I have a friend on a property with cave art here in the hunter valley of Australia. We really don't do enough to preserve it at all. He's responsible and ensures no harm but it's still weird to own private land with 10k+ year old art and have no one really give a damn about it.
Compare it to European attitudes, eg. Lascaux where they closed off the cave completely and only allow tourists near the modern reconstruction.
We really do take 10k+ year old history for granted here.
I think it's because of a sense of ownership and belonging (or lack thereof). People who made the art in Lascaux are, in a distant sense, ancestors of the present-day French. Most of Australia is of British ancestry, transplanted in the past few hundred years. The majority of them, including their government, obviously don't consider the Aboriginal heritage as their own.
I dunno, if I had a property with art that is 10,000 years old, I will try my best to preserve it. Regardless of whether they were made by my ancestors or not, because it doesn’t matter.
It was made by humans. So in a way, they are my ancestors, whether they spoke French or some other language doesn’t matter to me
No most Europeans, including those in Australia care deeply about cultural preservation. In this case every European involved, the government, media and owner of the land all do. The odd thing is how the aboriginal people have done nothing to preserve this art for thousands of years. I would be curious to know if the previous vandals mentioned in TFA were leaving European or aboriginal names behind. One of the complaints the aboriginals had was lack of access to the cave. Europeans may be the ones more interested in preserving the ancient markings, the non-Europeans may be the ones more interested in making their own. Can anyone blame them?
Europeans everywhere care mostly about owning and profiting off of artwork, preservation of a work is important insofar as it allows Europeans to hoard the art and sell it, or grant prestige to their museums and galleries compared to other museums and galleries.
The cultural preservation is utterly unwanted - that's why things like the Benin bronzes have been forever broken and split up amongst Europeans in pieces, rather than retained as the one cultural work of being a history book for people to actually use in benin.
The same happens with Europeans in British Columbia. Rather than cultural preservation, the Europeans put totem poles on metal brackets to make sure they stay up forever and will never fall down, removing the intended time component of falling down, decaying, and being made anew. The intention of Europeans is to remove the cultural component and traditions, and turn it into an ownable artifact.
How was the Australian government profiting from installing security measures at the prehistoric cave art in TFA? I agree Europeans value history and sometimes see things as too static, but this is because Europeans are a thoughtful and sentimental people not because we are somehow profiting from putting delicate cave artifacts behind a gate.
In fairness, that same article suggests cameras would have helped.
> “The failure to build an effective gate, or to make use of modern security services, such as wildlife monitoring cameras that operate 24/7, has in many ways allowed this vandalism to occur,”
They get really mad at you when you tell them their acknowledgment of land / country to the Gadigal / other peoples is just a way to pay lip service and not actually do what’s required.
If they really actually cared, they would have protected these sites.
It absolutely is just lip service. So was Rudd's apology, milestone that it was.
"We acknowledge we're on stolen land"
"Are you gonna give it back?"
"Nah"
Imagine if I pinched my neighbour's TV, plugged it in and said "I acknowledge the traditional owner of this television" before switching it on. Wonder if he'd be cool with it.
I'm a fan of the frank honesty of Uncle Jack Charles:
> His criminal life saw him break into many homes in the "posher districts of Melbourne" - a deliberate choice, he says: "I robbed as rent collection for stolen Aboriginal land!"
> "Those mansions were on my mother's land, but I'm sure if I told the judge I was a rent collector, not a robber, I'd have been given another two years on my sentence."
( Bastardry (2008) is a funny and moving biographical documentry )
This is what pisses me off about the acknowledgements cropping up everywhere now. "We acknowledge this land was never ceeded". Ok, so isn't the next rational step to give it back then?
I've never met a white person who spouts "it's still their land" who actually gives back their 700sqm they worked to buy.
People in France now are barely related to the people who were there 10k years ago. Heck, I'm not even sure there are a lot of descendants of the Gauls left.
The thing is it’s the Gauls that are not much related to the people that drew cave art. European hunter gatherers were replaced by eastern farmers in the Neolithic.
The law is such that if an immovable aboriginal artifact is found on your property you're shit out of luck. You become responsible to keep it intact, you have to allow access to various people and likely be limited in your land use, all with no compensation.
This creates an incentive to destroy such artifacts (i.e. scarred trees, petroglyphs etc) and not tell anyone.
It also exists in a wider context of "history wars", where federal institutions take sides on quite controversial subjects, further alienating the stereotypical farmers.
At least for the cave in the article it's thousands of square meters of art. The art looks like parallel lines made by dragging fingers over the surface.
I guess you could take some pictures, but it's not the kind of art that really needs high res 3d scans. In this case it's more the concept of "there was a human that did something here a very long time ago", rather than how the art itself looks.
The vandalism only covered a small portion of it, but I suspect the vandals didn't even realize they were overwriting anything, since it's really not very obvious as art - it just looks like lines.
Poignant explanation of why such pre-historic art is important:
> It shows that they have a life, they do have culture, they do have art as we do today. They may not have done it for the very same reason, but they do have it. And it shows that they do not just merely survive, they live.
Yeah... Can we swap? Or like find a middle ground?
Here in slovenia, we have socialist buildings from 1970s that someone decided to culturally protect, and the owners cannot renew the leaking facade and add insulation, because the outside has to stay the same, and puting insulation on the inside would reduce the inside space and make walkways and doors too narrow to pass (or carry a fridge through or drive through with a wheelchair).
The government probably knows the carvings are there but doesn’t really force his family to take any steps to protect the rocks as far as I’m aware. They are just chilling in the forest covered in moss and dead leaves all the time.
I suspect they would have something to say if his family tried to develop the land though.
The solution to that is simple: Enforce an exact reconstruction to be paid by the owner in case of destruction of the original for protected-status buildings. That's usually more expensive than keeping the old building viable.
It's important to preserve modernist and brutalist architecture, so I can sort of see their point. I'm surprised there isn't another option in that specific case though (Can they not just add doors to the stairwell? Or do they oppose that too?)
Too much brutalist architecture is being covered in tacky "neo-classical" plaster facades.
Brutalism is an interesting architectural movement, but speaking as someone who lives in a city that has human-scale architecture, lots of trees and lots of eclectic housing, I understand Europeans who don’t want their cities dominated by remnants of the misanthropic planning regime that was imposed on them.
