Recent comments describing Aboriginal Australians as ‘primitive’ and suggesting that our people achieved little or nothing over tens of thousands of years are deeply hurtful. But my concern goes beyond one person or one statement. These words reflect an attitude that Aboriginal people have encountered for generations, and one that my people and I have had to deal with throughout our lives.
We also need to question the word ‘primitive’ itself. Primitive according to whose standard? The term carries the legacy of a Western, ethnocentric model that ranked cultures on a supposed ladder of human progress, with European civilisation placed at the top and Indigenous and other non-Western peoples described as backward or primitive. Modern anthropology has substantially rejected this unilineal way of understanding cultures. Francis L. K. Hsu argued as early as 1964 that the concept ‘primitive’ had become empirically and theoretically obsolete, while Claude Lévi-Strauss challenged the assumption that peoples labelled primitive were somehow living at an earlier stage of human history. Contemporary anthropology likewise describes this as a ‘bias of backwardness’: the mistaken assumption that Western wealth, technology and social organisation provide the universal measure of human development. Cultures do not represent different stages on a single journey toward becoming Western; each has its own history, knowledge, values and ways of organising human life.
This matters not only for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, but for any people group. No culture should be regarded as inferior simply because its knowledge, social structures, relationship with land, spirituality or ways of sustaining community developed differently from those of Europe. Difference is not evidence of deficiency.
Aboriginal cultures developed sophisticated systems of law, kinship, ceremony, trade, ecological knowledge, language, spirituality and responsibility for Country. These systems were suited to this continent and sustained communities across enormously diverse environments for thousands of generations. They were not failed attempts to become European societies. They represented different ways of understanding human life, community and the natural world.
There is also physical evidence that directly challenges simplistic claims about Indigenous achievement. At Budj Bim in Victoria, the Gunditjmara engineered an extensive system of channels, weirs and dams to manage waterways and harvest kooyang (short-finned eel). The system dates back at least 6,600 years and supported settled communities, food production and trade. It is now recognised as a World Heritage cultural landscape and as one of the world’s oldest and most extensive aquaculture systems.
What troubles me particularly is that these attitudes have not disappeared. Australian National University research involving more than 11,000 participants over a ten-year period found that 75 per cent of Australians tested demonstrated a negative implicit or unconscious bias toward Indigenous Australians. This does not mean that three out of four Australians consciously dislike Aboriginal people. It means that negative associations can exist beneath conscious awareness and can influence the way Indigenous people are seen and treated.
For Aboriginal people, this is not merely an academic discussion about history or terminology. We have lived with the consequences of being described as backward, uncivilised, incapable or inferior. My people and I have had to encounter assumptions like these throughout our lives. They affect how people listen to us, how our knowledge is valued, how our culture is understood and, at times, whether our experience is believed.
That is why language matters. When the old language of ‘primitive’ peoples is repeated today, it does more than misrepresent the past. It can reinforce the very assumptions that generations of Aboriginal Australians have had to struggle against.
Australia should be mature enough to have difficult conversations about Indigenous policy, disadvantage, responsibility and our shared future. But those conversations should begin with truth and with the equal dignity of all peoples. We can disagree about policy without diminishing a people or their culture.
Perhaps the question we need to ask is not, ‘What did Aboriginal people achieve according to Western standards?’ but rather: ‘Have we learned to recognise knowledge, achievement and civilisation when they take a form different from our own?’
About the author
Reverend Dr Rex Rigby is a member of the Excelsia University College Board of Directors. He is currently the National Superintendent of the Wesleyan Methodist Church of Australia and the first Indigenous national head of a denomination in Australia. Rev Dr Rigby has been in pastoral ministry for 37 years, serving in Brisbane, Melbourne and country Queensland. He has planted four churches and overseen the planting of a further 10. He is also an Adjunct Lecturer in Pastoral Ministry with the Eva Burrows College and The Nazarene Theological College.
Sources
Australian National University, “Three in four people hold negative view of Indigenous people,” 9 June 2020. https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/three-in-four-people-hold-negative-view-of-indigenous-people
Australian Government, Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, “Budj Bim Cultural Landscape.” https://www.dcceew.gov.au/parks-heritage/heritage/places/world/budj-bim
UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Budj Bim Cultural Landscape.” https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1577/
Hsu, Francis L. K. “Rethinking the Concept ‘Primitive’.” Current Anthropology 5, no. 3 (1964): 169–178. https://doi.org/10.1086/200478
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “Primitives?” The UNESCO Courier. Originally published August–September 1954; republished 8 July 2019.
https://courier.unesco.org/en/articles/primitives
OpenStax. “Western Bias in Our Assumptions about Humanity.” In Introduction to Anthropology, section 1.4. https://openstax.org/books/introduction-anthropology/pages/1-4-western-bias-in-our-assumptions-about-humanity
