Backbencher

For the first lecture, we went over the Aborigines and Maori of Australia and New Zealand. The Aborigines were a nomadic culture. The Maori were a culture that moved to different places each season of the year. They were farmers, and were very adaptable to the environment and new other cultures, such as the Europeans. The Aborigines were violently resistant against the Europeans. The Maori adapted many of the European cultures and used it against them.

Once the Europeans arrived to Australia and New Zealand, the megafauna were killed off or food. And therefore changed the landscape of the land. The race relations between the Euorpeans and the Aborigines and Maori were vasly different. The Aboriginal relations were bad. The Europeans destroyed the traditional cultures of the Aborigines, and killed them outright on the frontier. The children were kidnapped and put into a systme of adoptions. The Maori adapted to the European ways of living, and were synthetically resilent against the Europeans. The Maori had a population increase in the mid-20th century. This was due to the talk of a bi-cultural country and an immense pride in "model" race relations.

Author David Ausubel wrote the book The Fern and The Tiki. This book focused primarily on the race relations of both countries, and how they weren't as good as once believed. De facto segregation prevailed in both countries, and the white prejudices were pervasive towards both native culutres.