Hacker News Reader

Comment by kevinkeller | Hacker News Reader

I think it's because of a sense of ownership and belonging (or lack thereof). People who made the art in Lascaux are, in a distant sense, ancestors of the present-day French. Most of Australia is of British ancestry, transplanted in the past few hundred years. The majority of them, including their government, obviously don't consider the Aboriginal heritage as their own.

View on HN

I dunno, if I had a property with art that is 10,000 years old, I will try my best to preserve it. Regardless of whether they were made by my ancestors or not, because it doesn’t matter.

It was made by humans. So in a way, they are my ancestors, whether they spoke French or some other language doesn’t matter to me

The point is you’re in the enlightened minority.

No most Europeans, including those in Australia care deeply about cultural preservation. In this case every European involved, the government, media and owner of the land all do. The odd thing is how the aboriginal people have done nothing to preserve this art for thousands of years. I would be curious to know if the previous vandals mentioned in TFA were leaving European or aboriginal names behind. One of the complaints the aboriginals had was lack of access to the cave. Europeans may be the ones more interested in preserving the ancient markings, the non-Europeans may be the ones more interested in making their own. Can anyone blame them?

Europeans everywhere care mostly about owning and profiting off of artwork, preservation of a work is important insofar as it allows Europeans to hoard the art and sell it, or grant prestige to their museums and galleries compared to other museums and galleries.

The cultural preservation is utterly unwanted - that's why things like the Benin bronzes have been forever broken and split up amongst Europeans in pieces, rather than retained as the one cultural work of being a history book for people to actually use in benin.

The same happens with Europeans in British Columbia. Rather than cultural preservation, the Europeans put totem poles on metal brackets to make sure they stay up forever and will never fall down, removing the intended time component of falling down, decaying, and being made anew. The intention of Europeans is to remove the cultural component and traditions, and turn it into an ownable artifact.

How was the Australian government profiting from installing security measures at the prehistoric cave art in TFA? I agree Europeans value history and sometimes see things as too static, but this is because Europeans are a thoughtful and sentimental people not because we are somehow profiting from putting delicate cave artifacts behind a gate.

Out of curiosity, what would you do, put an electric fence and surveillance cameras around it?

It's a hypothetical, but a couple cameras and a sign letting people know the area is under surveillance will probably do.

According to the article:

> The vandals forced their way past barbed wire and dug under a steel gate

so I doubt cameras and a sign sign would've deterred then.

In fairness, that same article suggests cameras would have helped.

> “The failure to build an effective gate, or to make use of modern security services, such as wildlife monitoring cameras that operate 24/7, has in many ways allowed this vandalism to occur,”

The US also has significant protections around the Native American rock art at California’s Lava Beds National Monument.

https://www.nps.gov/labe/learn/historyculture/rockart.htm

I think National parks and monuments get better funding.

They get really mad at you when you tell them their acknowledgment of land / country to the Gadigal / other peoples is just a way to pay lip service and not actually do what’s required.

If they really actually cared, they would have protected these sites.

It absolutely is just lip service. So was Rudd's apology, milestone that it was.

"We acknowledge we're on stolen land"

"Are you gonna give it back?"

"Nah"

Imagine if I pinched my neighbour's TV, plugged it in and said "I acknowledge the traditional owner of this television" before switching it on. Wonder if he'd be cool with it.

I'm a fan of the frank honesty of Uncle Jack Charles:

> His criminal life saw him break into many homes in the "posher districts of Melbourne" - a deliberate choice, he says: "I robbed as rent collection for stolen Aboriginal land!"

> "Those mansions were on my mother's land, but I'm sure if I told the judge I was a rent collector, not a robber, I'd have been given another two years on my sentence."

( Bastardry (2008) is a funny and moving biographical documentry )

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-48702542

This is what pisses me off about the acknowledgements cropping up everywhere now. "We acknowledge this land was never ceeded". Ok, so isn't the next rational step to give it back then?

I've never met a white person who spouts "it's still their land" who actually gives back their 700sqm they worked to buy.

People in France now are barely related to the people who were there 10k years ago. Heck, I'm not even sure there are a lot of descendants of the Gauls left.

The thing is it’s the Gauls that are not much related to the people that drew cave art. European hunter gatherers were replaced by eastern farmers in the Neolithic.

My point was that the Gauls, who were much closer to us than 10k years ago, have been replaced too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com