Half of our cities have buildings just like that. There is nothing special about them... just ugly socialist reinforced concrete buildings. I would understand if there were just a few left over, but there are large neighbourhoods just like that.
A lot of people thought that we should not preserve pre-war architecture, and that's why we now have a lot of modernist and brutalist architecture in its place.
I do agree that aesthetics and fitting into the neighborhood should come into the equation somewhere: the Barbican is probably worthy of preservation, some random shitty shoebox municipal library or housing estate probably isn't.
You don't need to preserve everything to remember history. If we never destroy old buildings, we'd have to abandon all our cities and find new places to build new cities, because we can't just keep living like it's the middle ages (or whatever time period you feel we need to preserve).
built by the government during socialist times, and built in the same was as pretty much all the other socialist buildings were built (reinforced concrete or from premade concrete blocks). A bunch of our cities were built during the socialist era, and pretty much all the buildings look the same, and some things (especially parking garages) are actually the same all over the country.
Its kind of a false equality. European remains are interesting because they are from a point that the people grew past, a flash in our culture. Aboriginal artifacts are equivalent to aborigines when they were encountered (even as they are now to an extent). I can go look at an Aboriginal, they are nothing special, there is no mystery to their leavings.
Is it possible that the teenagers did not know that the "scratchings" (for lack of a better term) were actually ancient and wise and sacred and enlightened aboriginal art?
That's not my point. Yes they were aware of the cave. But they wrote something over wavy lines in limestone that could actually pass for a natural feature.
In any case yes it's probably stupid for them to write something there without consulting with their elders.
If you mean the case in the article? Almost no chance. The drawings were deep in the tunnel system which itself is essentially in the middle of nowhere.
> The Mirning peoples had been in talks with the Australian government over needed changes to the site’s maintenance, asking for increased security and better access for the tribe to the caves. Currently, the tribe needs to request a key from the local environmental department to access the site, making it difficult for tribe members to visit and for the Mirning to protect the site.
This is absolutely infuriating and also kind of expected at the same time. It's the result of a culture that has permeated every Australian government agency at all levels.
Indeed. The Australian public service has been thoroughly hollowed out. For a couple of decades the incentives for talent have dried up. You can get a reading of this by watching a Senate Estimates session where senior Canberra bureaucrats are questioned. Seat-warmers, for the most part.
I guess this specific cave being so off limits might have fueled the idea of picking exactly that one, they might very well have been oblivious to the damage they were doing.
That makes me think the opposite, I broke into multiple caves as a (stupid) teenager and had no intention of doing anything destructive (besides underage drinking).
It’s a weird Australian idiom; “don’t look now, but there is a spider crawling up your leg”, I think from the ‘made you look’ game. Australia is full of weird idioms one of my favorite “yeah, nah” and “nah, yeah”
This is exceptionally sad. I've seen some of the cave art in other parts of Australia and it's mind-boggling that someone could be so horrible as to destroy it for their own entertainment.
I googled a bit and you would not recognize it as art - it's basically a bunch of parallel lines made by multiple people dragging their hand over it in a straight line.
The lines cover thousands of square meters of the walls, and the vandalism is of a small portion.
I suspect the vandals did not even realize they were overwriting anything.
Nobody lives nearby. The "Null" in Nullarbor isn't just for fun! The cave is in the middle of a desert with a population of 50 and the desert is on an isolated coastline with such centers of population as Border Village Roadhouse, Old Telegraph Station and Head of the Bight Lookout 100 km away.
Vandalising prehistoric rock art seems not so uncommon. I remember that I have seen a photo of GIs posing in front of rock art they vandalized during WW2 in northern Africa, but could not find the Web-site again. (Did someone else come across it and can provide a link?) While searching for it, I encountered photos showing vandalized rock art from Lybia: https://www.temehu.com/vandalised-rockart.htm
Sporadic, but deep and intense where it occurs .. and often to levels not appreciated by most Australians.
On the plus side many Australians have a deep respect for Aboriginals that's a mixture of genuine, idealised, etc.
You can see working evidence of Government working to correct aspects of racism in things such as the Coronial inquest into death of an indigenous 19-year-old K.Walker at the hands of police.
The uncovering of attitudes with the Territorial police toward aboriginal people has been slow but steady with more to come next month.
Mind you, not the first inquest or royal commision into aboriginal deaths in custody and I doubt it will be the last.
The most common thing we hear about aborigines is either "project delayed because ancient dump discovered" followed closely by "Aboriginal focused government program is expensive and ineffective". The most common attitude would be indifference, followed by a general irritation if something Aboriginal related "gets in the way".
Racism is hard to measure, it's fairly common, but most often taking the form of condescending paternalism, rather than actual negativity (not that this does not exist, but it's a tiny proportion).
It's a complex topic. Cosmopolitan white Australians generally tend to overcompensate on the virtue posturing front in regards to being pro black rights. Many not actually having ever met an indigenous member of our population. Rural whites tend to be more cynical as they have direct exposure to the effects of rampant alcoholism and crime in many indigenous communities.
I grew up around indigenous kids in Townsville several decades ago (shoes at our school were optional which I thought was a win for everyone). Honestly didn't consider the black kids any different, despite my actively racist parents.
The general consensus now is that the indigenous population is no doubt disadvantaged, but there's still an undercurrent of it being perceived as a self inflicted situation due to poor choices / victim mentality / whatever. A common story that does the rounds is of government provided housing having campfires lit in the living room.
I'd say it's a pretty universal opinion that all gov policy on the matter has been, and still is, ineffective or wasteful. I have no idea how you'd actually legislate effective change here though as it's most certainly not a matter of just throwing more money at the problem.
Yeah I would say its quite a big problem, lots of people have derogatory views about first nations peoples. Government basically uses marketing tactics to portray us all as a big inclusive happy family, but that couldn't be further from the truth.
> Government basically uses marketing tactics to portray us all as a big inclusive happy family, but that couldn't be further from the truth.
It's the same way in the US with native Americans. They teach you about the genocide committed. What they don't teach you is that the government aggression towards natives didn't actually "stop" until Kennedy (and even then I'm still in doubt)
I have a note to look for a good book about the American Indian Movement, it isn't something we were taught in school.
