Counter-Currents
Triumph of the Nomads:
A Race-Realist View of the Australian Aborigines
Spencer J. Quinn
2,621 words
Geoffrey Blainey
Triumph of the Nomads: A History of Aboriginal Australia
Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1976
Is it possible to romanticize aboriginal peoples and still tell the truth about them?
Geoffrey Blainey did his best to find out with his absorbing study, Triumph of the Nomads. Despite being subtitled A History of Aboriginal Australia, it really is nothing of the sort. Triumph of the Nomads is an anthropological study which deals with the thirty-thousand-year existence of the aboriginal peoples on the Australian continent before the arrival and ascendance of European whites. As would be expected from an academic, Blainey romanticizes the aboriginals quite a bit. At the same time, however, he tells it like it is, and seems to keep ideology to a minimum. This makes Triumph of the Nomads interesting from both a historiographical as well as an anthropological standpoint. But for Dissident Right readers – especially the white ones – Blainey’s honesty and restraint renders a good deal of his work downright enlightening. Triumph of the Nomads is a potentially crucial red-pill in the ongoing culture wars of the early twenty-first century.
Blainey clearly has enthusiasm for the subject matter, and lovingly dwells upon the minutest of anthropological details. For example, he dedicates an entire chapter to the aboriginal diet, and enlightens us on topics such as how the aboriginals killed bandicoots, how they removed poison from yams, and how they ate the raw, still-living flesh of seals. He also entrusts his readers with the knowledge that Tasmanians tended to eat more meat and fish than continental aboriginals. In another chapter, he describes how what’s known as “petrological analysis” can glean the source of an aboriginal axe and trace its path across the continent over many years. As would be expected, several competing theories regarding the origin (or origins) of the aboriginals get lots of attention in Triumph of the Nomads, especially early on.
Despite what I have no doubt is sound science, much of this work goes beyond general interest and will appeal mostly to readers who are interested in either anthropology or Australia, or both. Survivalists planning a trek through the outback might also find much value in this book. For example, who wouldn’t want to know how the aboriginals used frogs to avoid dying of thirst in the desert?
There are also several passages that provide a sense of genuine wonder about aboriginal man. One in particular stands out: the mystery of the giant shell mounds found on various Australian shores. For centuries, the aboriginals had been discarding their empty shellfish shells in gigantic heaps, and – at least as of 1976, when this book was written – no one knew why. One mound in particular was over ten feet high and occupied half an acre. Another was dated to have begun in the seventh century.
Several themes stand out, however, that will not escape the notice of race-realists and others on the Dissident Right. Chapter seven, entitled “Birth and Death,” hits home with gruesome details about how aboriginals fought and killed each other – which they did often. Blainey estimates that only about three hundred thousand pre-colonization aboriginals ever occupied the continent at one time. One of the tricks to their survival as nomadic, stone-age, hunter-gatherers in the arid, isolated environment of Australia was to always keep their populations low. These people had few possessions, never having more than they could carry in their arms. As a result, women would never care for more than one small child at a time, since two would require two arms. This often resulted in the immediate killing of babies upon their mother’s death, as well as the automatic killing of one of a pair of twins at birth. Too many children would simply place a crippling burden on any family or tribe. It is this purely utilitarian logic which led to the appallingly high rates of abortion and infanticide among the aboriginals.
The logic, however, wasn’t always so utilitarian given the prevalence of ritual infanticide among the aboriginals. Selfishness had something to do with it as well. At one aboriginal settlement in 1948, several women supported continuing the high abortion rate because, as Blainey explains, “[T]hey said they wanted to play about with men, not babies.” At this same settlement, it was estimated that at least half the miscarriages were deliberately induced. Blainey did not have to include this information. He could have simply exonerated the aboriginals for bowing to ecological pressures, as other scholars have done – or simply avoided the topic entirely. While he admits that the ecological pressures to limit their population sizes were real, he introduces what he calls “heartless pressures” to explain the utter lack of remorse the aboriginals showed for the slaughter they engaged in.
