environment around them. This change might be for better or worse, but we will never find out. But with the European settlement came the birth of industry, agriculture, forestry, fishing, mining, manufacture, electricity, gas and water just to name a few.
Bourke, E and Edwards, B. 1994. Aboriginal Australia. St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press.
Ancient Aboriginals were the first people to set foot on the Australian continent, over 40,000 years or more before Colonization (Eckermann, 2010). They survived by hunting and gathering their food, worshipping the land to protect its resources, and ensuring their survival. The aboriginal community had adapted to the environment, building a strong framework of social, cultural, and spiritual beliefs (Eckermann, 2010).
The indigenous Australian culture is one of the world’s oldest living cultures. Despite the negligence and the misunderstanding from the Europeans, Aboriginals were able to keep their culture alive by passing their knowledge by arts, rituals, performances and stories from one generation to another. Each tribe has its own language and way of using certain tools; however the sharing of knowledge with other tribes helps them survive with a bit easier with the usage of efficient yet primitive tools which helps a culture stay alive. Speaking and teaching the language as well as the protection of sacred sites and objects helps the culture stay...
Australian indigenous culture is the world’s oldest surviving culture, dating back sixty-thousand years. Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders have been represented in a myriad of ways through various channels such as poetry, articles, and images, in both fiction and non-fiction. Over the years, they have been portrayed as inferior, oppressed, isolated, principled and admirable. Three such texts that portray them in these ways are poems Circles and Squares and Grade One Primary by Ali Cobby Eckermann, James Packer slams booing; joins three cheers for footballer and the accompanying visual text and Heywire article Family is the most important thing to an islander by Richard Barba. Even though the texts are different as ….. is/are …., while
For many years Australia has been an isolated land, away in the bottom corner of the world, surrounded by thousands of kilometres of ocean at some points. This isolation has developed entire unique ecosystems across Australia, ones that are full of unique native animals and plants.
Pre-dating to the early 15th century, when contact with European settlers was originally established, Indigenous peoples have been required to succumb to settler – colonization in an attempt to be integrated into mainstream culture. The initial purpose of colonialism was to be used as a tool to gain access to resources not otherwise available. As colonialism evolved, it has become a method by which foreign populations move into unfamiliar territories, and attempt to remove the colonized group from the currently occupied space.
For the first two weeks of my class, I had no idea where I was headed in terms of my learning experience but I soon found out. During the first week we had to define “indigenous identity” which by the way was a foreign language to me. After I determined the meaning of it (because there were so many choices) I settled on the meaning “that what connects a person or people by their culture, race, beliefs and way of life”. I never considered or included myself a part of that definition because I thought it only pertained to people of other nations or countries. Eventually my thoughts and understanding changed. As I stated before my reading “Thinking Like an Anthropologist” Chapter Five, “What was This Practice or Idea Like in the past - The Temporal Question (2008, Omohundro, J.T. ), will be an excellent and informative guide for my research (in which it was). Also having to use Syncretism as a tool allowed me the opportunity to not only research the past but present rituals, beliefs, etc. of African Americans and how much they have changed over the years. Looking through this research as a critic allowed me to broaden my horizons not only about my culture but other cultures that are included in this identity. We were first introduced to two articles: The “Gebusi” and “Body Ritual of the Nacerima”. And I thought their rituals and beliefs were somewhat extreme, but then I realized if they looked at our society and our practices, they could consider the same thing about us. Having said that I decided that as an African-American woman, I was prepared to take that journey into the unknown, to investigate my culture, our accomplishments, and therefore have the ability to share my findings and observations with others. Week after week we w...
The aborigines had small farmlands which are arid and dry making it difficult for them to
The Aborigine people are the natives of Australia and have inhabited Australia for nearly 60,000 years. When the europeans discovered Australia, there were nearly 600 native Aborigine tribes and clans. They are semi-nomadic
...ontext, even though, as David N. Livingstone (2003) has so elegantly demonstrated, science is always ‘a view from somewhere’: the museum, the field, the botanical garden, the hospital, the human body, or a particular region. Lauer and Aswani (2009), drawing on Ingold (2000) argue that it is not the scale, comprehensiveness or validity of knowledge that should be compared, but ‘modes of apprehending the world’. Indigenous knowledge should not be viewed as content ready to be extracted and applied to help with natural resource management, but instead it should be seen as a process – a set of practices and interactions between people, other living beings, and things; one that has been developed and tested over many generations, has enable people to live in Australia for more than 3000 generations, and one that is underpinned by a complex relational ethics (Rose 2005).
The early indications with regard to the origin of the Aborigines determined through carbon dating showed traces of their existence as early as 40,000 years ago; probably the earliest arrivals of indigenous Australian human migration came from Indonesia and New Guinea. Australian evidence was found in 1970 near the shoreline of a lake: stone artifacts, shells, bones and disposal of trash were found. Another significant change in the archaeological record after 6000 BC discovered was the introduction of a new stone-age in Australia’s prehistory, stone working consisted of removing flakes and grinding the stone into sharp and precise points to make spears but clubs were the most common weapons used. Men usually fought in duels with heavy-wood swords and large shields. One of the main reasons that the Aborigine’s culture was lost was because they had no specialized structure of government, monarchy, army or any one person in control except head of the house which was limited in control to his immediate family. There was however, a status, the firstborn male got to eat before the other sib...