Earlier today I was looking for some information about geology in British Columbia and clicked a link about an abandoned town. The last line of the wikipedia entry was enough to give me a pause and look up more. The entire entry is:
> Kimsquit is a former village of the Nuxalk[1] at the mouth of the Dean River on the northeast side of Dean Channel in the Central Coast region of British Columbia, Canada.[2] Kemsquit Indian Reserve No. 1 is nearby at 52°49′00″N 126°58′00″W,[3] which is on Kimsquit Bay; Kimsquit Mountain is nearby.
> The village was shelled by the Royal Navy in 1877.[4]
The BC Geographical Names site includes a little more information:
> Kimsquit was the site of one of the last gunboat actions on the BC coast when, in 1877, HMS Rocket, under Lt Cdr Charles Harris, shelled and burned the Nut’l village. Several of its residents had allegedly murdered the survivors of the wreck of the George S Wright in Queen Charlotte Sound in 1873 – though his charge was never proven.
> What they don't teach you is that the government aggression towards natives didn't actually "stop" until Kennedy (and even then I'm still in doubt)
It is still very much in progress. Native American activists are not exaggerating when they describe reservations as third-world countries located in America. The sovereign status of first nations is in many ways used against them and prevents real help from arriving (e.g. the horrendous alcoholism and abuse that exists in some areas).
It was a big deal that US President Joe Biden named a person with indigenous background (Deb Haaland) to be Secretary of the Interior, as the Bureau of Indian Affairs exists under that function.
It depends where you are. Cairns is very different from Sydney, for example, with indigenous Australians being relatively better integrated (at least as far as I observed growing up there), although there are other race relations issues in Sydney also.
I am not an Australian but I've been to Australia and have Australian friends and colleagues. "Racism" is not quite the right word for what's been done to the aboriginals, it's more like the genocide committed against indigenous people in the Americas. Aboriginals are "Black" but that's beside the point - the British did a very thorough job trying to wipe them off the face of the planet. Think Trail of Tears level horror if you're familiar with US history.
If you want to read about things that are even more truly horrific, read up on the history of Tasmania. It was even worse there.
As to the second question, for most of Australia's history much of the most consequential pieces of racism were government policy. To get a sense of injustices inflicted on indigenous Australians, do some reading on the Stolen Generations (for a start).
It's a shame that this happened, but it's not unsurprising. If you put a probability of loss on every relic of antiquity, they multiply out to a substantial amount of destruction every year.
Ultimately it's a matter of cost. The cost to secure all of these pieces is extremely high. We won't be able to safeguard everything, but there are probably low hanging fruit in applying basic security measures to the items most at risk or of highest value.
The tragedy of heritage sites in Syria being blown up in the past few years by ISIS also comes to mind. Turkey plundered as much as possible before ISIS C4'd the sites.
Another comment suggests that the Mirning people wanted to volunteer to protect it, but the local government was restricting their access. So while cost may play a part, there was also an issue of lack of concern from the government.
There are liability issues with volunteers which make it impractical for government to agree to that formally. They essentially have to be contracted or employed in some form. It has been a rent seeking strategy in many instances.
A better strategy would be to properly fund the park ranger service, many of which are indigenous anyway, and commit to a specified level of surveillance and patrol. Rangers have powers to expel people from park areas and know how to liaise with police, but general cost cutting has reduced their effectiveness. Park rangers can also legitimately patrol cultural sites on private land without causing issues with farmers (cattle rustling is still a thing).
Historically this is why in the United States both nominal and actual penalties imposed in Federal criminal cases can be so swift and harsh: the Federal government doesn't want to be in the business of prosaic criminal law enforcement. (Ignoring the changes wrought by the War on Drugs.) But this doesn't work unless the population appreciates this. In the U.S. it's generally understood that Federal penalties tend be swifter and harsher even for mundane infractions; an American will definitely think longer about, for example, trespassing on Federal property than they will comparable private or state properties, even when there's less chance of being caught on the former than the latter.
Or perhaps what this really points to is granting or expanding indigenous groups' territorial and legal sovereignty over various lands and sites, so they can make these decisions themselves.
The development of cities is the origin of the word, it's not the current meaning, at best, it's one part of that meaning.
Pretty much all words work this way - see the joke thread under this one saying that the perpetrators in this case shouldn't be called vandals because that's originally the name of a specific German tribe.
The current colloquial definition of civilization almost certainly includes aboriginal society, and from what I can see from a quick online search, the current academic definition often does too - at least, I was able to find several references to Aboriginal civilization in a quick and casual search. However I also checked a few definitions of the word and it seems that's technically incorrect - large scale technical achievements (for example, but not exclusively, cities) are a requirement to be considered a civilization.
Looking a bit deeper, however, I did find some articles pointing out that this definition of civilization is a Eurocentric view and that we should broaden the official scope of the word to include Aboriginal culture since they had a very high level of development in other areas, just not the ones that led to building cities. That seems reasonable to me. It's important not to get hung up on the historical origin of words. Instead we should focus on the most useful definition for us modern humans who are hopefully working towards a more inclusive understanding of the world.
You lose the meaning of the word if it becomes too inclusive, and you'd simply have to use a new word to distinguish between societies that developed cities and other major technological advancements and those that did not. There were key and fundamental differences between pre-colonial Indigenous Australian nations and the way people lived in say, England, at the same time.
While the origin of the word itself is quite literally Eurocentric, being a judgement and description invented by Romans, the consensus has been for a long time that civilisation did not start in Europe which undermines the idea that it's simply a Eurocentric/racist idea.
You can also certainly argue that civilisation has major faults and ignored local indigenous knowledge in colonial contexts due to a misguided sense of superiority. If I may suggest a good book on this kind of thing, check out Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott. I don't buy into the idea that civilisation is inherently superior (although I do like a lot of the things that come with it) which is probably why I don't see a need to make the word more inclusive.
That pretty much boils down to Euro-centric judgement, early British, Dutch, and French reporting, different ideals of what constitutes "culture", destruction of effective but hard to see artifacts (wells, river and ocean fish traps, degradable townsites), etc.