He also estimates that between thirty to fifty percent of live aboriginal births ended in infanticide, and claims that infanticide was the strongest check on aboriginal populations. This is quite a claim, given how warlike the aboriginals really were. According to Blainey:
While epidemics came irregularly, armed fights were more an annual event in many parts of the continent and Tasmania. Violent death – by spearing or clubbing – was a restraint on the growth of population. Occasionally there were pitched battles or raids in which many men took part. The casualties might not, at first sight, seem large; but the death of two men in a battle involving forty meant that casualties were approaching the scale of the battle of the Somme. An aboriginal fight could absorb a large proportion of the adults within a radius of fifty miles – indeed could involve a far higher proportion of able-bodied adults than any war of the twentieth century could possibly involve.
Blainey’s conservative estimate of the annual aboriginal death rate was 1 in 270, but later admits that it could have been as high as 1 in 150. This is the same as Germany’s during the Second World War (the Soviet Union’s was 1 in 130), but we should remember that that war lasted only six years. Blainey’s calculations, however, involves every year. Indeed, his estimates of the sheer lethality of aboriginal warfare matches those of anthropologist Lawrence Keeley in his 1996 classic War Before Civilization. Although Keeley focused little on Australian aboriginals (and, unfortunately, seems not to have cited Triumph of the Nomads in his work), his description of warfare in pre-colonial Africa and South America is quite similar: frequent, low-level wars among primitives over large geographical areas leading to a much higher proportion of casualties than in war between civilized nations. And the warfare never ends.
One character who makes an appearance in Blainey’s work is William Buckley (not, of course, William F. Buckley). William Buckley – all six feet, six inches of him – was an English veteran of the Napoleonic Wars who in 1802 was convicted of stealing cloth in his home country, and sentenced to a convict settlement in Australia. He escaped and then spent over thirty years living among the aboriginals. His reminiscences comprise some of the earliest in-depth accounts of aboriginal life by Europeans, and are a real jaw-dropper when it comes to describing aboriginal war. He claimed that what he had seen was “much more frightful” than his experiences fighting the French in 1799.
I quote Blainey at length because it is truly gripping reading:
As a result of the battle two women in Buckley’s group were killed. That night his group took revenge: they ambushed the sleeping enemy, beating three to death, wounding several more and putting the remainder to flight. The wounded ones were not spared. They were beaten to death, said Buckley, and their legs and arms amputated with sharp shells, flints and stone tomahawks. . . .
This casualty list does not exhaust Buckley’s experience of aboriginal fighting. Near Mount Moriac and close to the present highway between Geelong and Colac, Buckley’s group was temporarily weakened by the absence of most of the men on a hunting trip. His group, being vulnerable, was suddenly attacked, and a boy and a girl were speared to death. A raid to take revenge was successful, killing two of the enemy. Not long after, camped on a freshwater lake, Buckley and his friends heard uproar across the water and next day found people massacred in their sleep or drowned after fleeing into the reed beds. How many women died is not recorded but Buckley saw ‘many women and children’ on the ground, ‘wounded and sadly mutilated’. Near the shores of Lake Modewarre three men were speared to death and a four-year-old child was brained in a further episode of revenge. In another fight, ostensibly over the possession of women, one woman was killed and two severely wounded by the riverside somewhere near the present Queen’s Park at Geelong. Later Buckley’s party was again attacked, and his oldest friend was killed, along with wife and son: in the next round three of the enemy tribe were killed. In recounting these and other fights between wandering bands Buckley tended to remember himself as an armed peacemaker, a conscientious objector, or war correspondent.
Another aspect of Triumph of the Nomads that deserves mention is how Blainey’s admiration for his subjects comes off as condescending. I’m sure he’s being sincere, but he heaps so much flattery on the aboriginals despite their manifest limitations that it’s easy to wonder if he’s trying a little too hard. One of Blainey’s more annoying habits is to constantly compare aboriginal life to European life, and describe it such that the aboriginals come out smelling like a rose. Case in point:
Cottages, fuel, and clothing represented the elimination of negatives more than the adding of positives. A fortunate peasant on the Prussian plain who, by work or by inheritance, possessed a cosy cottage and a large stock of firewood and warm clothes did not necessarily have more comfort than a naked aboriginal whose normal shelter at night was a windbreak and whose fuel was scattered deadwood.
