Aboriginal Engineering – Technologies for an Enduring ...indigenousengineering.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Indigeno… · Aboriginal engineers as it is still evident in the

Aboriginal Engineering – Technologies for an Enduring Civilisation

An introductory text

Elyssebeth Leigh Cat Kutay

Expansion of processes developed by OLT Projects

Engineering Across Cultures and Indigenous Online Cultural Teaching and Sharing

http://indigenousengineering.org.au/

AboriginalEngineering—Technologiesforanenduringcivilisation 1

Introduction Engineering is a problem based practically oriented discipline, whose practitioners aim to find effective solutions to social, technical and economic challenges. While it is a relatively new academic discipline, it has a long heritage of practical contributions to human social development. Modern engineering is simple a modern manifestation of principles and practices relying on the application of methodologies and analyses evolved to solve both new and very old problems. All civilisations have their own approaches to engineering practices, as evidenced by the variety of constructed forms visible in different countries and cultures, and in Australia we have visual evidence of two remarkably different approaches to engineering.

In Australia we have visual evidence of two remarkably different approaches to engineering. In our cities, towns, mines and roads we see proof of the human capacity to construct almost anything the mind can conceive of. All this reflects a set of western or European concepts about civilisation and relationships with the land on which such things are built. The knowledge to do all this first arrived on this land in 1788 and its products, as they mark the landscape, obscure, damage and often deny the existence of a far older form of engineering whose traditions are counted in the thousands of years, not just centuries. This much older engineering produced and developed resources for a civilisation whose knowledges, built over eons, had created ways of living in harmony with the land. Moreover, it had done so in such a manner that most of its marks went unnoticed, or were misinterpreted, by European observers whose writings were the first print based records of what had been achieved. This booklet provides a point of departure for exploration about that engineering, although the research which initiated this work had quite a different goal from the direction explored here. That initial work was undertaken for two Office of Teaching and Learning (OLT) projects. The first project was focusing on how to attract more Indigenous students to a career in modern engineering. It began unwittingly with an implicitly deficit model, which was itself eventually challenged and changed by the work of the project team. As work on that project proceeded, the phrase ‘Aboriginal Engineering’ was used frequently eventually leading to a repeatedly asked question along the lines of what engineering did Aboriginal people have? In hindsight it is hard to comprehend how the obvious answer to that question. That is, that Aboriginal civilisation had the same kind of engineering knowledge as other cultures, just expressed differently, took so long to emerge. Engineering, is after all just a practical means of providing for human security and comfort, as well as social and structural needs, however the phrase ‘Aboriginal Engineering’ seemed unused and unfamiliar and did not sit comfortably with many who engaged with the project team. Interestingly those who questioned and occasionally objected to the use of the phrase included both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. This work hopes to open all eyes to the fascinating work of Aboriginal engineers as it is still evident in the landscape, and as it can be inferred from artefacts of all kinds, within whose shape and form lies the evidence of embedded engineering knowledge of an enduring civilisation. The second OLT project was around storytelling as knowledge sharing to link community practise with academia to provide the resources for students to engage with Indigenous knowledge’s. In acknowledgement that this booklet is to be launched in Sydney we would like to start with an acknowledgement of the engineering of the Dharug, Dharawal and Gadigal people of the Sydney Cove (Waran) with a story of Barangaroo. This is the story of a woman who was skilled in fishing and the use of fire. She was someone who “knew fire”.


If western science tried to explain fire, the ripples and motion, where it will travel at any time, how much it will burn, how hot it will get, this would involve more non-linear equations than our present computer power could make any sense of. By breaking science down into component parts and trying to build this up again in to the whole system, we loose the picture of how things work. When confronted with a complex problem, engineers will approximate, reduce the variables, simplify the equations. The process is to extract the patterns in the system, the main features and how things generally interact. It in in this pattern matching that we start to approach the holistic methods used by Aboriginal teaching. If we had used an Aboriginal approach when the smog enveloped Sydney from the coal-fired power stations, we would have worked to develop clean energy long before the present crisis. The Aboriginal approach incorporates sustainability: economic, environmental and social sustainability; from the start of any design or project.


Chapter 1

Exploring Intersections In effect that OLT project opened the doors to an exploration of the intersections among a number of apparently different concepts, including engineering practices and current retellings of Australian history as well as widely held erroneous beliefs about culture, and similarities and difference among ways of thinking. Current paradigms around such factors appear settled and familiar. So this work may, for a while, unsettle many taken for granted assumptions and beliefs. Such taken for granted assumptions include a belief that Aboriginal people did not have any knowledge of engineering or other staples of western/European society including maths. In actual fact what was built and manufactured on this island continent in the era prior to the arrival of European culture was both sophisticated and enduring, as well as clearly sustaining a complex civilisation for millennia. It was also regrettably alien to arriving European observers and settlers, being unrecognisable as engineering and technology, and therefore largely invisible to them. European perceptions of terms like ‘built’ and ‘manufactured’ simply did not encompass what they were observing, and as those perspectives began to dominate, Aboriginal knowledges and evidence of engineering achievements were gradually harder to find, with some being lost to sight. In the 21st century perspectives on the value of sustainable approaches to maintaining quality of life are changing, at the same time as there is increasing an acknowledgement that there was a great deal of knowledge present on the Australian continent, despite earlier denials. This change is being accompanied by a growing awareness of, and appreciation for, the benefits to be gained from considering how to use that knowledge intelligently and sensitively for the good of all. For example, when western science sets out to explain a phenomena, it usually begins with an approach that separates the collective whole into component parts, in order to build it up again into this whole system. This is an approach that quickly loses sight of the holistic picture of how things work. That is, when confronted with complex problems, western oriented engineers tend to approximate, reduce variables, simplify equations, and focus on the component parts first. Yet, when the aim is to track systemic patterns, identify key features and map interactions among variables, it eventually finds a need to apply holistic methods of analysis. When it does so it is then veering towards use of the kinds of approaches familiar to traditional Aboriginal engineering and social practices. Rather than exploring the component parts in order to understand the whole, these operate from a holistic environmental and social sustainability perspective, beginning with acknowledgement of connections to country as the origin and source of knowledge and life. At this intersection of concepts and approaches lies this work. It began by seeking ways to engage indigenous youth with a western/European conception of engineering, and now sits squarely in a meeting place where practices from two quite different traditions of engineering are being collocated in order to learn from and about each other.


Engineering Concepts Engineers are concerned with finding technical and economically effective solutions to concrete challenges. This work wanted to contribute to realisation of a society in which engineers understand the practicalities and realities of good engineering practice, while also acknowledging that they must address these practicalities within the context and limitations of important and urgent socio-cultural requirements and expectations. Engineers Australia, which is the peak professional body for engineers in Australia, wants to ensure that all engineering graduates:

…. take responsibility for …. all interactions between the technical system and the context within which it functions. The latter includes understanding the requirements of clients, wide ranging stakeholders and of society as a whole. (Engineers Australia, 2014)

This involves thinking about engineering activity as based on abstracting useful information, making judgments and solving problems with the aid of certain important principles. Those principles, and how they influence judgments, are embedded in the engineer’s worldview, and/or the worldview of their clients. The contention of this work is that western/European and Aboriginal Australian worldviews are/were so different as to produce engineering solutions that appear to bear little or no resemblance to each other. Recognition of this underlies the importance of ensuring that engineers, and the broader society in which they work, appreciate (and take account of) the diversity of possible perspectives on engineering tasks and solutions. For instance, learning to consider multiple paths to achieving desired goals may show how to incorporate sustainability principles into civil engineering projects. Consider the alternative solutions to the problem of planning for, and completing, transport of the ochre mined at Wilga Mai in Western Australia (DPI, 2007) across the parched inland landscape to its users living in central Australia. The Aboriginal engineering solution was use of songlines and petroglyphs to map the route and guide travellers, who moved within the landscape. The more recent, equivalent western solution was to build the Indian Pacific railroad and miles of paved road on top of the landscape. The scope of the transport problem addressed by each solution is undoubtedly different, however the nature of the Aboriginal solution suggests how Aboriginal civilisation have survived and prospered in the same kind of country as that in which Burke and Wills died. Histories of engineering fail to mention the engineering activities of the Australian Aboriginal civilization, either before or after the arrival of European influences. Geoffrey Blainey’s most recent volume of Australian history (Blainey, 2015) is the first widely available text to make mention of engineering activities in the era prior to the arrival of European residents (although he uses the term ‘technologies’ rather than ‘engineering’). This project intends to collect oral and written histories and analyses of the engineering of Aboriginal civilisation together with an understanding of the social principles and beliefs shaping their nature and appearance.


