Every time I see a picture of those ice skaters my brain melts down all over again. What part of this planet do you have to be from to not know that blackface is a Bad Idea and Hugely Offensive? Yikes!
I've found that Sky News is often full of fail. I imagine the reporter did about as thorough a job with research as the ice skaters who thought that a couple of youtube clips could teach them how to dance like brown people.
Hmmm... but nothing's gained by being more inclusive when it means that diversity is subsumed by cliche. Not all brown people dance alike. And neither are their dances necessarily harder to learn than non-brown peoples.
But you're right - they needed to do more than watch a couple of videos for research. Their mistake was in not getting an Aborigine to show them how it was done.
The hypersensitivity of many Aborigines towards keeping their cultural practices secret or restricting its performance to their own people is a natural reaction to their situation, but its a cultural nationalism that may one day outlive its usefulness.
Rock art can be dated from accretions that lie over the pigment as well (ancient wasp nests being the classic example).
And I got the impression that there's also quite a lively debate on how Australia was settled by Aborigines. Whether it was one wave or several waves - each theory having the additional burden of politics - since several waves would point to most of the current lot being only the most recent people to come to Australia before Europeans and might undermine land rights claims.
Its interesting that there is such a proliferation of language groups - given the lack of impassable terrain features as an isolating factor - the only other explanation is that they've been here a very, very long time. We also have too many marsupial species in Australia given the time supposedly involved. Perhaps there's something about Australia that just leads to speciation.
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I've found that Sky News is often full of fail. I imagine the reporter did about as thorough a job with research as the ice skaters who thought that a couple of youtube clips could teach them how to dance like brown people.
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But you're right - they needed to do more than watch a couple of videos for research. Their mistake was in not getting an Aborigine to show them how it was done.
The hypersensitivity of many Aborigines towards keeping their cultural practices secret or restricting its performance to their own people is a natural reaction to their situation, but its a cultural nationalism that may one day outlive its usefulness.
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And I got the impression that there's also quite a lively debate on how Australia was settled by Aborigines. Whether it was one wave or several waves - each theory having the additional burden of politics - since several waves would point to most of the current lot being only the most recent people to come to Australia before Europeans and might undermine land rights claims.
Its interesting that there is such a proliferation of language groups - given the lack of impassable terrain features as an isolating factor - the only other explanation is that they've been here a very, very long time. We also have too many marsupial species in Australia given the time supposedly involved. Perhaps there's something about Australia that just leads to speciation.
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