Such a comparison is silly and useless given how the Prussian would have been a lot less comfortable than the aboriginal if they were to actually trade places for a day. From a relative standpoint, you can make the same comparisons between a grizzly bear and a Prussian. If one’s natural habit is to sleep on a pile of leaves under the stars next to a handful of glowing firesticks, of course one would be as comfortable as a white man sleeping on his bed and pillow. They don’t know anything different. But since the aboriginals lived in a constant state of war (or warre, as Hobbes would put it), one wonders how comfortable they really were when they had realistic chances of waking up in the morning facing the pointy ends of their enemies’ spears. At least in Europe, wars were typically declared ahead of time.
Sadly, Blainey eschews this kind of analysis in his effort to rehabilitate the aboriginal image. He also delivers high praise whenever he can, such as when he describes the aboriginals’ “astonishing knowledge of plants, animals, birds, and fish.” In some cases, I would imagine, his praise is justified, such as his reporting on the aboriginal knack for reading the clouds, Moon, and stars in order to accurately forecast the weather. He also mentions their physical gifts, as in for example how their physiques made them more suitable than whites for (ahem) spear-chucking. But to claim that the aboriginals had powerful “intellectual equipment” because they could distract a fleeing goanna by imitating the sound of a hawk, or because they could catch mussels with their toes while wading in the river, is pushing it a bit too far. (I knew of someone in college who could play “The Beautiful Blue Danube” with his armpits – is that evidence of powerful intellectual equipment?) And for several pages, Blainey goes on breathlessly about how the aboriginals hunted magpie geese, and endeavors to impress us with their determination, tactics, and organizational skills. Sure, as anthropology this is interesting. But Blainey fails to grasp that this sort of thing hardly classifies as a great accomplishment. After thirty thousand years of trial and error, one would hope that the aboriginals would have figured out how to hunt geese.
Blainey tips his condescending hand in another way, and it’s fascinating. He calls his book a history, yet in it he fails to mention more than four aboriginals by name. Imagine a proper history in which hardly any of the principals are mentioned by name! In the case of Triumph of the Nomads, here they are: 1) Billi-Billeri, a legitimately historical figure, although Blainey’s reference to him is fairly oblique; 2) one Tommy Came-last, whose big claim to fame was a passable Scottish accent; 3) one Dick-a-Dick, who traveled to England in 1868 and threw a cricket ball one hundred fourteen yards; and finally, 4) one Cole-be, a man who, upon the death of his wife, killed his infant child by dropping a large stone on it and then hastily buried it with its mother so the white onlookers wouldn’t realize what was going on. He later defended his actions by saying that without its mother, the baby was going to die anyway, so he might as well have gotten it over with as quickly as possible.
How can an author convince us of the aboriginal “gift for observation and deduction,” or argue that their abilities “suggest that our definition of intelligence or perception might be too narrow,” when the most noteworthy aboriginals he can come up with are these four? And speaking of intelligence, Blainey, like all other mainstream academics (even as far back as 1976), never really describes the shortcomings of the aboriginals. He goes into great detail regarding their strengths, mind you, but never for their failings. For example, when hypothesizing about why the aboriginals never picked up agriculture, he serves up the following humdinger:
We are also inclined to imagine that Cape York was probably too barren, too dry to support adequate gardens. It is tempting to conclude that even if aboriginals had wished to be gardeners, the harsh physical environment prevented them. This argument was dissected by Jack Golson. In the end he decided that the absence of gardens could not be explained by deficiencies in the environment, the absence of techniques or the scarcity of cultivable plants. Clearly the northern aboriginals must have preferred not to be gardeners.
