CHARLES WOOLEY
These darker days of the year are often known for their madness. It may be that where light brings sense and clarity to the world, darkness engenders the opposite. Israel Folau aside for a moment, this is surely the season of brooding misapprehensions and screwy thinking. Though it is possible that I read too much, especially now when the ocean is cold and my trout lakes are frozen.
So much madness gets reported in the papers around the solstice days of winter it’s hard to keep up with everything. Some of it annoys the hell out of me, but I’m damned if I’m going to keep it to myself.
If you missed the following and it doesn’t equally annoy you, my sentient readers, then I will go to bed until spring comes tapping at my window.
It was reported this week, but seemingly ignored thereafter, that university lecturers have been warned off teaching their students that Aboriginal people have been in Australia for at least 40,000 years.
“So far so good,” I thought. “They are pushing back the date of first human occupancy based on new scientific evidence.”
But no, there is no science at all involved here. Just patronising academic pandering to superstition and perceived belief.
It turns out that some academic loonies at the University of New South Wales insist no time frame may be set on the arrival of the first humans.
This would be, to use their favourite word, “inappropriate”, and that it would be “more appropriate to say they have been here since the beginning of the Dreaming.”
This apparently would “more properly reflect the beliefs” of many Indigenous Australians who believe that “they have always been in Australia from the beginning of time and come from the land.”
Is it really the serious science of anthropology or some odd form of paternalistic and inverted racism to deny the subjects of scientific enquiry access to the latest information on their longer-term anthropological history?
And is it better or worse that the new instructions overruling the teaching of scientific fact apply to all students regardless of their background?
This is probably an attempt to obviate accusations of academic apartheid but, kiddies, I wouldn’t run up a big HECs debt at UNSW. Stay home.
Promisingly, the Anthropology page on the UTAS website suggests inquiry rather than dogma: “The debates aroused by the different theories will then be canvassed. Throughout the unit it will become evident
how these debates have shaped (and continue to shape) the discipline of anthropology.”
Wisdom from my old university: explore the arguments rather than seek to erase them.
The crazy language-re-tooling boffins, given their way, will hurtle us back to the 1600s. We should never forget the trial of the Italian physicist and philosopher Galileo Galilei over his outrageous proposal that the earth moved around the sun.
The Roman Inquisition investigated and scared the hell out of the brave scientist and, in 1615, concluded after not much consideration that Galileo’s view, that the sun and not the earth was the centre of creation, was “foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical,” because it “contradicted Holy Scripture”.
A question for history students: Compare and contrast the Galileo trial with the UNSW edict on “appropriate” teaching.
Specifically draw conclusions as to how far (if at all) Western thought has progressed in the intervening four centuries?
Back in the day, the Inquisition showed Galileo the tools of their trade. The names alone are quite enough: The Chair of Torture, the Brazen Bull and the Pear of Anguish.
Actually viewing those ghastly instruments of persuasion would have left nothing to the imagination and, quite wisely, the old boy agreed he must have got his sums wrong and that the earth was indeed as stationary as a road worker on the Midland Highway.
But as his mates rushed him out of the building, the famous physicist started to protest, muttering, “e pur si muove” (“and yet it moves”). Hurrying him away I’m sure his friends hissed, “for f **** sake shut up, Galileo!”
They were a pretty dumb mob of bigots, the Inquisition, and might well have been able to hold down a taxpayer-funded job as language police today.
But you can bet your fingernails I wouldn’t have been saying so 400 years ago. Sadly, on present indication, things are not getting a whole lot better.
In a time of declining freedom of speech on campuses everywhere, what will the language advice police at UNSW do with a young anthropology lecturer who teaches that human beings have been in Australia for between 40 and 50,000 years?
You wouldn’t fancy that teacher’s career prospects.
And where is Galileo now that we need him?