Challenging the deficit view of Aboriginal civilisation Many current Australian government policies are based on a deficit view of Aboriginal civilisation and therefore aim to address gaps in social indicators in such matters as health, housing and education by making Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians more alike. Rather than suggesting a meeting of equal minds the belief underlying this goals suggests that everything will be all right once western/European standards and practices are shared by all. This is rooted in a belief that cultural disparity exists as a hierarchy in which some cultures are superior (better or more developed) than others, and that the solution to disparity lies in actions enabling everyone to be the same by moving everyone up to western/European standards. Thus a top down approach is applied to achieving parity through promoting initiatives advocating, implicitly and explicitly, that one culture’s knowledge as superior to the other’s and working to close the gap by enforcing on everyone, a blanket imposition of the artefacts and beliefs of the assumption of superior culture. However, that gap indicates the presence of a social divide based on misunderstandings about essential cultural differences, and creates an implicit perspective that all aspects of Aboriginal Australia need paternalistic support (Pholi el al. 2009, Vass 2012). The outcome of such a belief is the position that there is no need to understand, or even consider, the quality and depth of knowledge which had helped ensure survival of a safe, comfortable and productive civilisation for many thousands of years before the current era. To redress the errors of such a belief involves methods of engagement with Aboriginal knowledges that enable full and equal participation, without a stigma of deficiency. Such methods must be built on engagement by all participants on equal terms, and demolishing the attitude that an Aboriginal heritage is less than that of other societies. Because this work began in engineering education its propositions concern insights about what can be learned by adding Aboriginal perspectives to processes and solutions within that discipline. Valuing Aboriginal perspectives, and replacing out-dated perceptions of cultural inequity with a deeply respectful curiosity, positions Aboriginal knowledges as equal with, and simultaneously different from, other knowledges. Enacting this changed perspective helps to reveal that a key cause of the deficit gap is a lack of knowledge of each by the other. It resides in a general ignorance of Aboriginal beliefs and values, as well as a widespread lack of understanding of the practices, knowledges and principles underlying Aboriginal Australia’s enduring civilization (Pascoe 2014, Gammage, 2011). One way to make the change is to acknowledge the omission of Aboriginal engineering knowledge from current teaching practices, as well as the comparative absence of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students from Engineering classrooms. The change will also be sustained by intentional learning about, and sharing of information concerning the true nature of aboriginal engineering as it was practiced across the entire continent in diverse, and yet fundamentally similar, ways.


What is Aboriginal Engineering? We noted above that engineering is a problem-based practically oriented discipline, whose practitioners are concerned with finding the most technically and economically effective solutions to practical challenges. Described this way the practice of engineering is as integral to Aboriginal communities as to any other form of human society, and despite beliefs to the contrary must have been integral to sustaining life and community through the eons before European travellers arrived. Given this the question is more realistically phrased as 'what evidence is there for aboriginal engineering?' Engineers Australia has long acknowledged that such evidence is present at the place called Budj Bim (see website) in present day Victoria. At this site is evidence of sophisticated Aboriginal engineering practices indicating that differences between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal engineering reside more in the way that philosophical and societal beliefs influence and shape achievements, technical skills and attributes of each groups of engineers. In a paper on this subject Jordan (2012) provides an interesting definition of engineering, drawn up by the founders of the Institute of Civil Engineers. At the time of establishing their Institute they described

“ . . . the profession of a civil engineer, [as] directing the great sources of power in Nature for the use and convenience of man.”

A comparable definition of Aboriginal engineering practices as proposed as part of the work of the OLT project, defines them as

Working with Country to develop and sustain safe and healthy living for the group, in a manner that enacts a custodial role for humans of caring for Country, including minimally disturbing the land. (Leigh et al 2014)

Of the many potential differences between these two characterizations of engineering, this work is primarily concerned with the nature of the relationship with, and consequent conceptualising of, the physical character of Nature. The Institute of Civil Engineers was explicit about Nature as existing for humanity’s ‘use and convenience’. How that version of humanity responds to Nature via the work of engineers is evident in the highly visible constructions, reshaping and reworking of the physical landscape for human purposes. Land is there to be owned, worked and used as convenient. This sense of using Nature for man’s purposes is vastly different from Aboriginal concepts of relationship with Nature. These reflect a set of expectations about human custodianship of Nature as described by Mary Graham (2008) in this way:

The land is a sacred entity, not property or real estate; it is the great mother of all humanity. The Dreaming is a combination of meaning (about life and all reality), and an action guide to living. The two most important kinds of relationship in life are, firstly, those between land and people and, secondly, those amongst people themselves, the second being always contingent upon the first.

Aboriginal engineers faced the same kinds of problems as any other engineers, about transport, housing, health and the generation and preparation of food, they simply chose to address them in quite a different manner. In doing so they caused less harm to Nature, while also appearing to be less developed in their thinking, at least as assessed by early European arrivals. This initial view has been maintained by subsequent generations, who are encouraged to observe Aboriginal lifestyle and social practices solely through the lens of western/European conditions and expectations. In real terms, however, Aboriginal


engineering creates desired outcomes (safety, comfort, sustenance etc.) similar to other forms of engineering, using quite different strategies and principles, leading to misperceptions about both the quality of the work and the apparent paucity of the thinking behind it. The philosophical stance influencing Aboriginal engineering does not separate humanity and country considering them as indivisible when framing actions for problem-solving aiming to deliver sustainable solutions. Skuthorpe and Sveiby (2006) demonstrate that it does this in ways that 21st century engineering is only just beginning to appreciate. This does not mean that Aboriginal people did not construct, mine, harvest or otherwise disturb the course of Nature. They did and in many quite spectacularly large formats. For example. Aboriginal engineers used stone to build extensive fish traps at Budj Bim in Victoria and Brewarrina in NSW, (McNiven & Bell, 2010; Jordan, 2012 and First Footprints) to name but two of many such places both acknowledged and unrecognised around the Australian coastline, and inland waterways. Similarly, there were extensive Aboriginal mining operations across Australia (DPI 2007). A major example of such activity occurred at Wilgie Mia, a deep and extensive mine in the Weld Range of Western Australia which was in continuous use for about 8,000 years (WA) producing an estimated 42,000 tons of ochre. Aboriginal people also regularly undertook intensive agricultural activity (Pascoe, 2014; Goonrey, 2012) in contrast with the mistaken belief that theirs was a hunter/gather society. An intimate understanding of the properties and behaviours of a wide range of material is evidenced in the skill of weaving baskets and producing deadly accurate spears and boomerangs (Sculthorpe et al, 2015). However, considerations, that were strictly adhered to, in regard to managing such resources, drew on custodial principles rather than ownership oriented beliefs. Aboriginal engineering is engineering based on societal principles and beliefs that accounted for country as an integral owner and contributor to solutions for problems of survival and sustainment, rather than merely an inert canvas on which clever resolutions are superimposed.

What happened to Aboriginal engineering knowledge What is now better understand is that when one culture is witness to another culture in action, interpretation of the actor’s culture will be based not on neutral analysis but on assumptions embedded in the observer’s own culture. To illustrate how this happens Pascoe (p17, 2014) provides the following description written by a European observer in the late 1800’s

As soon as the water began to run back to the river the blacks used to make a fence across these channels of thin sticks stuck upright, and close enough to prevent the fish going through, but leaving a space at one side, however, so that when the fish found they could not get through the fence, they naturally made for the opening. A black would sit near the opening and just behind him a tough stick about ten feet long was stuck in the ground with the thick end down. To the thin end of this rod was attached a line with a noose at the other end; a wooden peg was fixed under the water at the opening in the fence to which this noose was caught, and when the fish made a dart to go through the opening he was caught by the gills, his force undid the loop from the peg, and the spring of the stick threw the fish over the head of the black, who would then in a most lazy manner reach back his hand, undo the fish, and set the loop again on the peg. I have often heard of the indolence of the blacks and soon came to the conclusion after watching a blackfellow catch fish in such a lazy way, that what I had heard was perfectly true

In the 21st century less jaundiced thinking allows this passage to reveal the cleverness of the


engineering being described, while discounting biased beliefs about laziness. However, assumptions, such as those of this observer, help explain the lack of explicit records about, and respect for, Aboriginal engineering in Australian history. Dame Mary Gilmore’s (Gilmore webpage) is one voice that went against this trend. There is another, equally compelling reason why knowledge about aboriginal engineering is not easily accessed or readily available. As it became harder for Aboriginal groups to sustain their way of life in the face of encroaching take overs of their land the knowledge went underground. Knowledge holders, those not killed by disease or conflict, found it harder to ensure that what they knew could be safely passed on to the next generations. It is likely that they found many different ways of avoiding the imminent demise of their vital knowledges. And only when to time is right can this knowledge begin to re-emerge. As Skuthorpe and Sveiby (2006) demonstrate so powerfully, Aboriginal Australia was a knowledge society long before the west recognised such a concept. Providing a safe environment for such knowledges to remerge will involve building positive perceptions about the value of that knowledge, encouraging respect for its beauty and power to sustain, as well recognition of the fact that it has long been denied denigrated.