"Culture" and "civilization" are different things. Chimpanzee tribes have culture, as do orcas and dolphins, but I don't see how you can call their societies "civilizations". The group of people here on HN have a "culture", but this is not a "civilization", it's just a website (though it's part of a civilization). Humans lived in hunter-gatherer tribes for hundreds of thousands of years or more before they invented agriculture and created what we now call "civilization". I really don't see how you could properly apply the term "civilization" to any group of people that live in tribes.
It's nice that we can agree that this come down to a Euro-centric judgement as to what constitutes "civilisation".
If it's a matter of long establish trade routes, borders, territory, stone housing, multi generational aqua culture infrastructure, agriculture, oral transmission of history, etc. then yes, civilised.
If it's a case of a bunch of euro colonisers going "Yeah, Nuh" then no, not civilised.
Not at all, you might like to reread and perhaps identify the point at which I assert that I "personally, should be able to decide the proper definition" of "civilised".
I merely pointed out that if one adopts a Euro-centric definition them, indeed, Australian Aboriginals are not civilised.
This is historically what happened when the English declared Terra Nullus - a concept that was later overturned.
If you're unsure of how to reason forward and contrast varying axioms and definitions then this HN thread might of some interest and shed some insight:
I know this is going to be an unpopular opinion but I don't really think this is THAT big of a deal. Yea, I know the art is old and all that and it really is unfortunate but its also the nature for all things to change.
Maybe in another 30k years, we'll be looking at the defacement as an amazing piece of art that tells the story of the current social climate at this point in time, or something along those lines.
As much as I hate to be in agreement with the down voters, I joined them on this.
Yes, it IS that big of a deal. Anything 30K years old made by humans is precious beyond measuring. We don't have written words that old. The stock of them is strictly limited and there won't be any more (unless someone discovers one somewhere else, which will be world news).
You're applying graffiti logic to a piece of cultural heritage because it happens to be a graffiti. That spirit is at the core of modern graffiti as an ephemeral medium by design - which is often why you'll find muralists tacitly tolerating the occasional bombing. However I think this particular piece of art had crossed into cultural heritage some time ago, and as such was a real dick move. Even using modern graffiti interpretation of the tenet, there are some pieces you just don't cross.
They could have put their vandalism on another wall that didn't have one of the rarest pieces of human expression. But no, they purposely went out of their way to destroy something extremely rare and utterly irreplaceable.
Yes, all things change, and eventually everything will be lost in the eventual heat death of the universe, and all human endeavour will be rendered pointless. But it's still a totally pointless and tragic waste.
> But no, they purposely went out of their way to destroy something extremely rare and utterly irreplaceable.
It's actually not so clear it was purposeful. If you didn't know there was art there, you would not be able to tell. It's very possible they just wanted to write some nonsense, and didn't realize they were overwriting anything significant.
The art looks like parallel lines made by dragging a hand over the surface, and it covers virtually every bit of the surface. The vandalism is only in a small part.
A more useful reaction is to teach people more history, so they would know about their heritage in the cave.
Artwork such as this is not just important from an artistic perspective, it's important from an archeological, historical, and paleontological perspective. There is a lot we have learned from ancient rock art and probably a lot that we have yet to learn. For example, by exampining the kinds of animals in ancient cave paintings paleontologists have been able to learn certain details about the appearance and behavior of now extinct megafauna.
Considering the security established around it and the knowledge of what it was, I find it hard to believe that enough photos, samples, etc, weren't taken before this vandalism to have gained or have the capacity to gain any knowledge these drawings may provide.
This is going to sound cynical or possibly even dismissive, but not all cave art is alike and it is possible that the cave in question wasn’t prioritized for study or preservation because it was common or relatively unremarkable from an archaeological perspective.
I’m not saying it was unworthy or worthless, but given the limited amount of resources and grant money to go around, this cave may simply have been neglected in favor of the others.
Having access to the original artifact itself is still important. We have a lot of second hand accounts of things that happened in the distant past but for many of these things, we are missing original accounts or original artifacts from the events in question. It would be nice to pick a wild example, to be able to see what the Ark of the Covenent actually looked like despite having a pretty good description of it, because we have no way of knowing (aside from faith I guess) how accurate the description is or what it leaves out and what that would tell us about the people who built it. Also, even the most complete description of an artifact is still bundled with the assumptions and presuppositions of those doing the describing. There may be things that future generations would wish to learn that we simply currently lack the grounding to explore.
There's a parellel in the early expeditions to Pompeii or Troy which did a lot to destroy the sites in question and destroyed a lot of knowledge in the process.
You'd be surprised, especially since the security wasn't as tight to keep them out. There aren't as many archeologists or anthropologists as they are other types of researchers out there.
This is correct. There are hundreds of archaeological sites world-wide that have yet to be excavated, simply because archaeologists haven't had time to excavate them all.
Out of interest, is that a matter of funding (not enough Archaeologist positions) or people actually going into the discipline? (Not enough applicants for positions)
I'm not sure but it's likely both. I'm a physicist and google says there are about 10k in the US while there are 5.3k archeologists in the US, and physics is already niche amongst the physical scientists. Compare for example, there are 33k biologists, and I assume that's only pure researchers, not doctors, lab techs, etc.
edit: corrected a number. Also, I looked at "employed" meaning full time or part time research vs. just having a PhD in it. Like physics PhDs are 58K which sounds about right, just few actually get a faculty position, temporary (post-doc, staff scientist) or otherwise.
As for why I say both, the number of positions tends to also put downward pressure on number of applicants I think and makes it more likely people who study it or consider studying it consider other fields or jobs before even applying.
I don't think the "big deal" is necessarily that it changed, but rather that it was vandalized. For example the Notre Dame fire was certainly very unfortunate and it would be better if it hadn't happened, but ... such things happen, and in that sense it's "not a big deal" (IMHO restoring it as an exact replica is a mistake).
Whether the vandalism was intentional is not entirely clear yet, but a natural disaster damaging or even destroying something is different from humans intentionally doing so through ignorance or malice.
Or let me put it this way: if some natural disaster destroys your car you'd be bummed out and curse at the world for a minute, and then move on as such things happen. The response would be different if I were to wreck your car with a baseball bat.
Suppose I dug up your grandmother's tombstone and destroyed it with a sledgehammer then proceeded to urinate on it. Then I told you that I don't really think it is that big of a deal, that your grandmother is old and all that but it really is unfortunate for all things to change. Perhaps I even said that that you should look at my urination as a defacement of your grandmother's tombstone as an amazing piece of art that tells the story of the current social climate at this point in time.
