My country is Ancient. It has the oldest continuous civilisation on the planet. There were people living here in the last century pretty much the way their ancestors did at least 50,000 years ago. Today most of them live dramatically different, ‘westernised’ lives although they desperately still cling to some ancient ways and culture, be it in modern cities, or in the deepest outback country.
They were people OF the land though, they never owned land – it owned them and they respected it. Their temples, their sacred places, were never man-made, they were the mountain ranges, the hidden valleys in sandstone cliffs, the river beds (that may dry up completely for months at a time) the waterholes and the rocks.
They were nomadic also, never settling down in one spot long enough to ‘bury’ any memories. They did not build over those of the ones who lived there before. Archaeology here is finding 10,000 year old rock paintings in caves, digging up bones or tools in sand dunes or around long dried up lakes, and the odd 50 million year old fossil in a cliff that used to be underwater but is now a 1000 foot above sea level. Occasionally it is carefully cutting back a riverbank where the gradual erosion in a river bend has revealed the bones of an ancestor that could either be 300 or 30,000 years old.
But my continent country now has a history of 2 successive civilisations, the second of which started just a couple of hundred years ago – way too short a time frame for us to have much of our own civilisation to ‘dig up’.
But it has been enough time to ‘bury’ quite a bit of the previous one, at least the human parts of it.
BLob's Blog 
Thank you sharing! I know Australia is a beautiful country. I lived there for 3 years as a child with my parents and I have fond memories of it. We were in Canberra. MZ
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Cool! 🙂
Canberra is of course where most of our federal politicians spend their time 0 locally that gives it a bad rap! ;-). It has some of the best and some of the worst things about Australia… like can get very very hot and very very cold! 😉
Thanks for letting me know. 🙂
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I was trying to guess where you live. Australia! Seems so exotic and remote. I would love to visit your country sometime.
Yes, we in the US have a horrible track record of our interactions with the Native Americans. Their civilization existed for tens of thousands of years and was pretty much obliterated in a few hundred. Their attitude about the land is one we certainly would do well to adopt.
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There is certainly a degree of similarity in our 2 countries past history and ‘development’ 😉
(both before and after colonisation).
If you do get the chance to visit i’m sure you’ll feel very welcome, almost a home away from home. 🙂
It’s a pretty big place though – you may need more than one trip to do it justice and see all it’s different faces! 🙂
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We are the same, in that.
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I definitely see the similarities.
Much of Australia has not been developed/settled by Europeans however so we graciously passed something called The Mabo Act (after a native who fought for indigenous land rights – Eddie Mabo).
This gives those Aborigines who can demonstrate an ongoing history of land occupation the rights to ‘own’ the land. In such areas (which can be vast areas larger than Texas in some cases!) Australian citizens need Aboriginal permission to enter or use the land and it’s content.
The tourist site Uluru pictured, in the Heart of our country, is one such region.
Do Native reservations have Native ownership or are they granted under Government
largesse?
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