The Enduring Engineering project aims to collect, record and promulgate this knowledge for use by future generations, and especially future engineers. This is starting with this booklet, and its associated web site, is just a beginning.

Equal representation of ways of knowing Bringing this enduring knowledge to general consciousness and achieving acceptance is clearly going to be a complex process. Seeking a way to frame thinking about such knowledge the OLT team developed the Venn diagram shown in Figure 1. That search was about finding a way to acknowledge barriers, value different perspectives and provide for diversity of thinking, and promote a unique approach to encouraging recognition of Aboriginal engineering within the context of formal academic disciplines. The diagram presents three crucial aspects of the wider picture, identified as ‘Western ways of knowing’, ‘Engineering ways of knowing’ and ‘Aboriginal ways of knowing’. The convention in drawing a Venn diagram is to represent the circles as having equal dimensions, but this is only convention and not a fact. Appreciating that ‘essentially all models are wrong and some are useful’ (Box and Draper, 1987) the image represents a way of describing relationships among different ways of thinking. It does not quantify anything. In creating the image, the intention is to identify and share awareness of unique, and shared, characteristics among three ways of knowing, including:

• Engineers learn to deal with the world, and with human problems, in a manner that uniquely creates an Engineering way of knowing. Non-engineers who encountering engineering in action can testify to its difference from other disciplinary training.

• Western social constructs, are built on a particular way of knowing that informs such diverse aspects as language formation, social relationships and connection to the physical world. This is, of course, manifested differently in specific sub-groups called (for example) English, German, Romanian, etc.

• Aboriginal social constructs, also built on a particular way of knowing, similarly inform the languages, relationships and connections to the physical world. This too is manifested differently across the 200+ Aboriginal (pre contact) Australian nations.

• Western ways knowing and Engineering ways of knowing overlap to create buildings, roads, mines and technical processes etc. that we occupy and see around us today.


• Western ways of knowing and Aboriginal ways of knowing share features including creation and use of language and social relationships (albeit with different outcomes).

• Aboriginal was of knowing and Engineering ways of knowing overlap to create buildings, structures, transport routes and processes of an elegant sufficiency, often quite unlike similar products of Western thinking.

Western ways of knowing refers to the broad, generally held, views characteristic of mainstream Australian society. This shapes much of what is taken for granted in social interactions and informs many policies promoted by governments, the forming and reforming of legislation, and important issues such as land development. This perspective contributes heavily to the deficit view of Aboriginal civilisation, described above. It assures those who hold it, that theirs is the correct view, as it is also the most commonly held view. Paradoxically, given its dominance, it is the least obvious of the three perspectives, being so integral to the Australian social context that its influence is invisible, simply because it is what most of us know and do not question. In Australia this dominant perspective is built on traditions of western European thinking. Ownership of property is a central tenet, along with beliefs in the superiority of human beings over all other species and a preference for dualist thinking.

Figure 1 a Venn diagram for understanding relationships among ways of knowing

Developing a means of representing an Indigenous perspective involves engagement and teamwork with articulate and passionate Aboriginal members of society who are crucial to recognising how to distinguish between the two initial perspectives. Relationship to Country is a core Aboriginal value, and country cannot be owned in the manner of western ownership. There are no superior beings, since all life has equal value and its place in the world is assured by relationships not hierarchies. Thinking is pluralistic not individualistic or dualist. An Engineering way of knowing is the product of extensive training and learning. Those who become engineers are primarily practical problem solvers in a problem centric world. Life and


country are in relationships mediated by the nature of, and solutions to, emerging problems. Solutions are valued, and thinking is focused on addressing problems rather than on the merit of acting/ not acting. Engineer excel at understanding the nature of gaps in service, performance, comfort and access and aim for solutions to specific problems as they arise. Where a non-engineer may consider a wide river to be a beautiful place or an impassable barrier, an engineer will regard it, first and foremost, as implicitly raising the question of how can it be crossed most effectively/efficiently/quickly and so on. Engineering education in all cultures is therefore focused on understanding how things work in order to make them work better in some definable, and socially acceptable manner.

The Artefact Space In the crucial space, where all three ways of knowing intersect and overlap, is located the ‘Artefact Space’ (Leigh et al, 2014) where concepts, ideas landscape features and constructed items can be located for the purpose of analysis and reflection. In this representation the key feature being explores is Land, the notations indicating a baseline for each way of knowing. This central intersection is where items, places and ideas can be situated for the purpose of exploring them from all three perspectives. No item placed here for analysis can be thought of in terms of being either/or one thing or another. All three ways of knowing must be brought to bear, allowing emergence of new understandings about both the item and its cultural and societal significance. Here, then is opportunity for seeking agreement on how to operate with a conscious awareness of the (overlapping and sometimes contradictory) impacts of all three on behaviour and outcomes. The Artefact Space, emphasises an appreciation that the term applies equally to tangible items and intangible notions. Artefacts can be objects, environments, beliefs and ideas, each in a different way providing powerful tools with which to explore ways of reconciling divergent, even opposing, worldviews. From an engineering perspective, an Artefact (infrastructure development, housing, community facilities, locked filing cabinet etc.) arises as the solution to a problem to be solved or a design to be optimised, and the absorbing concern is what to do about it. An Aboriginal worldview indicates that the absorbing concern will be first for relationship with the artefact. Emphasis is on the centrality of relationships with Aboriginal thinking. The artefact is not separate or external to the thinker, it is part of them and must be managed with that in mind at all times. Mary Graham (2008) expresses this concept in this way

[Land, country] is, not property or real estate . .. The Dreaming is a combination of meaning (about life and all reality), and an action guide to living. … The land, and how we treat it, is what determines our human-ness. … the relation between people and land becomes the template for society and social relations. Therefore all meaning comes from land. You are not alone in the world Aboriginal people have a kinship system which extends into land… One's first loyalty is to one's own clan group… Every clan group has its own Dreaming or explanation of existence... a person finds their individuality within the group. To behave as if you are a discrete entity or a conscious isolate is to limit yourself to being an observer in an observed world.

Developing appropriate ways and means of sharing the implications of what Graham describes is simultaneously central to achievement of project outcomes and very, very complex. The table on the following page is a beginning compilation of parallels between Western and Aboriginal engineering.


Using the Artefact Space: an educational example Redesigning engineering to develop technologies appropriate for Aboriginal communities, is happening in many locations around Australia. Understanding Aboriginal Engineering as an integral contributor to general engineering knowledge also requires redesigning engineering education. In 2013 Aboriginal perspectives were incorporated into an existing first year subject at Wollongong University. The unit of study, called Engineering Design and Innovation, merged theory and practice using an assessment task requiring students design and model an innovative approach to contemporary engineering problems. Material incorporated into the subject introduced students to Aboriginal precepts, which they applied to developing solutions to engineering problems at Sandon Point, a designated Aboriginal place (see OEH, 2011) in the Illawarra region. Writing an opinion piece in the local newspaper, Colin Salter (2014) a Wollongong University academic noted that

Developing protocols to support [the City Council and the broader community] in deciding what facilities are most appropriate [for Sandon point] is key [to development of a co-management agreement for the area]. This includes their form, design and location. Implicit in such an approach is respect for culture … practical recognition of their history, connections to the land and struggles to protect it. Most of all, it is acknowledgement of country.

