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Sure. https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/12/infanticide-in-traditional-aboriginal-society/ https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/12/infanticide-in-trad... ht

• defrost 3y ago
  Good on you for the reply and the two sources, have an upvote for engaging :) Quadrant Well, there's your problem - it's not a science or anthropology journal it's an unabashedly conservative wank fest for overly educated private school chums that utterly hate the proles and Australian aborigines. > According to University of Michigan professor of anthropology Aram Yengoyan: Who has spent how much time in Australian aboriginal societies? > Contemporary European observers of nomadic, tribal Aborigines were in apparent agreement that about 30 per cent of new-born Aboriginal children were routinely killed. Again, no surprises there - there's an extremely long list of things that early European observers agreed upon about aborigines ... and most of them were garbage, worthless save as justification for having repeated massacres of local groups upset about being pushed from their lands. > According to Samuel Gason (1845–97), an early settler of the Flinders Ranges, writing of the Dieyerie tribe of the Cooper’s Creek area between South Australia and Queensland, “about thirty per cent are murdered by their mother at birth”. These are the same early settlers frequently associated with poisoning water holes and killing the very people they spent some time defaming as barbaric. The problem with all these accounts is that many aboriginal groups continued through until recent times with their traditional practices, in the Western Desert [1], far north Queensland, remote Kimberley regions (where I'm from) etc. and anthropologists didn't find much in the way of actual baby eating. What you have in the Quadrant article is a collection of all the European "Aboriginals are heathen scum" gossip of times past bundled up and presented as fact. Your second link, the paper on scihub by Collishaw (1978) is, umm, kind of long winded and noncommittal - it passively rejects the 30% figure thus: both reported that 30% of the children were killed at birth. These contrast with other reports from S.W. Australia of infrequent infanticide. and then never really commits to a frequency figure other than discussing at length the kinds of things that happened at much the same frequency in European countries at the same time - deformed children were often killed at birth, in hard times with not enough to eat weaker children would die to allow stronger children to survive. It's an odd paper that has a few sound sources (Spencer .. good source, but unsurprisingly had a strong European point of view) but largely appears to repeat a lot of settler gossip. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30500591 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30500591
  • jojobas 3y ago
    So, basically, anybody who wrote about it is a part of an evil white conspiracy engaging in a coordinated attack on the noble savage, and William Rubinstein is just as well a bigot by virtue of publishing in Quadrant. Unfortunately for this viewpoint, Paleolithic infanticide is firmly in the "why and how" stage of research, rather than "did it happen", welcome to sources here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_infanticidal_childrearing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_infanticidal_childrearin... It was a universal phenomenon not disputed by anyone of note, some societies (i.e. Marshall Islanders) developing a complicated system of who gets not to kill their child, and assuming Australian Aboriginals should be seen as a null hypothesis with no serious evidence to the contrary, and a fair amount of supporting evidence. As for contemporary Europeans, your claim is not supported by near exponential population growth ever since the Neolithic Revolution, as agricultural mothers didn't have to walk ~9km per day carrying all her non-walking babies. Children sure died left right and center, but infanticide was a no-no since at least the Middle Ages.
    • defrost 3y ago
      > So, basically, anybody who wrote about it is a part of an evil white conspiracy engaging in a coordinated attack on the noble savage, and William Rubinstein is just as well a bigot by virtue of publishing in Quadrant. If you say so - I'd have phrased it differently myself and pointed out the history of Quadrant articles on Australian Aboriginals that proved to be dubious at best. For anyone outside of Australia or unaware of Quadrant, its editor for many years was on a crusade to downplay European interactions with aboriginals. It's a massive multi volume kind of side issue to argue, see [1] [2] for airplane overview. As a general rule, skin colour aside, colonisers did have a tendancy to overstate their virtue at the expence of those whose land they appropriated; check in with India, Canada, much of Africa, etc. There's a bit of a pattern. Infanticide at low freqency being universal is correct - on that we agree, and Europe was just as prone as elsewhere, just as cannabilism was quite the fad in Europe a lot more recently than you might suspect if you're not already aware. Where we disagree is in this 30% of kids killed and some high percentage eaten nonsense. > Agricultural mothers didn't have to walk ~9km per day That sounds about right for anyone tending crops when planting or harvesting by hand and many mothers hand tie wraps for carrying their babies ... you, ahhh, did know that I trust? It also sounds as if you're under the delusion that Australian Aboriginals were nomadic on a daily basis and never settled down in one place for months at a time. You'd be quite wrong on that score. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Windschuttle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Windschuttle [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_wars