https://www.artshouse.com.au/first-nations/

Yolngu desired the rivers of black and white culture to become one

Non-Indigenous Australia should consider the possibility that the best chance the people of Australia have at surviving the coming climate apocalypse is for white people to learn from Indigenous cultures; from people who live as one with nature, who lived in the Australian environment for tens of thousands of eyars without destroying it.

Indigenous Australians are among the world's greatest survivors

In First Footprints, a book and documentary series by Scott Cain, it was established that the Aboriginal people survived the last ice age. During that time Australia was not glaciated en masse. Instead with the water locked up in glaciers and ice-caps worldwide, with the lowering of sea level and the increasing land area, Australia was locked in the greatest drought in world history. The most inhospitable inhabited continent on Earth became even more inhospitable. No water to be had, overnight temperatures of minus 25 Celsius. And yet, in those conditions people lived, thrived and developed complex cultures. This ice age lasted 10,000 years; it glaciated the mountains and turned 90% of the continent into desert. A massive extinction event wiped out the mega-fauna on which Indigenous populations would have relied for food. People survived, are still here now, because of adaptability that would ensure our survival through any future apocalypse.

Lynn White, Jr in The Historical Causes of Our Ecologic Crisis [Science, Volume 155, Number 3767, 1967] wrote: “Especially in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen.” This anthropocentrism is at odds with animistic beliefs that existed before Christianity and could be seen as a root cause of our ecological woes.

it was a sort of adaptive wisdom, a way of looking at the environment, people and resources that ensured survival. It was interconnectedness and an unselfish, connected, way of examining the world that fortified Indigenous people against disaster.

Aboriginal cultural ways instead see humanity as part of nature

• Indigenous Australians survived the last Ice Age. They likely carry that survival wisdom with them
• They survived one of the most brutal invasions and colonisations in history
• Perhaps the most resilient community on earth could teach us about how to survive the coming climate apocalypse
• indigenous culture sees humanity as a part of nature, whereas Western culture (rooted in Christian and enlightenment thinkers) sees earth as seperate from humanity, and only useful for exploitation
• Western culture, rather than practising interconnectedness, is focussed on the celebration of the individual at the expense of the collective.