The Real History of ‘Civilisation’

By Craigus McVegas

After landing at Sydney Cove it took the British just 38 years to turn their own drinking water into a sewer. How civilised.

Pauline Hanson¹ reckons Aboriginal people are the most primitive race on Earth because they never invented the wheel.

So let’s have a look at some history and see who is really primitive.

In 1788, the First Fleet landed at a freshwater creek called the Tank Stream, clean water looked after by the Gadigal for thousands of years. Governors took a range of measures to protect the stream but none of it worked. By 1826, the colony had to abandon its own water supply because it had become an open sewer. Today it runs under the city as a stormwater drain.

Tens of thousands of years of care to keep that water clean, and 38 years of ‘civilisation’ to destroy it.

At Madjedbebe in Mirarr country, the scientific journal Nature puts people on this continent making ground-edge axes 65,000 years ago. Those axes are the oldest found anywhere on Earth. Somebody standing on this soil invented them.

At Budj Bim in Gunditjmara country there are stone channels, dams and weirs built to farm eels, running for at least 6,600 years. Engineers Australia rates it among the greatest engineering works ever built in this country. It is older than the pyramids and it still works.

65,000 years, and the water was still clean, the soil was still there, and the fish still plentiful. First Nations land management was so advanced that when the British colonists arrived, they didn’t even know what they were looking at.

Now let’s look at 238 years of Pauline’s ‘civilisation’. 100 native species have been wiped out for good, and Australia holds the worst mammal extinction record on the planet. In Queensland alone, hundreds of thousands of hectares of bush are bulldozed every year to run cattle, which is why Australia is the only wealthy country on the world’s list of deforestation hotspots.

The rivers are dying, the topsoil is stripped, the reefs are bleached, and the forests are burning. How civilised.

Europe got rich through the export of violence and theft, then built a story afterwards to make the violence sound like progress. Pauline is still regurgitating that story because without it, she is just an ignorant and bitter woman who inherited a stolen country, and is still trying to whitewash history.

Now, I already know how the comments will probably go. But if you learnt anything about Indigenous Australians at school, I’m curious, what was it?

Stand with First Nations people against these colonial lies. Share the facts in this post.²

1. Leader of far right *Aust political party One Nation, who recently said more just awful and completely wrong things. ↩︎
2. Craigus McVegas’ original post is on facebook in the Australians Against Racism group: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19QP1n89N5/. Cover image was accompanying the facebook post: source unknown but please advise if you know. ↩︎