Never minding the fact that this is your grandmother we're talking about, can you think of any other reasons why this would be wrong? Can you think of any historical reasons why a 30k old artifact of visual communication might be noteworthy to preserve?
You’re comparing sone kind of relativism to something that is one of the earliest depictions of human art. I think it most cases the earliest form of art versus pedestrian vandalism will be more significant, pedantry aside.
Maybe in another 30k years people think the cave stuff beats anything Michelangelo did. And the only reason today we might feel different is because Michelangelo did his artwork only 500 years ago.
I'm not sure why you're bringing another poster into this or why you bring up a strawman Louvre. But it does seem like you are pretty committed to your belief that wiping out culture is okay as long as it is non-Western. I wish you well with this.
Do you genuinely not realize how absurd and downright offensive the strawmen you're constructing here are?
The cave we're talking about here are one of approximately 100,000 Aboriginal art sites scattered around Australia, and best we can tell was abandoned by all, including the Aboriginals who once lived there, for around 19,000 years until rediscovered in 1956. Yes, it would be nice to preserve it and the teenage edgelords who vandalized it should be punished, but their thoughtless graffiti isn't exactly genocide.
> Do you genuinely not realize how absurd and downright offensive the strawmen you're constructing here are?
Do you?
You haven't actually responded to any of the points I've made, you're simply insisting that because "there's a lot" of Aboriginal art sites, vandalizing them is somehow okay or not that big of a deal.
> their thoughtless graffiti isn't exactly genocide
Thoughtless destruction is pretty much the exact definition of genocide.
That makes absolutely no sense. Climate activists destroying art isn't right either.
When you get to the point that you feel it necessary to destroy things to advance your cause you've entered down the path of leaving behind your humanity.
If thoughtless destruction is just 'in the eye of the beholder' then the 9/11 bombers were simply wrong from one point of view and there is a world in which they were right to kill thousands of people - after all, the West has committed many crimes, yes?
Or we could say that the Trail of Tears was a smart decision to get productive land into the hands of people who knew what to do with it.
Cultural genocide IS a big deal. Whether it be by small disrespectful or ignorant acts such as this, or by structures and institutions of a dominant culture that form, allow, and perpetuate those acts.
I am with you. Obviously, it would be better if it had not happened from our perspective, but I am not going to lose any sleep over it. Visitors to the caves 30,000 years ago defaced the natural beauty. It is reveled and studied today. The parents or elders might have castigated them for vandalizing sacred grounds or admonished them for wasting time with such worthless endeavors. Today, we do the same.
Banksy largely gets a pass and is celebrated. In 1,000 years or 50, someone might be selling this new imagery on a t-shirt.
I found a fossil upper palate and strange humanoid teeth in Ohio during my teens. Sadly, it is lost forever. Considering it might be a rarity here and possibly significant to science, I wish it had never disappeared. I occasionally lose sleep over that. It meant something to me. That cave art means something to others. I can empathize in that context.
Pretty unfortunate and disrespectful. Sort of emblematic of Australian bogan culture however. For some reason Australian teenagers are among the worst in this regard. As someone that grew up in country Australia this really doesn't surprise me at all.
Contributing factor is that racism against indigenous Australians is somewhat fueled by the same sort of rhetoric that became popular in the Trump election campaign. Notably that the white poor feel they have been short-changed by legislation that they see unfairly benefits the non-white poor. Also the prior government was much like Trumps administration in they normalized a lot of right wing opinions that were previously looked down upon here, emboldening these twats.
Personally I don't feel a lot of love for either camp (the indigenous Australians I interacted with didn't do themselves any favors) but 30k yr old art is still art so it's disrespectful all the same.
> the indigenous Australians I interacted with didn't do themselves any favors
Aboriginal and Torres Straight islanders have experienced systemic, soul crushing racism for 300 years. It seems unfair to expect them to be cordial and have a nice discussion about it all.
I'm not talking about having a discussion with them. I'm talking about attending highschool in a country town with 30% indigenous population.
Also I'm acutely aware of what their people have endured. I personally don't feel like it justifies the behavior that I encountered in my schooling years.
As someone keenly aware of the history of Australian country towns I have to ask .. when you talk to the old people in town that were born in the 1920s and 1930s did any of them talk about going out and beating up or shooting "trouble making" fringe dwellers?
That was pretty commonplace right across Australia and leaves attitudes that persist for decades, not to mention the rounding up and confining by law to reservations, denial of access to employment, treatment as "welfare leeches" despite being denied access to trad. land, employment, and preyed upon by grog dealers that see aboriginal welfare checks the way a meth dealer sees marks.
This is how we arrive at Brigg's Bad Apples [3] .. and then we have the locals going out and running aboriginal kids over (2016) [1] or beating them to death (2022) [2] on suspicion of theft.
Not really? Then again my town was predominantly German Lutheran when it comes to the oldies and they are much more reserved. Even if they held those opinions they would keep them to themselves.
My experience with crime and indigenous folk was unfortunately much more personal. When I was ~13 a group of Aboriginal teenagers stole our car, proceeded to use it in a robbery and then left it burn out on the side of the highway. Thankfully we don't leave anything of value in our car. Those kids weren't much older than me, the eldest was 15 I think. They were caught but not charged or anything.. which I also think is a bit unfair given they already had prior history. Had I been caught doing the same thing I can almost guarantee I would have been punished severely if not for the fact I have no previous record at all.
If that was the only incident I could probably write it off as just a few bad apples but I had to go to school with them.
They were rude, disruptive and physically beat the shit out of people just for amusement assuming they actually went to school, much more likely would be to find them at the skate park drinking, smoking weed and vandalizing random public property.
If anything when I was growing up I couldn't understand why the oldies seemed to put up with them when if I was to even be caught having a beer with some mates underage I was treated like I had disrespected the entire community.
Growing older I begun to understand a bit, obviously at that age I didn't fully comprehend the extensive damage that had been done to their culture and I think that is a contributing factor why the older people in our community was more lenient on them than us.
It's an ongoing battle with real grievances behind it all for sure - and people that hunt and kill to survive, even today, don't pull back on the violence when it arises.
