The Nomadic Alternative – Page 172

but they did not defend it, nor did they necessarily live there.

Such Aboriginal concepts of territory reduce to absurdity the various lebensraum theories that plague our political thought.

Neither deracination nor the frustrations of settlement can affect the hunters' stability. They perpetually move about their lands, familiarizing themselves with every detail and fixing mental frontiers beyond which they need not go. The hunter believes his world to be ideal, his territory the ideal territory. Since he is self-sufficient, his only motive for travelling abroad is a peaceful one - "to marry far", or to make those intellectual borrowings that enhance the meaning of life. Since the numbers of a tribe remain at an ideal level, territorial expansion is unnecessary.

Frontiers remain stable, to overstretch them unthinkable. "There has never apparently been the least attempt", wrote Spencer and Gillen, "made by any one tribe to encroach upon the territory of another. Now and again they may have inter-tribal quarrels or fights, but there is no such thing as the acquisition of fresh territory. No idea of this, or of its advisability or otherwise, has ever entered the head of the Central Australian native. Very probably this is to be associated with the fundamental belief that his alcheringa ancestors occupied precisely the same country which he does now.

If an Australian tribe disappeared the neighbours did not annex it. It 'belonged' to nobody; no mechanism for claiming it existed within the framework of known social laws.

The squabbles and fights that do occur invariably concern the exchange of women or some imbalance in the gift exchange cycle.

Hunters do not ruin their land by overgrazing, nor do they dig it up, but allow it to give its resources freely. The land lies undefended because there is nothing to defend except from outsiders who defile it. Hunting rights are rarely exclusive and a man may usually hunt over his mother's homeland. Each Bushman band 'owns' its own waterhole and clusters round it when the dry season comes. Mobility begins afresh with the rains, and the same band exercises its time-honoured rights to harvest the nuts of a particular tree, a source