By Morgan Brigg and Mary Graham
Australia is facing the dual challenge of climate change and global financial crisis. Politicians and policy-makers work overtime on these issues, but is modern culture up to the challenge? And what might an ancient culture be able to contribute at this juncture?
Recent policy commentary suggests that Aborigines, far from contributing to the resolution of our big issues, should be the recipients of modern wisdom. Commentators proclaim that Aborigines need to get on board with the Australian mainstream, to take up employment opportunities and join the "real economy".
A striking instance of this commentary came from Warren Mundine in a speech to the Bennelong Society in 2005. Mundine evoked Charles Darwin to suggest that Aborigines need to adapt to compete in a harsh world, that they must change to survive.
Yet what Mundine and other champions of the mainstream miss is that Aborigines have been constantly and rapidly adapting to European presence. In everyday life Aborigines have innovated to negotiate introduced European legal, political and administrative systems. They have excelled in the arts, literature and in scientific and sporting domains. Most speak fluent English.
This is not to say that all is well in Aboriginal communities, but we need only ask how many other Australians are fluent in an Aboriginal language to point out a basic hypocrisy.
Many European Australians simply don't see rapid Aboriginal change and innovation, while some Aborigines note that European Australians have been slow to adapt to their new environment.
The parlous state of the Murray-Darling river system is perhaps the most recognisable marker of European inability to recognise and adapt quickly to changed conditions. Much of the mainstream persists, in the face of climate change and the global financial crisis, with a view of happiness as the accumulation of things. We remain entranced by four-wheel-drives and flatscreen televisions, the energy intensive and climate-warming entrapments of the 21st Century.
The West's claimed civilisational superiority and its capacity to change and progress are, of course, routinely linked with science. Yet recent decades show the inability of our political institutions and leaders to either hear or respond to climate science with sufficient speed or conviction.
Industrialisation, science and technology are incredibly powerful and have brought amazing benefits to much of humanity. But in civilisation terms the West is somewhat like a petulant teenager - all power and bluster but lacking in maturity and wisdom.
As we face the global financial crisis and climate change, it is the mainstream that has some serious adapting to do. At this time we would do well to put aside civilisational hubris and enter into a conversation between indigenous people and other Australians about relationships among ourselves and with our environment.
There are no simple or easy lessons, and we need to steer well clear of simplistic prescriptions about "closeness to the Earth" of the type peddled by mystical New Agers. But we do have a unique opportunity to plot our future through a truly remarkable exchange between the world's oldest living culture and its most mobile and powerful culture.
Aboriginal Australia offers a chance to reflect on the competitive and survivalist ethos that drives much mainstream thinking about politics, economics and society. Many economists see individual competitiveness, linked with the naturalist ideas of the world as a harsh place requiring a struggle for survival, as the engine of inventiveness and productivity.
But Aborigines show - and we show each other, as evidenced in the recent outpouring of support after the Victorian bushfires - that it is possible to relate to each other and to the landscape in other than a survivalist mode. Meanwhile, the economistic survivalist ethos breeds a savagery as demonstrated in recent reports of executive bonus payouts even as corporations were failing or receiving taxpayer support.
We all, especially whitefellas, need to change to survive in the face of serious challenge. We can better achieve this change through a reflective exchange that draws upon Aboriginal thought to ask serious questions about the sort of society in which we want to live.
Morgan Brigg is a lecturer in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland. Mary Graham is a Kombumerri woman and community development worker from the Gold Coast.