It's rare to scratch an old town Australia and not find covered over 'genocide' like past events, and the rights given in 60s and 70s were very much a double edge sword for many, "now you can vote and we see you as people and not 'native animals' anymore - now fuck off and don't get in our eyeline".
The cure, although not simple, is respect and understanding and recognition of that, from both sides - albeit how hard such positions can be to reach.
My first move in country when I'm staying for any time is to see who the families are and to talk to some and to watch and see people.
That tends to minimise any trouble down the road, but there are few easy answers as yet.
Throwaway, because this is unfortunately a contentious issue. You shouldn't get a pass for treating people like shit regardless of what your ancestors did or did not do, so it pains me to hear your story. I never had much trouble at school with anyone except for poor or 'cashed-up' bogans, and yes it was damn traumatising. I can see a lot of personal bias in the comments here - whether that's warranted or not I don't know but it's interesting to see how people reflect on indigenous matters.
I was schooled in multiple Australian states, and 'indigenous studies' was a mandatory class in all of them. I'm not sure how valuable they really are. Yes, I can make cave art and face paint with ochre. I can safely eat a few otherwise inedible looking plants in my backyard and the bush if I so choose. We got to pat crocodiles and learn languages that have probably since died out. (Fun fact: Some aboriginal languages are now mere heuristics completely made up by people in government/local municipality-run initiatives with next to no association to indigenous cultures but with an enormous sense of undeserved guilt).
Thanks to those classes I'm also aware of the various atrocities that took place, it was drummed into us constantly that we should feel personally responsible for what some dead or otherwise decrepit people did or did not do. Most Australians are migrants, even more so now than in decades past. Why should they be made to feel guilty or be 'short-changed' as you so put it? It's ridiculous and stifles humanity's progress if you ask me. I suppose that's my biased opinion.
Respect to all, but I don't believe indigenous issues have much to do with me or millions of other Australians. We didn't do anything wrong, why should we pay the price? It's got nothing to do with me or my family.
My personal opinion is that we should acknowledge what was done wrong unto them and do our best to support those that are disadvantaged through no fault of their own.
However I draw the line at ignoring or being more lenient when it comes to crime, poor behavior in schools, vandalism etc. Yes, bad stuff happened in the past but it shouldn't create license to be poor members of society forever.
There have been periods where we have seen this from different socioeconomic/racial groups and usually they moved past it. I remember when I was studying in Sydney there was a lot of angst about Vietnamese gangs in the South-West, over time that gave way to Vietnamese being welcomed and considered some of the most friendly communities in our society.
I hope we are to see similar take place with the Sudanese in Melbourne, currently characterized similarly to what the Vietnamese gangs were and still undergoing difficult integration into Australian society.
At it's core Australia is a multi-cultural nation, almost entirely composed of immigrants from all around the world. It's unfortunate that it came at the cost of the traditional lands of the indigenous Australians but they really should be able to see at this point that it's not race that holds them back, otherwise other disadvantaged and displaced would similarly have the same issues.
>Contributing factor is that racism against indigenous Australians is somewhat fueled by the same sort of rhetoric that became popular in the Trump election campaign.
indigenous Australians have been the victims of racism and racist action for centuries. Trump's effect on them -- if there is any at all -- is a small blip in their history.
Your attempt to shoe-horn your personal issues into this feels apparent to me.
If you weren't living here during this time you may not have been aware that Abbot + Morrison being elected resulted in a distinct change in what was considered "acceptable" discourse. The reality is it definitely emboldened the worst kind of people.
Whilst the Morrison government was pretty shit, the call of "aboriginals are getting more from Centrelink than me" is not at all a new one, and can't be attributed back to them. And comparing our government at the time to the Trump administration is laughable.
The "acceptable discourse" is no more right wing or conservative since Abbott. If anything, progressive voices are louder. You know Rudd was publicly against gay marriage as a sitting PM, and it was passed under a Liberal government, right?
If you want to see the evolution of our acceptable discourse, go read a Murdoch rag from 40 years ago. A few opinion pieces from The Herald in the 80s might let you see what "acceptable discourse" was then compared to now.
The assertion (one I personally believe) is it isn't really overt racism as much as it is one of dismissal and treatment of their concerns as less valid, for example, people in other comments saying "they just look like lines," which itself is dismissive of the fact that the indigenous people there found these markings as sacred themselves. The original sin lies with the government just not treating it as important as it should be, which comes down to them not seeing the markings as being as precious and worthy of protection as say a historic building that they'd likely protect to some degree. That dismissive attitude toward one piece of cultural heritage isn't overt racism (like hurling slurs, being disciminatory, etc) but it is treatment of serious concerns without the weight they deserve.
10 years of a person's life for a (really stupid) childish mistake? And of course when they get out of prison there will be serious career impact that will last their entire lives. What they did is horrifying, but barbarism can't be the right answer.
Bypassing security of the type described and being oblivious to why the security is there requires a type of autonomy and narcissism that exceeds "childish mistake".
Draconian punishments aren't a good way to protect ancient relics. It only takes one person to not even know what the site is, let alone the punishment, to ruin it forever. Also, it's cruel read-a-news-story desire for vengeance for damaging something you probably never even knew existed in the first place.
Pilbara mining blast confirmed to have destroyed 46,000yo sites of 'staggering' significance
> "Deeply troubled" traditional owners in the western Pilbara have had their worst fears confirmed after Rio Tinto detonated explosives near culturally significant sites dating back more than 46,000 years.
> A Rio Tinto spokesperson said blasting in Juukan Gorge occurred over the weekend, and on Tuesday the company confirmed its ancient rock shelters were destroyed.
Just to clear, this sort of fuckery has a direct impact on the HN tech world, there are many mapped resources on indigenous lands with mineral leases held by Rio Tinto and others.
( eg: $64 billion Resolution Copper Arizona for one )
If mining companies cannot keep promises to respectfully operate around cultural sites without damaging them .. then resistance to granting permissions to proceed drastically increases.
You can make the entire remote area off limits, patrol the boundary with armed law enforcement officers.
You can't climb Uluru (formerly known as Ayers Rock) as a tourist anymore. You can only look at it from miles away. And there are certain perspectives from which women can't look at it because the Aṉangu have rituals on certain parts of the rock that are exclusive to men, that women aren't even allowed to see.