This resonates with feedback received from students who at the close of the subject had created original solutions to such problems as erecting a large meeting place on the site without in any way breaking the surface of the land. As we reflected on the outcomes of this approach we realised that Sandon Point was an Artefact in all the meanings of the word that we were exploring. It is a physical space, with deeply important and intangible spiritual significance to the members of the tent embassy who have occupied the site since 2000. The controversy engendered by this occupation represents enactment of the kinds of conflict often to be found when Western and Aboriginal thinking collide rather than connect. Non Aboriginal students, completing the subject, commented on how the experience had opened their eyes to the different perspectives associated with Aboriginal thinking. They expressed, in their designs and their writing, a new regard for the complex nature of reconciling Western and Aboriginal attitudes to the land. Two articulate responses, among others received, expressed team based insights in this way:

The team comprised four members brought up within western culture and it is therefore difficult to truly understand and empathise with aboriginal culture and innovate designs without unconsciously applying western bias in regards to structural design and construction methods. Connections [that] the Aboriginal people have with the site is understood to run deeper than a mere form of respect, instead tying them to their ancestors and to the land itself and as such the conservation of this connection needs to be at the forefront of any development.

The initial conceptualisation of the intersection of the three viewpoints of the Artefact Space focused on the idea of identifying and using artefacts which could exemplify aspects of at least two of the three perspectives, and in doing so could highlight the nature of the place where all three overlap and have shared features.

For example a very old woomera found during the Sandon Point project provided opportunities to explore the diversity of such forms across the continent, while highlighting


the fact that their concept and design demonstrate finely honed application of engineering concepts including mechanical advantage and mechanisms. There are a large number of known Aboriginal engineering sites around Australia such as Budj Bim in the Gunditjmara country of south western Victoria (Jordan, 2011). Many other sites are currently better known by archaeologists and are ripe for re-exploration as engineering sites.

Consider this comparison between Budj Bim and the Ma’rib Dam in Yemen. Budj Bim is a vast and complex Aquaculture system consisting of constructed dams, ponds and channels designed to direct and store eels and fish for routine harvesting. It is archaeologically dated at 8,000 years of continuous use. The Ma’rib Dam was built somewhere between 1750 and 1700 before the current era, to provide a irrigation water to the surrounding area, including it is believed the city of Ubar. Both systems were constructed to support concentrated populations, both required precision in construction to manage water flow, both required an in depth understanding of natural processes.

The Ma’rib Dam suffered many breaches, partly due to warfare in the region, partly due to the stress on the structure. Maintenance was performed regularly by the people who controlled the region, which changed hands over time. The structure in its final form included a dam

14 meters high with extensive waterworks at both the northern and southern ends, with five spillway channels, two masonry-reinforced sluices, a settling pond, and a 1000-meter canal to a distribution tank. In 570 or 575 of the current era, the dam was again overtopped, and this time left unrepaired. The breaching and destruction of the Dam of Ma’rib was a historical event, and was alluded to in the Quran (Ma’rib Dam website).

When the knowledge of the maintenance skills was lost, the dam was left and the city eventually was disused.

Figure 2 Redesign of what Marib Dam was like (Ma’rib Dam Website)

The very different cultures and values informing each set of engineering solutions, produced very different systems. Budj Bim, was built on principles of respect for country so that all its work has a low profile which was evident to early settlers but did not reveal its purpose and scope to them. The Yemen Dam, in contrast, stands above the landscape, dominating everything and making its purpose very prominent and explicit to all who view it, while also incorporating a different style of water distribution system. As examples of comparative engineering these two sites illustrate the fact that solutions to similar problems can be engineered in quite different ways. Also the longevity of Budj Bim is exceptional.

The focus for exploration of such comparisons will be on the cultural factors influencing


decisions about water resource management, and the implications of these for related engineering activity. Integrating Aboriginal perspectives into our understanding helps identify and assess points of interest which may provide scope for educational activities and tourism directed at exploring ways in which the three perspectives are equally relevant for understanding both past solutions and planning for future, culturally sensitive ones.

Present day examples where this process is necessary are exceptionally common, such as Aboriginal community consultation to identify sites of archaeological and cultural significance, and negotiation of land use agreements with Traditional Owners. These are particularly critical for large infrastructure and mining projects. Also promotion of knowledge of the culture and its embedded knowledge has increased interest in understanding the technology and techniques behinds these engineered artefacts.

We hope through this work to encourage and enable more programs to be developed and for Aboriginal communities to be engaged in an appropriate way in such projects.


Chapter 2

Culture and Technology in Aboriginal Engineering Since the introduction of European culture into Australia, Aboriginal people have been involved in this cultural practice. One aspect of Aboriginal culture that is unique is the ready adaption to new environments and the ability to understand and absorb new ways of perceiving and being. This ability may have been encouraged by living in a country with a

highly varied climate, and fostered by the strong oral tradition of knowledge sharing. There are some outstanding figures in early colonial history. Maria Lock, who as a young girl topped the school examinations in Sydney in 1819 (Parry, 2005). David Unaipon (1872-1967) is well known for his engineering designs, adapting the design of the boomerang to develop a propeller system shown in a pre WWII drawing of a helicopter. He took out a patent for his design to convert rotating motion into a tangential reciprocal movement, which is the basis of the modern sheep shears (Jones, 1990). However he received no financial return when this design was used in the modern mechanical shears, presumably as he was not recognized as a citizen .

Figure 4 Mechanical design of shears by Unaipon (Gizmodo, 2014)

More recently Eric Willmot worked as an engineering in the 1980’s and 90’s and developed a system for continuously variable-ratio transmission for use in gearing . His work in controllable variable-motion in mechanical engineering rigid body mechanisms was used in Australia’s first hybrid car. He has over 90 international patents in his name and wrote the book Pemulwuy, The Rainbow Warrior (Willmot, 1988). The rapid and successful adoption of the technology of another society was exceptional, and exemplifies the need to engage with the Aboriginal knowledge tradition as a source of invention and inspiration in technology. The way we gather knowledge, as well as the types of knowledges we seek and recognize, depends on the society we live in. Lerner (1991) provides a detailed account of the shift in focus for scientific research between the time of the work conducted in pre-slave Ionian Greece to the time of Pythagoras. By then Greece had become a slave society, after conquering and capturing many neighbouring nationals and the new money economy was creating debt slaves. By the fifth century BC Western empirical science was being developed. By then Anaxagoras a Greek scholar could extrapolate from the use of water vortices, as a means of separating

Figure3MariaLock


river sand and finer dirt, to the concept that similar vortices could serve to separate the earth and the heavenly bodies and create the universe as we know it. In that earlier society, knowledge was something anyone could find through observation and experimentation. In the later society, that of Pythagoras and Plato, science and knowledge was becoming an abstract concept, an ideal that could be attended to only by those few who had time to sit and ponder while others worked. This process has seen an ever widening separation between those who ‘create’ knowledge and those who don’t. In turn this has contributed to Western social constructs about knowledge and the relationship between human beings and the world around them. As time passes, technologies developed by humans are determined by dominant social values and priorities. Western cultures have largely focused on the individual benefits of proposed technology or research. Progress requires the development of new markets; there is an increasing emphasis on the market, rather than on social good, for determining priorities for investment. Individualist cultures have, over time, spawned the present emphasis on market economies, with decreasing attention given to the deficits such a focus may create in providing for the needs of humanity.

Many of the current complex technologies have developed because of the direction set by long established social principles informing western civilization. A paradox emerging in the 21st Century is that the very success of such technologies is creating conditions that are now becoming unsustainable, leading to potential for destruction of the very environment in which we live. In Australia we have a unique opportunity to learn firsthand from a cultural approach that is totally different to the more familiar Western one that now dominates the landscape. This approach created engineering and associated technologies enabling Aboriginal civilizations to live sustainably within the landscape for up to 60,000 years before coming into contact with those other social constructs. This is a period of time far longer than that of any other society. Aboriginal society, circa 1770, had developed an approach to engineering that was entirely different to that familiar to early European arrivals on the continent’s shores. The principles on which this engineering was built, are based on belonging to the land, and informed engineering feats that created minimal disturbance across the landscape, while enabling sustainable habitation in conditions which frequently proved entirely inhospitable to Europeans. They presaged the contemporary development in western oriented environments of the concept of appropriate technologies emerging in the ‘small is beautiful’ era and increasing in importance and influence through to the present. More attention than ever before, is being given to sustainability criteria as applied to all engineering and is gradually being adopted by national governments, in accord with the Paris Agreement However, to appreciate the link between this emerging awareness and traditional Aboriginal engineering practices and the principles underlying them, involves understanding something of the social fabric that produced it. And, as well, the process will require learning how that knowledge can contribute to a more sustainable technological approach for our future welfare. Part Two explores what is appropriate technology in the Aboriginal context and considers why it is different. Part Three looks at how that technology was shared, how it is taught and passed on, and what were the social effects of this process. That is the focus is on how the ‘appropriateness’ of those technologies was maintained and kept aligned with the very social values that created it.


