Adelaide 26 Pt. I

Finally, finally I found what I was looking for. The search is over, at least on the surface. At the South Australian Museum, which is really a natural history museum, I finally came across a larger exhibition on Aboriginal peoples. But slowly, and from the beginning.

I woke up in the morning and thought I would go to a market again, a proper market hall. It had rained heavily during the night, and today it kept going all day. On the way to the market I got completely soaked. The market itself, unfortunately not Melbourne quality: very tight, not much variety, it felt packed. So I stepped back out and headed through the rain towards the station and the museum. The right kind of day for it.

If I have to compare Adelaide with Sydney or Melbourne, it gives me a slightly sleepy impression. Fewer construction sites, less hustle, less of that constant background hum, smaller, more provincial. Many buildings look as if they have been standing there forever, and in some places the city feels like it is not moving at the same pace as the others. This is of course only my impression from a few days: in Sydney and Melbourne I see many more people with an Asian background in the street scene, in Adelaide noticeably fewer. I mention this because for me it is part of the different feel of the city. Why Adelaide ranks so highly in so many “most liveable” lists was not immediately obvious to me that day. Maybe it will become clearer. Who knows?

The museum was free again. Downstairs, among the dinosaurs and the preserved animals, it was full of people. The exhibition on Aboriginal peoples was much less visited. How could it be otherwise?

What did I learn there? That the ancestors of today’s Aboriginal peoples arrived in Australia a very long time ago, roughly in the range of 50,000 to 65,000 years. The museum said 50,000; more recent studies sometimes discuss older timeframes. Of course, land bridges and sea crossings from Southeast Asia are part of the discussion, depending on what sea levels looked like at the time. What I found particularly interesting is that genetic work suggests that after this early settlement there was relatively little additional gene flow from outside over very long periods, and at the same time there are strong regional patterns within Australia. This was never a homogeneous population. Aboriginal peoples are not a single homogeneous unit. We are talking about many Nations and language groups with their own territories, languages, legal systems, and traditions. Numbers like 250 around 1850 are often mentioned. Before colonisation, very many languages were spoken in Australia, often said to be in the hundreds, with many dialects. Trade took place across long distances, as finds suggest, but relatedness patterns often look regional, which is exactly what you would expect across large distances. If you want to go deeper, genetics shows that patterns on the Y chromosome can differ from those in mitochondrial DNA. That can hint at sex biased mobility, but it is not something you can explain cleanly in one sentence, and certainly not something that would have been the same everywhere. I just notice how quickly one slides into a false sense of certainty, because it sounds so objective and therefore so true, when in reality it was likely far more complex.

To shorten it: the material technologies of many Aboriginal Nations were historically predominantly lithic, meaning stone based, and they did not develop an Indigenous metallurgy. At the same time, people lived as hunters, gatherers and fishers, in some regions with very intensive land and resource management. Socially, these were highly complex, strongly institutionalised communities with pronounced systems of law, kinship and knowledge, just without statehood in the Eurasian sense. Standing in front of the objects, weapons, tools, finds, you see a lot of wood, bone or stone, plus ropes, nets, traps. And that is exactly where it becomes obvious: no metal does not mean less complex, it means different pathways, different priorities, different optimisation.

What impressed me massively was how knowledge was passed on. Not primarily written down, but performed, through oral transmission, storytelling, song, ritual, embedded in specific places, seasons and social roles. And there were memory supports that are simultaneously visual: string figures, the kind of finger loop games where motifs and sequences become visible, or sand drawings that show relationships, paths, tracks, ancestral figures and events as temporary diagrams. This is not just illustration. It is part of teaching itself. Content is coupled to action, rhythm, repetition and community, and that is how it stays stable across generations.

And then hunting. Tracking and stalking, reading the ground, moving in, everything very practical, very physical, very quiet. Spears, clubs, boomerangs, nets and traps, all of it is there as objects, but the real core is the knowledge behind them: animal behaviour, weather, water, timing.

And yes, I did not forget the part about poisons. That genuinely fascinated me. The museum said, in essence, that Aboriginal hunters used toxic plants by adding them in certain situations to waterholes in order to stupefy animals drinking there and make them easier to catch. It was said to be particularly effective on emus. At the same time, there was the very practical point that while a waterhole was treated in that way, people themselves had to rely on other water sources. For me that is one of those moments that shows how fine grained this environmental knowledge must have been: not only the effect, but consequences and logistics. The label also mentioned Duboisia species as an example, and that it is toxic to humans as well. So there is nothing romantic about it. It is concrete, careful, and responsibility bound.

Then the famous boomerang. The most common and functionally most important type is not the returning boomerang, but the non returning one, usually heavier and optimised for impact and range. The returning boomerang is lighter and designed aerodynamically so that, through lift on its airfoil like arms, spin and gyroscopic precession, it flies a circular path and can return close to the thrower. What matters is the combination of shape, curvature, profile, centre of mass, throwing technique, release angle, spin, force, and wind.

And even though the returning one is often the lighter one, it can really hurt when it hits. I saw that once as a child. Back then in Utzsetten we had a boy, I think his name was Andreas, a tinkerer and builder, model sailboat, kite, boomerang, everything. He got irritated easily, and we were kids, he did not always have it easy with us. One day he threw his homemade boomerang in the field. It always came back, even when he was briefly distracted. At some point he did not pay attention for a moment, and the boomerang slammed into his head. It hurt just watching it.

Why does it return? Because in flight it behaves like a rotating system of two small airplane wings. The airfoil shape generates lift, and the fast spin stabilises it like a gyroscope. Because one arm moves faster relative to the air than the other, lift becomes asymmetric, and through precession that turns into a curve. Spin again, the gyroscope, the electron, this rotation principle that keeps showing up in physics.

And then there is this social layer that I had not really had on my radar. Roles, rules, responsibilities, and even with something as basic as eating and sharing, nothing is random. One label gave an example for turtle hunting: the catch is divided by roles, one arm to this person, the other arm to that one, the skipper gets a leg, and the person who actually spears the turtle gets the head. It sounds almost banal at first, but at its core it is order and social logic.

I could write much more, but one last topic has to go in, at least briefly. Dreaming, often translated as Dreamtime, does not mean dreams in the psychological sense. It refers to a whole system of creation and origin narratives, law, ethics, social order, and knowledge of Country, land as relationship and responsibility. It is less a closed past than an ongoing layer that explains why places, animals, people and rules are the way they are, and how one should behave towards them. A “Dreaming person” is, simplified, someone who through ancestry, belonging and initiation is connected to certain Dreamings, often linked to places, totems, songs and ceremonies. From that follow rights and obligations, who may tell which stories, who is responsible for which places, who carries which ceremonies. Details differ strongly from Nation to Nation and are often deliberately not fully public. Complex.

And the blog image, the Yuendumu School Doors. They show Tjukurrpa, Dreaming, in a form that can be shared publicly. Not decoration, but a visual system that shows Country as a web of places, paths, events and responsibility. You can read the motifs like a map, with places and tracks, and at the same time like a narrative. And the link to song is, for me, the key: Songlines connect stations along routes, keep knowledge about orientation, seasons and resources alive, and ensure that stories are remembered accurately across generations. The fact that these were real school doors and carry scratches and graffiti makes them even stronger to me. It is not only art, it is knowledge, everyday life, a time document. And that Warlpiri Elders deliberately painted them on school doors in 1983 feels like a clear statement: school as a place of learning, and Tjukurrpa as knowledge that stands alongside it and belongs there. I think of the drawings on our own school doors, in that sense.