The Australian government has begun a crackdown on white encroachment onto indigenous lands that is really quite welcome (and a model for emulation by other countries with significant indigenous populations like Canada, New Zealand, and the USA), though it seems to have arrived a bit too late.
Mate, there are limits of reasonableness and I think your suggestion would be crossing them. These sites are quite remote and scattered all over the continent.
Near where we live, apparently the Mormon community keeps going out and doing this. It’s becoming a major problem and is apparently leading to a lot of drama between the two communities. (My information is secondhand, but came from a national parks interpreter)
I highly doubt this is true due my deep understanding of Mormon culture and their ethical inclinations. You are spreading second hand gossip and casting an entire religion into disrepute.
Please share facts or reliable reporting if you have such.
Your understanding of modern Mormon culture and their modern ethical inclinations does not change history.
Any religion such as hinduism with their caste-based discrimination and mormonism with their skin-color-based discrimination is in their correct place when found in disrepute.
Please inform yourself before standing for such shameful and unethical/immoral belief system.
If you are going to accuse someone of certain acts, it is only proper to have evidence to support your claims. Otherwise, it is simply slander.
The Mormons could indeed be or have engaged in disagreeable acts (I wouldn't know myself, nor do I care), but claiming so while skirting your own duty to be truthful is not okay. "Apparently" and "second hand" don't fly with accusations.
Ah, I thought it was common knowledge; You don't, yet... Thank you for holding me to a higher standard.
I wrote not from second hand knowledge. Nor, is it apparently apparent.
Here is one source: (1).
If it this is insufficient for you, for it seems you do not trust me as a source on the subject, here is a quote from the Book of Mormon:
"And he had caused the cursing to come upon them, yea, even a sore cursing, because of their iniquity. For behold, they had hardened their hearts against him, that they had become like unto a flint; wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them."
(2 Nephi 5:21) (2)
I will not belabor the content of this quote, for it is, hopefully, now clearly racist.
[Addendum: I re-read the thread and it seems to me now you were answering to me who was answering to a bifurcation of the original comment. I agree the original commenter would ideally have substantiated his claims. So would have the answer, (to which I answered) which claimed that because they are Mormon then they should be spared of judgement or scrutiny. I disagree (but that is something else).
This whole thread could have been avoided if the term Mormon would have been omitted. Which, I believe would have been fine, since whether those communities were LDS or not, it would have been the same.]
A long time ago I worked in Four Corners area. Most of those towns, especially in Utah are Mormon towns where you, as a visitor, are expected to respect their beliefs about smoking, alcohol, etc and to limit your own public use of things like this. It's pretty easy to do especially if you're like me and don't smoke or drink in the first place but it can be a culture shock to some like a few of my coon-ass friends (Cajuns from Louisiana) who are used to every afternoon being a great time to have a beer and party after a hard day's work. Summer's hot and the beer is cold but it sucked having to go to the state liquor store to buy since it was usually right across the street from the sheriff's office. LOL
Anyway, I spent months working there and came to know quite a few of the people pretty well, spending time with them in the field and after a while being invited to their homes for meals and an opportunity to relax outside the work environment.
In much the same way that those rich people who buy large ranches that surround public land end up believing that they can rightfully control how the public, with the exception of anyone in their circle of well-heeled friends, can access and use that public land, many of these local people there control access to public lands and use those lands as an extension of their own privately owned properties. Ownership of access equates to control of access and they feel is equivalent to ownership of public lands.
As an example of this I will note the very common case where locals carry out grave-robbing of Moqui and Anasazi sites that are on public land but are only reasonably accessible by passage across their private land since their land tend to control access into the lower canyon areas.
Back during the Cold War a lot of these people worked in uranium mines in the area and had good incomes. They supplemented their incomes by collecting and selling artifacts, even things they knew had been collected illegally on public land, and had separate businesses which, to tourists passing through looked totally legitimate.
For some of them, including several people that I personally knew, this ended back in 2009 when they were busted for dealing in artifacts [0] that they had illegally collected on public lands. Over a period of decades they have been responsible for so much destruction of archaeological sites out there with no repercussions until they were brought down by those arrests.
When I was eventually invited to their house I saw artifacts scattered all over the place. They were big collectors. They claimed that it all came from caves, grainaries, or other sites on their land just down the canyon from their house. They were very discrete about where they got everything but I had the feeling that since our company used helicopters to get access to the areas where we worked that they were absorbing what they saw for future reference. It was common for the chopper pilots to give a short tour of new sites that they had found as they traversed the countryside moving men and equipment.
It was spectacular from the air and appeared inaccessible from the ground in many places.
I wasn't surprised to see those people brought to justice. In some ways they were just trying to get by in an area with no real economy outside tourism. However, they knew they were breaking laws and chose to ignore the damages they did in the process.
Like I mentioned in a different post, a lot of these people did not have or hold full-time jobs. They worked when they wanted just long enough to earn a grub stake to continue exploration for artifacts or to allow them an opportunity to work gold or mineral claims across the state lines in Colorado. Our turnover in that area could be 20% daily as we cycled through people who only wanted a quick paycheck.
I won't talk about how the Mormon church is operating here in Texas though there is certainly no shortage of unethical individuals with that group either.
EDIT: I don't want anyone to come away with the message that Mormon = bad. That is not true. The message should be that they do not have a monopoly on ethics, morals, or anything else and as a group they share all the same faults and failings common to other religions or cultures. They're just people. Some spend their lives doing good things, others don't.
I know this is the article's title, and that this may sound as a tangent, but whoever destroyed the cave drawings were definitely not Vandals:
> The Vandals were a Germanic people who first inhabited what is now southern Poland. They established Vandal kingdoms on the Iberian Peninsula, Mediterranean islands, and North Africa in the fifth century.
I really want to thank you for your reply. You took the time to point me to what you think is the right direction, i.e., the current meaning of the word.
However, I know I didn't mention this before, but my point was more subtle, even to me at the time as I was not totally aware on why I even bothered to point out the origin of the word.
Today, looking at your reply, I had it more clear. Here we have an article telling us about a terrible thing, that is, the destruction of an unrecoverable piece of history. And in that same article, the writer engages in a language that is just the result of a prejudice against an old group of people, namely the Vandals.