Part 1 How Technology relates to Society

Appropriate Technology Technology is the embodiment of an individual's knowledge of the artefact created and the material from which it is created. When this technology is shared amongst a society and the knowledge to remake and maintain and use that artefact is shared, the technology becomes an appropriate embodiment of the social values of that culture. There has been concern expressed over industrial processes in that the artisans’ skills are lost when using mass manufacturing processes which devalue those involved in production. But also the emphasis on mass production determines what is selected as the artefacts that can be produced by this method. It is ironic that a highly individualistic culture has developed the means to provide the same material goods to all people. Yet this was developed more out of the ideal of progress, that short term gains are more important than the long term benefit even to individuals. So what is appropriate is a result of the interplay of many factors Both individualism and long term orientation are two of Hofstede’s (1991) criteria for distinguishing cultures. Hofstede’s work provides a categorisation of the independent variables that differential different cultures values and norms. While his initial study of IBM employees across more than 70 countries has received a lot of criticism, most research in factor analysis of what changes across cultures tends to map to similar aspects (cf Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner, 1998). The Hofstede dimensions are individual versus communal (I/c); power distance or the levels of hierarchy (PD); masculine versus feminine(M/F); uncertainty avoidance (UA); long term versus short term orientation (LTO); and recently added indulgence versus restraint. In these variables we can see significant difference between Aboriginal cultures and European ones. Also studies have been done using these dimensions with different Aboriginal groups, which have shown great variation depending on their type and level of contact with Europeans. This illustrates how aboriginal cultures are highly adaptable and varied.

Figure 5 From George et al (2012) who studied an urban NSW Aboriginal group and

Simensen (1999) who studied Aboriginal tourist operators from Cape York.


In Figure 5 we compare two studies of Aboriginal groups against the figures from Australia IBM workers as studied originally by Hofstede and Hofstede (1991). Hence the variation within Aboriginal culture is significant, while also significantly different to the basically European male workers at IBM. Some of this variation will be due to different experiences of invasion. However if we consider what we know about Aboriginal culture before Europeans came here en masse with guns and disease we can understand what was the cultural aspects that led to the engineering artefacts discussed in the third and final technology part of this book. But also importantly is the reason that the Aboriginal Engineering has been ignored for so long. It was the cultural blindness of the Europeans that caused the strong technological advances existing in Australia in the late 1700’s to be ignored and frequently lost. We hope this book will overcome some of the cultural and technical bias and provide future engineers, architects and others with an insight into a new approach to technology. The culture of Aboriginal Australia was based around a spiritual association with a land that was developed from at least 60,000 and probably over 100,000 years of settlement on the Australian continent or Gondwanaland.

Aspect of Culture relating to technology The fundamental differences between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians is their relationship to the land, and to each other. The land is as much a part of the society as the people living with it and the memories in place are so strong we who are recently arrived came only partly imagine. If you have lived on a parcel of land in Australia all your life. Maybe your parents and grandparents grew up there u may start to understand the significance to people of the land where thousands of generations lived, where the turning of a stone by passing travellers can be noted by trackers, where the knowledge of the environment is so deep the stories are changed as we progress through the la Niña/el Niño cycles and stories of the sea level rising 15,000 years ago are still shared The field of appropriate technology was a discipline that arose from engineers working in the field with communities who required specialist training and technology for their daily life. The work involved engineers in the redesign of technology to suit the society they were working with, and as such exposed these technologist to the inherently cultural base of the technology they were working with It is clear that any technology is not culturally independent, ether in design, or the choice of technologies or needs that are addressed by these technologies in terms of prioritising designs. So the focus became on what made a design more appropriate for one culture or another, and what was the process of overcoming these assumptions when changing designs. In work with Aboriginal people of Australia, various groups such as Remote Area Development Group (RADG) at Murdoch in Perth, programs at Pundulmurra College in Port Hedland and Centre for Appropriate in Alice Springs all developed process of consultation, listening and long term community engagement to overcome the ignorance of the needs of this different culture and variety of peoples. In particular, given the limited funds to actually influence technology such as washing machines, stove, water heaters, water pumps, toilets, etc that were used in remote areas with little adaptability the harsh conditions, the Aboriginal Technical Worker (ATWORKER) program (Seaman and Talbot, 1995) was developed to train community members in


installation and maintenance. In this book we consider therefore not just the technology, but also the process required for its continual recreation in communities, including training and knowledge sharing. In this section we look at how new technology is now being developed, as we will discuss traditional technology in the third part of this book where we give community voices some role in telling the oral history of the technology To understand appropriate design for different cultures we need to understand the assumptions built into our present designs. By considering the engineering of the aboriginal Australian culture we believe people can start to see the alternative options available in technology. We present here some of the significant cultural differences between the original cultures of Australia and the new migrant cultures

Relationships Aboriginal people emphasise their relationship to all other Aboriginal people, and to the animals, plants and land features, through their skin, totem and moiety. An Aboriginal child is born into this system of relations through their parents and their place of birth. Sometimes extra totem may be given as responsibility based on the young child’s abilities. This group interconnection provides the communal responsibility and bonds that ensure that social and technological progress is focused on the good of all the community, but also the good of all the people’s totems, the animals, etc. of which they are responsible for the wellbeing. Another OLT project around Indigenous Online Cultural Teaching and Sharing was developed to introduce these concepts of relationships into university curriculum and relate to Aboriginal people’s experience now, in areas such as education, health and justice. Much of the damaging effects of the present technology and processes such as health care relate to the application of one method or set of assumptions to people valuing quite a different set of priorities and relations. Using the techniques of Aboriginal storytelling we hope to provide an insight into the Aboriginal knowledge system and enable people from different cultures understand and appreciate at least the basics of the technology and its design. This aspect of technology, teaching how to make and use this technology, is very much a part of this relationship between people and we will see in the second part of this chapter the way that kinship is used to maintain knowledge. The main aspect that interests us here is that this kinship is not just with the local family or language group, but will all the other clans who have responsibility for the same totems or areas of land, and their neighbours. By sharing knowledge across any language borders and providing interchange over related regions and beyond, the knowledge provided a holistic understanding of how the environment was changing and adapting to climate and human variations. To continue to maintain this understanding required regular travel and regular meetings.

Mobility It is ironic that while Europeans value their weekend house by the beach or weekend gardening plot by the railway, Aboriginal people have been denigrated as nomadic for having various locations used in different seasons or parts of the climate cycle. While people moved around to follow the food surplus this was not by chance. The people developed fish traps to harvest a feed for ceremonies or used lines for single family groups. Along the coast yams were planted in the loamy soil and harvested when people returned. Across the centre grass was down before the rain (Figure 6) then harvested when dry. The lifestyle was based around a very deep knowledge of the climate and how it changed year by year, as well as the ability to read the weather based by on concurrent and consecutive events rather than a


rigid calendar. Hence technology had to either move with the user or be able to survive left to stand in location. To be mobile artefacts needed to be light or easy to be remade from commonly available resources. Also the knowledge to make the technology needs to be shared with every small clan or family group so they can be self supporting, hence the regular ceremonies and gatherings. However there would be those who make better artefacts who could trade these for other resources and train others in the skill.

Resources The resources that are available determines the cost of technology options. Traditionally the resources were those that were available through trade across Australia and to some extent across the pacific. Nowadays the access to resources for implement technology for communities is based on funding. While no effort has been made to pay the rent for the minerals exported or the food harvested from the rich soil, and the degradation of the land that results from these processes, some limited funding was made available for aboriginal people to live close to traditional lands. While people no longer have access to the most productive areas and so provide their own food, due to pastoral and mining leases on their traditional land, there is still effort to maintain a life on or near the lands their ancestors managed. To live here they need the resources of modern society as they cannot live their old lifestyle, and also need access to schools, health services etc. Hence much of western technology has been adapted to this new environment, and the resources that are available for this are limited by community funding.

