Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by aussiesnack 1310 days ago
Thanks for the film ref. Like most Australians, my knowledge of indigenous folk is patchy at best - a few books and local interactions here and there. I have actually helped hunt/collect & eat goanna (not bad) and turtle eggs (yuck), which probably puts me a bit outside of the Australian norm. But in truth the indigenous world is an entirely 'foreign' culture to most of us. As is European culture to many indigenous folk outside the cities - I came here from the UK and I remember being asked in Cape York whether or not we hunted much Dugong where I came from.
1 comments

We're in a time when only recently > 50% of the human population became urbanised.

Even in the UK and the EU you're barely a generation away from "what do you hunt" being a fair and reasonable question - hunting boar in a European forest in the 1940s was not altogether uncommon, catching birds, fish, rabbits, et al in the countryside to supplement scarce food was absolutely a wartime pursuit in the UK.

As a Kimberley kid I grew up spear fishing [1] from boats, jetties, reefs, and the shore as part and parcel of a life building radios to listen in on US submarine comms stations further down the coast and reverse engineer early NAVSTAR signals .. thanks to a lot of post war types that felt the need to stay in touch with world tensions and events in the region from Vietnam through to PNG.

Can't complain about a healthy lifestyle with plenty of fresh food :-)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gmCX7R-W4c

I've only been up to that part of the world once. Seems like an enviable place to have grown up.