Upon the recommendation of Jerry, guide and driver in West Arnhemland, we watched on DVD the four-part ABC documentary ‘First Footprints.‘ * * * * Highly recommended.
It is an engrossing examination of aboriginal life on Greater and Lesser Australia since time immemorial. Well, to be more specific, the 60,000 years before 1788.
It is part travelogue and part archeology with some ethnography, too, all with a light touch that lets the evidence speak for itself.
What the evidence shows is how aboriginals coped with the changing climate and the coming of the first boat people from England. They dealt with rising sea levels, epic droughts, and a changing fauna. Resilience is the word that applies.
It explores the development and transfer of technology within and among the peoples of Australia through time. A technological breakthrough in one part of Australia would be communicated to another part, three thousand kilometers away in a very few years, evidence of a continuous trade across tribal boundaries. If Joe figured out how to chip a stone tool in Sydney harbor, that knowledge would be in evidence in Geraldton within a generation.
There was so much that new and surprising to me that I cannot recount it here. We will have to watch them all again one day the better to take it in.
There is evidence of fish farming and settled agriculture in Greater Australia before the rising waters separated New Guinea and the Torres Islands. How did these primitive people do it before those advanced Europeans arrived to save their souls with gun powder and whiskey? I mimic the dreaded Erich van Däniken. The answer, Erich, is that they figured it out.
I though EvD several times on our recent tours through West Arnhemland and Kakadu because of the elongated human figures I saw in some rock art.
I could hear the egregious Swiss voice saying, ‘What else could they be but aliens!’ The answer Erich is artistic license. Check with Salvador Dali about watches!
‘First Footprints’ is also very informative about rock art, though it is never enough to satisfy me. I wanted more detail about the cosmology and less ‘Isn’t it great!’ expostulations from our guides. While I am carping, I would also have liked more about the social organization that underlay the art, the fish farming, the trade, and so on. Though perhaps we just don’t know, though surely everyone at the ABC knows how to speculate with pompous authority, or is that skill confined only to the News department.
The URL is http://www.abc.net.au/tv/firstfootprints/
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