Figure 6 Tindale’s map of parrots linked to grasslands (from Pascoe 2014)

As an example there is the use of renewable energy. These systems can be funded by the funding process where communities can get ten years power funding up front. Rather than requiring people to keep track of when diesel is needed to be transported in and paying for that, it was often better to use mainly solar or wind systems installed in self contained units that will switch on the diesel backup if batteries low. When installing these systems the solar panels and the inverter had to be protected. With a changing population and the system designed for a community rather than one family the


panels had to be robust against wind, storms and children playing with rocks. Also lighting storms could strike the wind turbines and effect the power inverter, and an interface had to be made so people understand what the state of the system is at any time. All the repairs and maintenance were made by qualified technicians coming out to remote communities. There was some work done to train people in basic maintenance but the system had to be set up as a viable option in a new environment before any handover to community. Similarly work was done to provide town camps with solar power to reduce cost. This was used for washing, lights, etc. Also the washing machines chosen had to cope with the sand from washing sandy blankets that often got into the agitator and caused damage. The point is that any technology has to be designed for the social, physical and economic environment.

Physical Environment. The obvious difficulty with remote and rural Australia is dealing with the heat and dust. Toshiba was one company that had engineers report on the effect of the Australian environment on their laptops. For instance sitting on the dashboard in the desert sun. Or the effect of dust storms. There are other aspects of the environment that affect technology design. Many communities are short on fresh water or the water is high in corrosive salts. Work with low flush or pour flush toilets has adapted Asian designs to remote Australia, however they needed to be constructed in Australia, and the bowl design had to be installed by a plumber in reverse as now the flush was from the front. From experience we often had standard components such as sewerage tanks installed in reverse, so that the effluent flowed back into the house. Hence any technical system would introduce the need to train people in the community to either install them or ensure they were installed correctly when delivered (see ATWORK program by Seeman and Talbot 1995). Furthermore many waste systems rely on regular maintenance which is not suitable for the mobile population. There are social aspects that arise from the environment. The sewage evaporation ponds at Jigalong in the Western Desert were built in a desert environment with no pool provided for children who therefore swam in the third evaporation pond, which they said the ‘water fellah’ told them 'was the clean water'. When asked if they got sick from swimming there they said no. When asked if they get sore ears or runny nose, they said all the time. So what the doctor means by sick was not explained. The training needed for introducing foreign technology is an integral part of technology transfer.

Community or social knowledge For technology made for communities, and specially communities that are isolated and trying to be independent there must be maintenance by community. So part of the design must be to provide a technology that initially works in that social and physical environment without major repairs and cost of parts. Hence the emphasis on 'small is beautiful' (Schumacher, 1973) initially where technology was designed for the specific needs of the community and now the use of standard systems and frameworks for websites (think of Joomla, Drupal, WordPress and Django) that can be tailored to the needs of individual group. By separating the interface design, the data storage and the middleware or functionality these systems allow the most important aspect, the interface, to be designed for local needs, while functionality that is common across many groups can be plugged in. The knowledge can then be presented on a website in the way the community wants to see


it, or in general for any artefact, workshops can be held to gather the variety of community needs for the technology, have the options discussed and limitations weighed up for each option. However we should note that the issue of data control and access is also a key concern in designing for Aboriginal communities. We will look at this aspect of knowledge sharing and knowledge generation in relation to new technology in the second part of this section. The point is that we can neither assume that a small group such as the local community council represent the community on every aspect of life, or that they have the knowledge to understand the technology being designed.

Sustainable Engineering The area in which traditional Aboriginal and western engineering practises have found most common ground has been over sustainability. We want to take this opportunity to draw out the aspects of technology that would benefit any progression towards a more sustainable development in the western world, and utilise the knowledge available in Australia for this purpose

Economic In developing a communal society, Aboriginal people provided an interdependence between people that ensured that resources were spread around. In fact through kinship an Aboriginal person is sister or brother to all their cousins, and all their aunts and uncle will be as parents and will usually spend some time for the child’s life caring for them and teaching them their specific knowledge they have on the child’s culture and totems. When an Aboriginal person is successful in the hunt, or at work, the resources must be shared around to all their family. This provides a welfare system for anyone not strong or healthy but also ensures that the benefits and rewards from a hunt are not too much, to discourage greed. At the same time the competition for resources between clans or language groups was managed by regular meetings, or corroborees. While these may have been called for specific events, they also happened regularly according to the seasons and the arrival of a large protein source: e.g. the bogon moth of southern NSW, the bunya nut of northern NSW and the fish traps on the Barwon river of inland NSW. When people sat down together to discuss the various experiences of each clan, and maybe told the story of the kangaroo in each of their regions along the river, they not only gained a fuller understanding of the whole story of this food supply, they also found areas of common interest and aspects that they could learn from and respect each other. This provided a governance structure that prevented conflict and encouraged the sharing and respect of knowledge, which is part of a sustainable economy. We hope that the stories about the technology in the third part of this book will provide an idea of the society that created these technologies and the depth of relationships between each person that existed.

Environmental The environmental knowledge is significantly tied into the language. Work has been done not only on how landscape is represented in language, and how this changes depending on whether the language group has lived there since the language developed (Marks & Turk, 2003, Turk & Stea 2014); but also how an Aboriginal language will describe the landscape in terms of affordances, such as water available, walking access, type of soil for growth, etc. The work to maintain and rejuvenate languages, as well as reclaim those nearly lost, is important part of the knowledge sharing, and the stories of each area are often only known in


the language of that area. When people are asked to talk about landscape outside their land, they will often say they cannot, their language does not talk about that area, or they do not have authority to do so (Turk pers. Comm.).

Figure 7 Brewarrina Fish traps over 40,000 years old

The greatest example of the failure to learn from Aboriginal people in environmental sustainability and care of the land is the total lack of understanding by the Europeans for many years, of the use of fire to regenerate vegetation and maintain health growth. Since Australia has used fire for rejuvenation for thousands of years, the plants have adapted to this, and the richness of the soil may have come from this process (Pascoe, 2014). However through lack of consultation and a lack of understanding of how people cared for land, this practise was not continued and the soil has rapidly deteriorated as a result. We talk about this under discussion about fire as technology. Much of this knowledge is being reclaimed by Aboriginal rangers in National Parks and Wildlife programs where language teaching and knowledge sharing are conducted together, to provide young people with the opportunity to gain the knowledge needed to start to maintain country again. The lack of public meetings and discussion to consult with all stakeholders and to ensure that all people affected by the changing land use were aware and involved, has caused great harm in this country. We hope that the next generation of engineers will learn from the mistakes of the past and realise from this work that there is great wisdom in the Aboriginal community which they should take the time to learn.

Social The social and the technical aspects of a society are highly interwoven and we cannot attempt to deal with one without the other. The examples you have read and will read later on Aboriginal technology, whether in adapting western engineering, of their own creation, are technologies that deal with very different issues. When designing compute resources for Aboriginal people we are looking at mostly mobile phone rather than PC access, similarly the boomerang had many different designs for different uses, rather than requiring a totally new technology for each use. These are the result of a mobile society that works to perfect what they have rather than change all the time. Probably the most important social aspect that can be gained from Aboriginal people is the techniques for sharing tacit or oral knowledge. There are two aspects to this, how to share all the knowledge required, and how to share only correct knowledge, not gossip about that particular aspect of learning. This is explained in the next section, relating to how knowledge is shared.


Chapter 2 Part 2 Knowledge Sharing for Technology

Knowledge is based in Language The first aspect of the Aboriginal language that was instrumental in initiating the language revitalisation process in NSW was the naming of place. This arises from the strong cultural tie to land and the fact that languages are used to name the land and create ties between people and land. This links to the way that Aboriginal knowledge is remembered and re-expressed as a story in place. For instance Langton (1997) notes that through the cyclic nature of the kinship system, a person's mother's mother and father's father will be the same moiety, and hence will often relate in the same manner to the same country, which reinforces this link to place to the grandchild. Starting with this relationship mode we look at how to support cultural knowledge. For thousands of years, Aboriginal people have been sharing knowledge through oral means on how to live in and maintain both themselves and their physical and social environment. While much of this knowledge is now recorded the framework for this knowledge is highly unstructured. Research is required to provide the ontologies and frameworks that will form the storylines for this knowledge sharing.