Sure. It was all a matter of preference. Like the Sub-Saharan blacks knew about Madagascar, and knew how to build boats, but just preferred not to go there. Perhaps the reason for this preference against farming was that the aboriginals just didn’t have the IQ for it? It’s a question Blainey was too cowardly to ask, let alone answer, when he wrote his book.
This last passage is indicative not only of the weaknesses of Triumph of the Nomads but also its strengths. Geoffrey Blainey did do a lot of good work and is not afraid to lead the reader – especially Dissident Right readers – to politically incorrect, race-realist conclusions, even if he himself does not make them. This reticence, I believe, is part of his overarching effort to protect the aboriginals from the contempt of whites. And, fair dinkum on that. White people shouldn’t have contempt for the Australian aboriginals. If a white ethnostate ever gets formed on the Australian continent, semi-autonomous land should be set aside for the aboriginals, and their rights as indigenous people should be respected. At the same time, however, we shouldn’t have contempt for the Truth. Whites should recognize aboriginals for what they are and never let the Left or anyone else use them as weapons against us. On this front, Triumph of the Nomads is a triumph indeed.
Spencer J. Quinn is a frequent contributor to Counter-Currents and the author of the novel White Like You.
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20 comments
I knew they were primitive but holy Christ in heaven, I had no idea they were just killing their own babies left and right. Wow.
If you want to identify the primitive (and I agree), you need to look elsewhere in theIr outlook.
Exposure of newborns as a test was common from Sparta, to Rome in some ages, to many places in pre-Meiji Japan, just as a few where it was official policy to allow it, I am sure that it is easy to find many others.
I am not so sure that was always bad. Sure, the Aborogines were a little worse, not giving them a chance, just dashing their brains out on a rock, then likely eating the remains.
Do you think that insisting on the right to second- and third-trimester abortions is any better than the old custom of exposure as a test? Or abortion-clinic comlexes making a market in parts?
First-trimester, wanting to get rid of the terrible results of a rape, sure, in such cases, some others, but most of the latter should never have happened in the first place.
In the USA, at least, Planned Parenthood still has a market in the results.
Geoffrey Blainey is an interesting character. Once an esteemed historian and academic, in the 1980s he made the mistake of publicly criticising the level of Asian (i.e. oriental) immigration to Australia at the time, and as a result was lampooned, harassed and ultimately hounded out of his position at the University of Melbourne. He’s been pretty much a non-person ever since. The irony is, the level of Asian immigration then was nothing to compared to what it is now. Plus since the 1980s we’ve added all sorts of African, Middle-Eastern and Subcontinental groups to the immigration mix. Australia is fast becoming a true shit-hole – if only we had listened to the mild-mannered and eminently reasonable Professor Blainey!
Yes, Blainey deserves a lot of credit for being politically incorrect. I believe he also wrote a non-PC history of the world, much more recently than the book reviewed here. And I don’t fault him for highlighting the skills that Aborigines possessed. One of the strengths of the West used to be its clear-eyed evaluation of other cultures. It’s fascinating and very eye-opening to read accounts by explorers and others like William Buckley.
Judging by news reports, Aborigines have committed a tremendous amount of incest and other child abuse in their culture, in addition to the infanticide mentioned in this article. I don’t know how for back in time the incest and other child abuse is documented.
“The median IQ of the seventeen studies is 62 and represents the best estimate of the average intelligence of Australia’s Aborigines”
Blainey was excoriated by the globalist establishment in 1984 for publicly questioning the rate of Asian immigration.
He did so after becoming aware of the campaign by Australian National Action to ‘Stop the Asian Invasion.’ This campaign, which was mostly carried off with stickers, leaflets and graffiti – accompanied by the Eureka Flag symbol – was implemented by a relatively small cadre of nationalists, but was nevertheless very effective.
Blainey’s respectability as an academic meant that the issue of mass immigration from Asia was covered in mainstream media; the whole furore was subsequently called the ‘Blainey debate’.
This demonstrates the usefulness of those who, despite not being fully committed to nationalism, are willing to ask uncomfortable questions about the social consequences of policy that screws white people.
Blainey took the seed sown by National Action and – consciously or not – turned it into a national debate.
