Indigenous Australian Philosophy

Ross Naidoo looks at Indigenous thinking through a philosophical lens.

- Ross Naidoo

The Indigenous or Aboriginal peoples of Australia speak several hundred distinct languages, distributed across a vast continent. Although their unique worldviews developed over long ages and great distances, the same folktales, concepts and traditional beliefs can often be found in many different language groups. Academic study of these matters has usually been the preserve of anthropologists, but can philosophy perhaps raise our understanding of Indigenous belief systems? To explore this question, I will be seeking to categorize their culturally specific wisdom under Western, and to a lesser degree non-Western, philosophical frameworks. At the end of the article I will suggest a return to the exploration of the sacred, as this is the foundational basis of Indigenous philosophy.

In an introductory essay on Australian Indigenous wisdom, I'm clearly not trying to capture the minutia and vastness of more than 50,000 years of the evolution of Indigenous wisdom. But it is valuable to use a philosophical framework that itself has over 2,500 years of continuous debate, speculation, and (occasionally) proof, to examine it.