Ian Keen - Aboriginal Economy and Society

Ian Keen

Aboriginal Economy and Society:

Australia at the Threshold of Colonisation

South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2004

Paperback                    xii + 436 pp.                             0 19 550766 5

The title of this massive and impressive book may inadvertently mislead: it is not a snapshot of life in Australia at the turn of the year 1788. Rather Ian Keen has drawn together the current state of knowledge of seven groups among the continent’s indigenous people to produce a work of comparison and synthesis. The approach reflects his opening argument that the valid comparison for Arnhem Land in the 1920s is Gippsland in the 1820s, although in concluding he admits that this ‘synchronic’ approach may be artificial, and risks conveying an impression of static societies that Keen would prefer to discount. The case studies focus upon the Kunai people of Gippsland, the Yuwaaliyaay of northern New South Wales, the Sandbeach people of eastern Cape York, the Yolngu of Arnhem Land, the Ngarinyin of the Kimberleys, the Pitjantjatjara of the desert and the associated Wiil and Minong people of the Albany region of Western Australia. (For simplicity, this review does not attempt to follow the use of accents in Keen’s revised orthography.) Some of the names derive from basic words for ‘human’, others are dialect or locational in origin, while one is evidently a European conflation. The nature of evidence also varies: for instance, Kunai culture was already ravaged by settlement when the amateur anthropologist A.W. Howitt began to record their way of life. Research on the adjoining Wiil and Minong is uneven but appears to point to elements of shared culture. Three groups are studied specifically in relation to their neighbours and although the term ‘Sandbeach’ reflects a regional self-identity, it spans several languages. The environments in which the groups lived (and still live) vary enormously. Thus both within the framework of time and the structure of identities, the case studies lack uniformity and require deft handling. This they undoubtedly receive.

Keen analyses the evidence under three headings: ecology, institutions and economy. In the process he throws doubt on many of the casual generalisations about language, identity (‘tribes’) and cosmology (‘dreaming’) which white Australians employ to make sense of their indirect indigenous heritage. Keen is particularly interested in the apparent lack of correlation between ecological factors and kinship patterns. He suggests that the seemingly low level of environmental determinism may be explained by shifting the discussion from means to ends. In reviewing the explosive subject of pre-contact Aboriginal population, he generally prefers to avoid overall numbers and speculate instead on square-kilometres-per-person densities. In each case study, however, it is clear that there were rarely more than a few thousand people in any group at any time. Hence societies had to achieve two aims: the regulation of sexual behaviour to avoid pre-marital breeding, and the avoidance of marriage between close cousins. What mattered was that there should be some system of control, even if the ornate details varied incomprehensibly from place to place. As the bureaucrats so often say, there have to be rules and this is one of them. Thus it was a Yolngu custom that if a man made sexual allusions within the hearing of a brother and sister, the brother would then attack not the speaker but the sister. No anthropologist has the faintest idea why this should have been so, but presumably it was perceived as in some way vital to the maintenance of the social fabric.

Keen closes with a word of hope and speculation. He would like his book to contribute to the understanding of race relations in the colonial period and today. It is possible, he thinks, that the nature of pre-contact culture in different parts of Australia helps explain the extent to which Aboriginal peoples were able either to resist or to accommodate the intruding newcomers. Historians might pose the question more forcefully. We know that there was Aboriginal resistance, especially across northern Australia. Keen tells us that we should discard the notion of Aboriginal Australia as a mosaic of helpless fragments locked within the cleanly delineated boundaries of textbook maps and think instead of networks of interconnection both within the continent and stretching outwards to the north. If we marry his revised perspective to an assumption of dynamic cultures, it becomes harder to explain why Aboriginal Australia did not respond to the European incursion by forming the kind of political confederacies that characterised aspects of Maori and Nguni resistance to white settlement. There are few problems in understanding the ravages caused by disease and alcohol around Port Jackson in the immediate aftermath of 1788 but, in continental terms, the First Fleet was a fleabite. If Aboriginal Australia functioned as a network, then it must have operated as a rapid medium for the transmission of information, which in turn means that peoples living far from Sydney had literally decades in which to re-shape and amalgamate their societies to resist penetration. Shared elements in Aboriginal cosmologies might have provided an ideological basis for a broad nationalist movement. Flexible redefinition of marriage and kinship structures, including the pervasive ritual of male circumcision, could have supplied elements of alliance and bonding. Fusing hundreds of sub-groups might well have been unrealistic, but surely somewhere on the advancing frontier we might expect to find at least one Shaka Zulu or a Te Rauparaha. If there is indeed a historical mystery to be tackled here, part of the answer must lie deep in the roots of local cultures.

Keen’s book is equipped with illustrations, helpful maps, extensive tables and a number of those diagrams covered with arrows that are so beloved by anthropologists. Referencing is of a high standard and in production the book lives up to the reputation of the publisher. This is hardly a work for the general reader, but it will surely find a place in any specialist library for its breadth and cautious exploitation of the comparative method.