As for Aboriginal Australia, there’s a significant group in the Aboriginal community which seeks autonomy from white Australia. We should work with that group because their ethno-nationalism mirrors our own.
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It’s about pre-contact, I know, but does the book mention drug or alcohol use pre- or post-contact? My interest in North American Indians prompts this question.
Blainey is an interesting fgure and historical researcher, but this was published long before he was controversial.
More interesting, palaeontogical evidence that, even in the early stages of reaching the southern parts of the continent, more than one type of hominid was present, research on that has been strictly forbidden for many years, ‘sacred burial spaces’.
A little was published before the ban.
In the same time-frame, they wiped out the (fascinating) marsupial mega-fauna, and likely wiped out most of the forests and savannahs of the time of their arrival (having no idea of how to make fire, but able to work out how to carry embers and to set a fire to get game).
The place was quite green in many places before that. The extent of rainforest and of savannah was much wider.
Some say that the desertification was a result of changes during the ice ages, I say that it was a result of hominid activity, that is a contentious point, and serious discussion of it is taboo.
Since the place had no glaciation (OK, a very iittle in the plateau in the sth-east), it is hard to imagine how ice ages since their arrival had any effect.
A good description of the Australian Abbos and other primitive peoples can be found in Dr. Weston A. Price’s 1929 work “Nutrition And Physical Degeneration”.
The work it’s self and it’s general thesis is legit. But what was was an “added bonus” for myself was the unintentionally “racist” bits scattered throughout— to the extent that modern versions of the work put a disclaimer in the front.
It’s really funny because, Price was fairly liberal back in his day yet it still comes out when put through a modern lens.
On a lighter and irrelevant but entertaining note, Blainey wrote a controversial work about the origin of Australian Rules football.
He was claiming that it was descended from Rugby.
I think that his conclusions are more from his being from a private-school Rugby-Union background than anything else.
Watch Gaelic and Australian football. Sure, differences (shape of the ball and pitch, scoring), but much the same in principle.
They even were holding matches under composite rules. It seems that the Australians were annoying the Irish by acting as bullies, and annoying the Irish officials by trying to poach players.
This is not to say anything against Blainey in general, but I do not believe his work of history of the sport, at all.
This sounds like a fascinating book which should have a long future when we are able to study the philosophy of human evolution.
I think the problem with this article can be boiled down to the statement “grizzly bears can’t drive cars as the white man can”.
Let’s be clear here. This view is completely justified in the face of the absurdity and ridiculousness of modern academia, which in a fit of inane self righteousness attempts to equate Aboriginal and European cultures. Indeed grizzly bears can’t drive, or for that matter even fathom the concept of a car, and if saying that makes me a speciest in someone’s eye, then so be it.
However to go back on the analogy, grizzly bears can swim, hunt, forage and distinguish smells far better than the white man. In many situations involving its survival in the wilderness it can be said that the grizzly is more intelligent than the average man, in the sense that it can select the plane of activity that benefits its survival and well being much better than someone for whom this environment is foreign. When we remove the comparison, it is perfectly acceptable to exhibit astonishment and wonder at some aspects of grizzly bear behavior that are so evidently unique from our own.
The same applies to the Aboriginals. They are significant because:
-They were incredibly well adapted to survive in the hostile and resource scarce Australian environment.
-Unlike modern western man who used technological means to reshape the world, they lived more or less in harmony with nature. This of course meant that the central moral precept of ours (thou shalt not kill) had no application for them, because nature places no moral quandary on murder.
-Their “religious” beliefs were founded upon an intimate and innate experience of the natural world, much devoid of the psychic abstractions and archetypal symbolism of civilized faiths, where it is difficult to distinguish between reality and analogy (which all religious arguments often boil down to).
-Last but not least, they were much closer in habit of being to the original, “primordial” state of man, at least as we envision it from the modern point of view.
More than a few on the right seem to idolize the “barbaric”, primordial style of living, deprived of moral quandaries which stifle the human will, freed from the material restrictions imposed by hated Judeo-Christian (in their opinion at least) civilization.