The oral tradition that is practised and perfected by Aboriginal people provides a way to remember extensive details of the landscape and the maintenance of the food supply, while only teaching knowledge that is correct for the moment in a highly variable climate. This contradicts the western notion that oral histories are unreliable (Gray, 1998; Attwood, 1988; Minoru, 2002); and is vital to the preservation of Aboriginal history and identity (Mellor, 2001).

Teaching through story As an example to explain the teaching method we consider the story of how the kangaroo got its tail. This is not a story told because Aboriginal people believe that sometime long ago a wombat was running around, got speared in the rear and the spear grew into a tail. The story is a theme, a ‘textbook’, on the care and preservation of the kangaroo. When a child hears an elder start to tell about ‘how the kangaroo got his tail’, they know they are entering a lesson about the kangaroo, much as our children know they are entering a maths lesson when they are told to get out their maths text book. The story also covers many levels to engage an audience coming in with different knowledge levels. The moral tales and tales of human relations (greed, caring, envy) are more for children, the practical details of the story are comprehended better when people are familiar with the landscape, and the spiritual knowledge is unclear to those without prior understanding (Sveiby & Skuthorpe, 2006). This understanding of the levels of engagement with oral knowledge links this with tacit knowledge sharing, which is the sharing of workplace knowledge about machinery, components and procedures, often shared only in oral form (Kutay, 2012). A story will be started by the elder at whatever point they know, or is relevant to the listeners. A significant feature of traditional storytelling is only those with authority to speak are able to present a story. Authority comes from 'being there' in person or through a close relation, being part of the group involved in the story or having some personal connection to the story (Povinelli 1993). When a law story is told, many people will contribute the part they know, what they have experience in, so first a theme is established, then many performers add their knowledge. Also when Aboriginal storytellers are speaking, they tend to include or invite other speakers into the story, either as a way of varying the story to keep the listener's attention, as a way of


emphasising main points by getting corroboration, or to allow alternative viewpoints to be expressed as a way to help the learner understand. While the teller of the story may start at any point in the narrative, it is their decision where to start. To elicit information at any point, a learner must give their understanding first as a statement of understanding, rather than a question, so the teller knows where to start and how to direct their story for the specific listeners.

The Kangaroo story Through the totem system there are elders who are responsible for the wellbeing of each totem, and when a community wants to hunt for kangaroo, they will go and ask permission of the elder responsible in that area, who will know if there are enough to allow hunting at that juncture. Learning to hunt is however very difficult. The clan cannot afford for young hunters to go out and be unsuccessful in throwing a spear and frighten away the whole herd. Aboriginal people are in general uncomfortable with trial and error training. This has been an issue in schools in Australia, where a Socratic style is used which is alienating and confronting to Aboriginal students. Hence the corroboree for the kangaroo provides an immersive and practical training. Here dance, music, storytelling and drama merge as a teaching method where a story if performed in front of people gathered from surrounding regions, sharing their part of the knowledge of the kangaroo, its breeding places, where the feed is good, etc. To prepare for a corroboree performance, the elders sit together and discuss their desires: the context of the corroboree, what is significant in the present situation for the people, which is related to the user’s desires within the environment. They evaluate the community’s goals and beliefs: this involves considering the themes that need to be covered for learning about the present context, which links to the audience’s goals. They interpret and interact with this environment: this develops the cohesion of the narrative, what will be presented for the social and creative linkage of information. So they decide what will be performed.

Once this corroboree has started, individuals contribute stories or songs relating to how their own knowledge fits into the previous narrative and so select the stories that are shared. The rendition of these stories will be through various performances (Kutay, 2015). The corroboree stories say that in the Dreamtime, men and kangaroos changed into each other regularly and in a corroboree the elder who was responsible for kangaroo knowledge will indeed become a kangaroo. He will show how the kangaroo smells the wind, and reacts to sounds. There are stories of historical films of Aboriginal hunters, one showing an older hunter standing up to throw a spear towards a herd of kangaroos. There was a medium sized male off to the right of the mob. The man throws his spear. The kangaroo was grazing and lifted its head, it smelled the wind, then leapt quickly to the right, directly into the path of the spear. To learn a skill like that you need many lessons with real kangaroos, or as near to this as you can get. The corroboree provided this opportunity. The kangaroo story in its entirety tells of the travel of the hunters, where they travelled and where they found food and water. By the position of the stars in the story the listener can tell the season, and can follow the story along a route that the people will travel often in their search for kangaroo. The story also tells where the kangaroo gets a good feed, where they breed and how to look after them. The stories are performed, to provide two benefits. Firstly the different components reinforce the sequence of the story for the story tellers, also the form of songs and poetry emphasise the imagery of the subject matter through sound (Magowan, 2001).


The people can recite the stories as they move through the country, either a they travel with their family, or in their ‘mind’s eye’ at the performance. Like the memory palace developed by Cicero, where an orator will place topics around their mental room so that they have a location in their head to trigger the memory of the point they want to make, so the storytellers of the Aboriginal community have a memory aid for where the food is through locational triggers. These triggers also include the position of the stars in each season. The season the story is set in will relate to the location of the significant starts in the story, such as when a significant person rises up at the end to join the stars. Also the layout of the stars can be related to land tracks, with a common pattern often seen in the two realms of earth and sky, providing a further guide for travellers. Stars are also used as a representation of kinship relations as a teaching aid for the community. The ability to have an overview of the land and how it is laid out, as presented in much Aboriginal art, shows a spatial perception that surpasses Western understanding, and this perspective is explained by Aboriginal people as being what they see when they fly over their country.


Chapter 3 Examples of Aboriginal Engineering Using existing resources we will provide specific physical examples of Aboriginal engineering that highlight the cultural influence on engineering. These examples will be linked to communities engaged with this engineering still, in some form. Together these resources will provide a way for teachers and community to learn about this knowledge in a practical environment. It will also provide an in depth knowledge of the different approaches to engineering and engineering thinking that reflect the sustainable and holistic approach of Aboriginal cultures, as well as assist people to learn in an environment that emulates as much as possible the Aboriginal techniques of knowledge sharing. Learning the knowledge involved learning the culture that surrounds that knowledge, as these two aspects are not separable. This is a lesson in the foundations of sustainability.

Table 1 Compilation of material showing parallels between Western and Aboriginal Engineering

Engineering Disciplines

Key Concepts Web links and Resource Sites

Aerospace and aviation

Design and operation of aircraft, propulsion systems, efficiency, spend and strength

http://www.alpha-port.com/nesdesigncontest/pdfs/GreatBoomerangChallengeOverview.pdf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boomerang http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woomera_%28spear-thrower%29 http://www.roninfilms.com.au/feature/10738/western-desert-woomera-fashioned-with-stone.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Unaipon

Acoustics How sound generated and propagated

http://newt.phys.unsw.edu.au/jw/didjeridu.html

Environmental

Preparation for growing foods, harvesting, preserving

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portulaca_oleracea http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bushtelegraph/rethinking-indigenous-australias-agricultural-past/5452454

Biomedical http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acacia_tetragonophylla http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bushtelegraph/rethinking-indigenous-australias-agricultural-past/5452454 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00156229

Construction Material and construction techniques

http://www.australia.gov.au/about-australia/australian-story/austn-indigenous-architecture http://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/land/aboriginal-houses#toc1 http://www.aboriginalculture.com.au/housing.shtml


Chemical engineering

Convert raw materials into useable products

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinifex_resin http://ecology.uq.edu.au/content/spinifex-project

Civil Physical infrastructures urban/living environments

https://www.australianarchaeologicalassociation.com.au/journal/review-of-gunyah-goondie-and-wurley/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_architecture http://www.australia.gov.au/about-australia/australian-story/austn-indigenous-architecture

Electrical Electrical energy generation and usage

At the time of European arrival in Australia there was also no electrical engineering in Europe

Network engineering

Protocols for linking knowledge packets

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songline http://dl.nfsa.gov.au/module/1566/ https://japingkaaboriginalart.com/articles/songlines-important-aboriginal-art/ http://www.naidoc.org.au/2016-national-naidoc-theme-announced

Telecommunications

Communication

Mechanical Force and energy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woomera_%28spear-thrower%29 http://www.roninfilms.com.au/feature/10738/western-desert-woomera-fashioned-with-stone.html also http://www.jaunay.com/unaipon.html

Mining Extraction http://www.environment.gov.au/node/19708 Materials Strength and other

features, production

Naval architecture

Construction and propulsion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_Dugout_Canoeshttp://australianmuseum.net.au/Building-a-canoe-noe-nowey/http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/news/2010/08/aboriginal-traditional-canoe-recreated/

Water and waste management Aquaculture

Physical, chemical, and biological treatment of water

http://www.environment.gov.au/heritage/places/national/brewarrinahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewarrina,_New_South_Waleshttp://www.environment.gov.au/indigenous/ipa/declared/lake-condah.htmlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budj_Bim

Project Management

Sustainability

Information Technology

Teaching knowledge


Chapter 4 Case Studies of Aboriginal Engineering Education in practice

This section will provide examples of exercises and course structures that can be used to engage students and community with the many different topics that arise from Aboriginal Engineering.

