Backbencher

Prof Isern has spent the first lecture period (all classes until last thursday) giving information about the native peoples of Australia and New Zealand. Unfortunately for me, I came into the class about a week late and had to play catch up to the lecture. When I first started taking my notes the subject was how the Aborigines changed their environment. The one piece of information that stuck with me was the idea of 'firestick farming'. I am a little curious as to where this information comes from. What evidence is provided to suggest the idea of burning the land and caring for it in this way? This is something I will have to explore on my own.
I find the Aborigine culture very interesting. The idea that they only committed to warfare if both sides were ready sounds very peculiar to me. Too bad the entire world today doesn't play that way.
The Maori are of interest to me because last spring I took a class by Kenneth Clark about 'Peoples of the Pacific'. The class focused more on the three major spheres of Oceania (Polynesia, Micronesia, & Macronesia), but also did touch on the topic of the Maori and New Zealand. The idea that the Maori came from the same people that populated many of the islands in the Pacific (in many waves) is very exciting seeing as how the cultures diverged. Not only culture, but language as well.
We also discussed the confrontations between Europeans and Aborigines. It's a shame that the European diseases affected the Aborigines in the quantities that they did, but it seems to be that way wherever the Europeans met new people. Which makes me think of the show Stargate SG-1. Nerdy, right? Well, in the television show (based on the movie) the team (led by Richard Dean Harris aka McGyver) travels to other planets in the Milky Way galaxy. They meet many different peoples on these planets but rarely does the idea of disease ever come into play. Maybe the writers of the show never studied European diseases and the effects on unprotected populations? Plot holes! But I digress.
It might have been wrong by our point of view today, for the Europeans to take the lands from the Aborigines like that, but this is only our perception and we cannot say that we were in the same culture as the Europeans and thus you have cultural relativism.
In review of the lecture, I learned some good information about the Australian and New Zealand native peoples and the first interactions between them and Europeans. There is some ideas brought up in the lecture that I will have to read more into myself.