But this is it! The Aboriginal essentially lives a live that is closer in essence to the tribal ancient Germanic or Slav. Civilization imposes a price on absolute moral choice. Things like mercantilism, centralized religion, statecraft and law-morality arise from civilized urban centers. Even when the character of civilization is pagan, as was in the case of the Hellenic world, many of its precepts were just as bureacratic, hypocritical and restrictive as we’ve come to observe of the Christian European world. There is a very systemic reason as to why this is necessarily so, but I won’t go into it now, as it is a subject of sociology, although I do believe that the smarter counter currents reader won’t need much explanation. Neither am I trying to say that civilization is superior to barbarism or that human beings must necessarily make a choice between the two opposing ends of the pole.
I am considerably more sympathetic to Evola’s point of view (though I understand that many find it absurd) that so called “primitives” are a product of contingent devolution and degeneration, and their in-depth study might perhaps offer glimpses and hints as to the basis of their origins. To those who find this notion preposterous, consider the cultural and mental development of modern descendants of the Maya or Toltecs, or for that matter the modern Copts, or the Indians compared to the height of civilized cultures that they descended from. Thus, if we are to value primordial pagan tribalism that was signatory of the ur-Aryan, then we need to respect or at least acknowledge the significance of the Aboriginal as a parallel image, perhaps a very faint one, of what that form of being represented.
This of course is not some call for polit-correctness on behalf of the right. We can perfectly appreciate the fine points of Aboriginal lifestyle without falling into the cultural relativist trap which fails to accord for the differences in quality and order of sentience of the races.
Please don’t romanticize these people. Of the races living in Australia, whites are far more “adapted” to living in the Outback than Aborigines. What you really mean is that they are adapted to living there with low intelligence, short life expectancies, etc. Clinging to life in a harsh environment is an achievement compared to dying there, I suppose. How many tens of thousands of years have they been there? How many of them did pass their bloodlines on to the present? How quickly did the white man “adapt” to living much better in that terrain? Harmony with nature? That just means falling victim to nature. Starving in droughts, dying of diseases, etc. that white people have overcome.
Hi Hafez,
Saying that the aboriginals lived in harmony with nature is incorrect given how much of it they burned. Blainey dedicates an entire chapter on this topic. The aboriginals constantly had fire and they constantly burned trees, bushes, grasses, etc. He describes how 5 aboriginal boys once burned up 9 square miles of bush in order to capture 3 wild cats.
I considered including this in my review but didn’t for space considerations.
Damnit, how can a frog save you from dying of thirst? That’s what I want to know.
Frogs and toads are very versatile creatures. Some species can be used as waterbags, pregnancy tests and hallucinogenics.
A collection of documented cases of cannibalism amongst the Aborigines with sources listed.
http://www.heretical.com/cannibal/australi.html
Leftists in general and especially those working in Govt services apologize for and romanticize the Aboriginals. And despite that 99% of these leftists are atheists, they idolize Aboriginal “spirituality,” and commission “smoking ceremonies” in public buildings to remove “evil spirits”.
In addition to general social security benefits, $30 billion is spent PA on Aboriginal programs. Alcoholism is epidemic. Petrol-sniffing is epidemic. Tax-funded housing is destroyed by them. Domestic violence is rife. Many of them lie drunk in city streets. Alcoholic brain damage probably takes the IQ down a further 10-15 points.
The ABC and leftists in general take in upon themselves to infuse the spirit of victimhood into those with the capacity for socio-political thought. Surprise, surprise, they blame whitey for their plight.
A couple of good things – many of those Aboriginals (those sober enough to GAF) opposed same sex marriage and of those few sober males, they tend to be pretty good at sportsball – for what that is worth.
The most interesting thing about Australian Aborigines is they’re widely considered to be the ugliest people in the world. Facially, they come closest to resembling pre-homo sapien species of primates. Some negroes with a bit of White admixture can have attractive facial features. But Australian Aborigines have such repellant facial features that even White race-mixing cannot hide them.
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