Approaches will include:

1. Teaching the teachers: AAEE workshops using images and discussion about people’s experience of Aboriginal people and technology

2. Projects with community: UW and EWB project at Sandon Point 3. Projects with case studies: Internship program and others 4. Projects about cultural awareness: Storytelling to develop awareness


References 1. Attwood, B. (1988) Understandings of the Aboriginal Past: History or Myth, Australian

Journal of Politics and History, 34, 2, 1988, p 271. 2. Blainey, G. (2015). The Story of Australia's People Volume 1: The Rise and Fall of

Ancient Australia. Melbourne, Vic, Penguin. 3. Behrendt, L., Larkin, S., Griew, R., & Kelly, P. (2012). Review of Higher Education

Access and Outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander People: Final Report. ACT.

4. Box, G. E. P., and Draper, N. R., (1987), Empirical Model Building and Response Surfaces, John Wiley & Sons, New York, NY.

5. Budj Bim website http://www.environment.gov.au/heritage/places/national/budj-bim 6. DPI (2007) Mining by Aborigines – Australia's first miners, Department of Primary

Industry NSW PrimeFact 572 7. First Footprints (2013) ABC http://www.abc.net.au/tv/firstfootprints/ 8. Engineers Australia (2014) Stage 1 Competency Standard For Professional

Engineers, Retrieved 22/8/2014 from http://www.engineersaustralia.org.au/ on 21/8/2014

9. Gammage, B. (2011). ‘The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia’. Sydney, Allen & Unwin.

10. George, R, Nesbitt, K, Donovan, M, Maynard, J. (2012) Evaluating Indigenous Design Features Using Cultural Dimensions, in Proceedings of the Thirteenth Australasian User Interface Conference (AUIC2012), Melbourne, Australia

11. Gilmore webpage http://www.ariahparkfestival.com/about-marygilmore.html. 12. Gizmodo (2014) https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2014/03/the-australian-da-vinci-how-

david-unaipon-almost-changed-our-nation/ 13. Goonrey, C (2012) Report on an Aboriginal Land Management Workshop led by Rod

Mason a respected Ngarigo elder from the Monaro region of NSW held at Garuwanga via Nimmitabelle NSW – report prepared for National Parks Australia

14. Graham, Mary (2008) Thoughts about the Philosophical Underpinnings of Aboriginal Worldviews in Australian Humanities Review, Issue 4, ANU E Press Retrieved 22/8/2014 from http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-November-2008/graham.html

15. Gray, P.R.A. (1998), Saying it like it is: Oral Traditions, Legal Systems and Records. Archives and Manuscripts, 26, 2 pp. 248-269.

16. Hofstede G. (1991) Cultures and Organisations. McGraw-Hill, London. 17. Jones, P (1990) Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 12, Melbourne University

Press 18. Jordan, J W, (2012) The engineering of Budj Bim and the evolution of a societal

structure in Aboriginal Australia Institution of Engineers Australia, Australian Journal of Multi-Disciplinary Engineering, Vol 9 No 1

19. Kirby, J (1895?) Old times in the bush of Australia : trials and experiences of early bush life in Victoria during the forties. Geo. Robertson and Co. Viewed 5.1.17 at http://handle.slv.vic.gov.au/10381/238432

20. Kutay, C (2012). Trust Online for Information Sharing, KMIS, Barcelona, October 4-7 21. Kutay, C (2017 in print) Teaching an Australian Aboriginal Knowledge

sharing process, Collette Faucher (ed) Culture Awareness in Human Reasoning and Behavior and in Intelligent Systems.

22. Kutay, C (2015) Presentation at CoEDL Seminar, University of Queensland July 23. Langton, M. (1997). Grandmothers' Law, Company Business and Succession in

Changing Aboriginal Land Tenure Systems, in Galarrwuy Yunipingu, Our Land is Our


Life, (pp. 84-117). St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press. 24. Leigh, E, Goldfinch, T, Prpic, K, Dawes, L, Kennedy, J and McCarthy, T (2014)

Shared Values: Diverse perspectives – engaging engineering educators in integrating Aboriginal engineering knowledge into current curricula. In Proceedings of the AAEE2014 Conference Wellington, New Zealand,

25. Lerner, Eric J (1991) Big Bang Never Happened. Vintage Press 26. Magowan, F (2001). Crying to Remember, in Bain Attwood and Fiona Magowan (eds)

Telling Stories, Crows Nest, Allen and Unwin. 27. Ma’rib Dam Website https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marib_Dam 28. Marks, D. A and Turk , A. G (2003) Ethnophysiography . Paper presented at the

Workshop on Spatial and Geographical Ontologies, 23 September, Ittinger Switzerland.

29. McNiven, I & Bell, D (2010) Fishers and Farmers: historicising the Gunditjmara freshwater fishery, western Victoria The La Trobe Journal No 85 May 2010

30. Mellor, D (2001), Artefacts of Memory: Oral histories in archival institutions. Humanities Research, III,1.

31. Minoru, Hokari (2002) Reading oral histories from the pastoral frontier: A critical revision. Journal of Australian Studies, 26:72 pp21-28.

32. Parry, M (2005). Lock, Maria (1805–1878) in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Supplementary Volume, Melbourne University Press

33. Pascoe, B (2014) Dark Emu Black Seeds: agriculture or accident? Magabala Books, Broome

34. Pholi, K., Black, D. & Richards, C. (2009). ‘Is ‘Close the Gap’a useful approach to improving the health and wellbeing of Indigenous Australians?’ Australian Review of Public Affairs 9, 1-13.

35. Povinelli, E (1993). Labour's Lot: The power, history and culture of Aboriginal action, University of Chicago Press

36. Salter, C (2014) Support for Sandon Point Aboriginal Tent Embassy positive for region, Illawarra Mercury, Opinion piece published July 16, 2014

37. Seeman, K. and Talbot, R. (1995). Technacy: Towards a holistic understanding of technology teaching and learning among Aboriginal Australians. Prospects, 24 (4), 760–75.

38. Schumacher, E. F. (1973) Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered 39. Simonsen M. R. 2005. Researching Indigenous Australians in Tourism, PhD Thesis

Victoria University. 40. Sculthorpe, G., et al. (2015). Aboriginal Australia: eduring civilisation. London, UK,

The British Museum. 41. Sveiby, Karl-Erik, Skuthorpe, Tex (2006) Treading Lightly Allen & Unwin, Sydney 42. Turk, A.G. and Stea, D(2014) David Mark;s contribution to ethnophysiography

research, International Journal of Geographical Information Science http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tgis20

43. Turk (2016) personal communication Perth. 44. Trompenaars, F. & Hampden-Turner, C. (1998). Riding the waves of culture. New

York: McGraw-Hill. 45. Vass, G. (2012). ‘So, What is Wrong with Indigenous Education?’ Perspective,

Position and Power Beyond a Deficit Discourse. The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education 41, 85-96.

46. Willmot, E (1988) Pemulwuy, The Rainbow Warrior, Bantam Press.

Printed by

Centre for Indigenous Technology Research and Development

Level 7, Building 11

Software Engineering

University of Technology Sydney

Documents

Aboriginal Engineering – Technologies for an Enduring ...indigenousengineering.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Indigeno… · Aboriginal engineers as it is still evident in the