Boodja is the word for country of the Noongar people, who are the original occupiers, owners, and guardians of the South West region of Western Australia. I am not knowledgeable about Noongar society or culture, nor do I know Noongar language, but I am now determined to learn.
Why now? I have lived in Western Australia most of my life, since my family migrated here some 55 years ago when I was just 15 years old. In all that time I was never told, nor did I read, the true story of what happened as this part of Australia was colonised by, predominantly, British people. A couple of months ago however I heard about a book by Bill Gammage: _The Biggest Estate on Earth – How Aborigines Made Australia_. I haven’t finished reading the book yet but I already got the message: up until 1788 the plants and animals of Australia were being carefully and systematically looked after by the native peoples – *everywhere*! Everywhere that is was feasible for people to visit and hunt and collect, was being managed according to principles and ecological practices based on local knowledge gained over the course of thousands of years! The evidence that Bill Gammage has collected, based on the journals, drawings, and paintings of early colonists and ‘explorers’ shows this convincingly. The layout of the distributions of forest boundaries, woodlands, grasslands, free standing shade trees, etc, could only have been achieved by following plans of sequential procedures over very long periods of time, hundreds of years in some cases.
What this indicates is an intimate knowledge in each local area, of the land, of the climate, and of the properties and requirements of all the species which could be detected by the naked senses. Furthermore this accumulated knowledge was being passed down from each generation to the next within a rather stable social system that had learned how to avoid problems of in-breeding of localised populations and to avoid or fairly solve the problems which always arise as the outcomes of injustice! Furthermore, as Australia is a continent subject to intermittent extremes of variation of both heat and rainfall amongst the otherwise more predictable patterns , the First Nations societies were clearly knowledgeable and adaptable enough to cope with such extremes.
There is much to be said about this but one thing worth thinking about IMO is that Australian First Nation societies were not class societies in the way that colonial societies were and still are. In fact as far as I can see it is only the native peoples around the world who were living on *and as part of* their country who are, or were, truly classless peoples. I think this is important because as far as I can see there is no class society on Earth which has successfully worked out how to prevent persons without empathy from getting into positions of power.
IMO the *vast* majority of social problems, wars, and other instances of social disintegration around the world, and throughout ‘history’, can be linked to the lack of empathy of powerful people. In particular to those who are/were able to avoid taking responsibility for the dysfunction of their actions and the disasters which resulted and/or the unfair and cruelly dysfunctional actions they encouraged or induced other people to do. IMO this is no small issue in this Modern Era
Thus, my question is what can I learn from Noongar Boodja?
Optimistic realism 