Why are the Vandals vandals? Because they destroyed parts of the Roman empire. So the Romans and their ways stand for what is considered correct, civilized, the apex of civilization, while all other peoples including the Vandals are not. The Vandals vandalize in the sense that they go against the established order.
But hidden in this assumption is the very idea that Romans acted differently from the Vandals. That they, when they imposed themselves on others, were somewhat more polished, more sophisticated. They were not. They vandalized, or should I say _romanized_, the Vandals and all other peoples around them.
So by using this language, even when we are not thinking about it, we end up perpetuating these hidden assumptions. The same could be said about using other words, but this word in particular made me feel this way when I read the article.
Anyway, thanks again for your comment. If I wasn't aware of the new meaning of the word, your comment would definitely improve my understanding. Unfortunately, I was just too obscure to really get my point across at the time.
. Growing up in Portugal, and learning about the Vandals in school, gave me a kind of feeling of relating more closely to that group. Partly because of this, they are not just historic trivia. I feel somewhat connected to them, though this may not be a real biological connection. I hope you get the gist of it.
> So by using this language, even when we are not thinking about it, we end up perpetuating these hidden assumptions.
It's definitely interesting to learn about the history behind the words we use. However words like these have long since lost their original meaning. I fail to see how it can perpetuate an assumption about the Vandals if most people don't even realize the word was originally referring to a group of people. Too much emphasis is placed these days on the words we use rather than the idea we're attempting to get across.
I understand that you feel a personal connection with the Vandals. But you can take comfort in the fact that nobody who uses that word in its current meaning is speaking ill of the Vandals as a people. And it gives you an opportunity to educate people about the history behind that word and the important lesson about hubris that we should learn from it. Because despite the negative connentation the word now has, wouldn't erasing the word from our language be another step towards forgetting about the Vandals and their history?
I feel I'm getting entangled in a discussion I'm not really a part of. I'm not a prescriptivist, I don't really care that much about the direction most of the language takes. I know it's alive; it has its own ways; it will change continuously despite all the efforts some may put behind keeping it in this or that way.
My point was just that it's a bit sad how what was nothing more than a prejudice, and an very biased one, got 'normalized' without us even being aware of it now.
And yes, your point is pretty valid.
> But you can take comfort in the fact that nobody who uses that word in its current meaning is speaking ill of the Vandals as a people.
That being quite true, that also shows how we are not really paying attention how language has been shaped by ideologies/prejudices/biases. In a way, it's also comforting to know that despite the way ideologues/those with prejudice try to shape our minds, all that gets silenced in the long run. Language has a life of its own.
> Because despite the negative connentation the word now has, wouldn't erasing the word from our language be another step towards forgetting about the Vandals and their history?
Well, one thing's for sure: no Vandal will feel vandalized by the historical vandalism of calling someone a vandal. May they all rest in peace.
Once again, thanks a lot for engaging. Your comments have been insightful. I really appreciate that.
But then on the other hand if you talk about cave drawings, historians aren't terribly far out of scope.
My reading of the headline went roughly like this: "Vandals destroy(ed) [..] cave drawings [oh, must have been a very interesting new archaeological approach if they could identify the the culture responsible for destruction] in Austra..[What?? How did they get th--oh, right]"
My suspicion is that whoever did this was emboldened when none of the climate change vandals who did similar things to paintings in museums got any real punishment. If they all got a year or two in prison instead, I don't think this would have happened.
I don’t think so. The climate change stunts didn’t actually destroy anything as they only glued themselves/threw soup on the glass coverings. If they were really looking at it they’d see the different between that and this sort of irreversible damage.
The article you linked to doesn't support your claim. It mentions 3 recent attacks, and all the paintings (Leonardo, Van Gogh, Vermeer) were apparently protected by glass and not damaged.
The climate change protestors did nothing wrong. We desperately need more attention on climate change or the human race will die out. There is literally nothing else anywhere near as important. Literally everything matters less.
To equate those two things is disingenuous and offensive.
I also agree that we desperately need more attention on climate change. In addition to that, to my knowledge no art was actually damaged by climate change protestors (who mostly projected soup on a glass, not directly on paintings...)
> ...Like the other targeted artworks, the painting was not damaged by the stunt...
This means that the artwork was not actually damaged, which is also exactly what the person you replied to said, so this article doesn't back up your claim at all
> We desperately need more attention on climate change or the human race will die out.
Imo renewable energy and and EVs are worthwhile because of air pollution, but we can do without the fearmongering about the world ending. Historically every time people have done that it was a load of BS
Yes and no. CFCs were going to end poorly without global action.
Venus would be inhabitable without a runaway greenhouse effect. That can happen here. No one knows the future. We should default on taking reasonable precautions.
Attention and support aren’t the same thing. Their stupid behaviour makes it less likely the general population will support climate action—few people want to be associated with these morons.
Our genetics probably won't die out. (There are a lot of us, and we're pretty resilient as a species.) But our culture? Our ideas, stories, values, history, even our technology stack? Those seem likely to be far more fragile that mere survival. I think "could be disruption" is selling it short - as a species, we've invested thousands of years into a particular pattern of fairly stable climate. Now, we're going to see that pattern change and simultaneously become less stable.
I don't think collapse of modern civilization within the next century is guaranteed, but it seems a dangerous level of possible.
That makes no sense. How is defacing art helping fight climate change? How does that reduce emissions or remove CO2 from the atmosphere? It doesn't. Also, it's terrible PR for anyone advocating for people to change behaviour in order to reduce their environmental impact. So, I think it's safe to say they are doing more harm than good.
> The painting is unharmed – the action was planned knowing it was properly protected. But there’s still been a huge outcry with people asking: why attack art? Why go after something as precious as human creativity, culture and beauty?
Tesla started 15 years ago, which is when it needed to to push through all the incredible issues needed to be solved to have electric cars being viable.
We are seeing great breakthroughs in renewables, and - partly thanks to Putin, ironically possibly the top attention-raiser - in nuclear, as burning gas beats burning coal, but not when someone else can turn off the tap.
People glueing their hands to priceless paintings do not feature in any of these decades-long progressions. They convince no one who isn't already convinced, and put everyone else off.
Compare it to European attitudes, eg. Lascaux where they closed off the cave completely and only allow tourists near the modern reconstruction.
We really do take 10k+ year old history for granted here.