Fractal politics and diplomacy: religion, governance, and conflict management in classical Aboriginal Australia

ABSTRACT Through a discussion of the overall patterning of religion and law, and using examples from Central Australia and Southeast Queensland, this response to the inaugural Coral Bell School lecture on Indigenous Diplomacy by Mary Graham and Morgan Brigg shows how Aboriginal people developed a system of embedded, detailed, and comprehensive fractal politics and diplomacy. The descriptor ‘fractal’ is used as it is particularly apt for explaining the long-lasting pre-colonial stable order that prevailed on the Australian continent. The broad categories in the classical Aboriginal fractal system are religion and the Law, geography and land tenure, kinship, and the class or skin system. The response explains how these elements lock together, and how this in turn supports diplomatic and harmonious relations among groups or nations. The fractal diplomatic systems of Aboriginal Australia thus generated multi-faceted identities and ways of forming polities at different scales to address particular socio-political needs and challenges dependent on broad contextual factors and the current circumstances. This anthropologically informed explication of the diplomatic system complements the more abstract model of Indigenous political relations described in the Graham and Brigg lecture.

In opening the lecture Indigenous International Relations: Old peoples and new pragmatism, Mary Graham spoke insightfully of the evolutionary political design of the classical order of Aboriginal Australia as created over millennia through a 'slow, collective, and emergent process' (Graham and Brigg 2023, 591).I take this as my cue to explain, from an anthropological perspective, how the 'fractal' components of this system work in a complex relational interweave.I use the descriptor 'fractal' as I think it is particularly apt for explaining the long-lasting pre-colonial stable order that prevailed on this continent.It is also a term that I first heard Morgan Brigg apply in conversation on this topic, and one that Graham and Brigg (2023, 593) use in their lecture in reference to 'fractal relationalism'.I offer this anthropologically informed explication to complement the more abstract model of Indigenous political relations described in their lecture.
In my view, the broad categories in the classical Aboriginal fractal system are religion and the Law, geography and land tenure, kinship, and the class or skin system.Here, I explain how they all lock together, and how this in turn supports diplomatic and harmonious relations among groups or nations.Because I refer to the classical system that has been both disrupted by colonialism and retained (there are significant regional variations) I use both past and present tense to refer to Aboriginal fractal politics and diplomacy.By discussing the overall patterning of religion and law as well as the specific cases of Central Australia and Southeast Queensland I show how Aboriginal people, by using 'landscapte as a template' (Graham and Brigg 2023, 592), developed a system of embedded, detailed, and comprehensive fractal politics and diplomacy.

Religion and Law: Basic and ramifying patterns
Classical Aboriginal Religion can be summed up with one term, the Dreaming, an ancient continent-wide belief system in which the relational interweave is embedded and from which emerge a series of parts.In the beginning, there were the Ancestral Beings who arose from the soft ground and who were part human and part animal, plant, or planetary or meteorological phenomenon.Hence, there were Kangaroo-men, Yam-women, Rain-men, Star-women and so on.Each Ancestral Being made at least one place and some travelled across the landscape making numerous places.At each place, they left something of their sacred energies.These are perpetual energies, still at the sites today, whether contemporary people know it or not.These places are the sacred sites, the building blocks of land tenure.
Other elements are also left behind by the Ancestors at these places.Many sites have a song that might express an associated sacred history which, if containing a moral code, is referred to as 'Law' today by conservative believers.In addition, ancestors may have variously left behind a ritual designed to catalyse the reproduction of the species associated with the site, a sacred object, or a sacred paint design for body or shield decoration.Most importantly, humans eventually descended from the Ancestral Being's energies at the site.For example, in the case of the Kangaroo-man, both humans and kangaroos descended; the humans retained something of the kangaroo essence and the kangaroos carried something of the human essence.Because these humans and animals were in such a strong relationship they are equated as kin.Those humans thus become responsible for performing the kangaroo ritual to bring about the reproduction of kangaroos.
Anthropologists use descriptors such as 'totems', 'increase rituals' and 'descent groups' to characterise the above relations.They speak of clans of descendants, with each clan having a shared totemic identity amongst its members who belong to a set of local sites forming a 'clan estate'.The continent is covered with such estates (called 'Countries' by many today, or as 'principalities' by a Yagara colleague).Clan estates are but one element of the socio-geography.Several estates may in turn amalgamate into dialect group territories, and into larger units of socio-geography, then into language group territories (the last sometimes referred to as a 'new tribe' or a Nation), and even into wider regional polities (Sutton 2003, Chapter 8).
This base system becomes more complex and entangled with further elements and variations across the continent, including through the overlay of the 'skin' system.In Central Australia there are eight 'skins' or classes, called 'subsections' by anthropologists, which were categorised into four patri-couples (father-child pairs or semi-moieties).This classification system classified the totems (plants and animals), the sacred sites, the estates, and the patri-clan members.Hence a clan of Japaljarri and Jungarayi skin people of Kangaroo Dreaming preside as kirda or bosses over their Kangaroo sites that form their estate, and because they have the sacred Kangaroo essence or energy, their responsibility is to perform the Kangaroo increase ritual.The cultural landscape was thus divided into such estates that were each classified as belonging to one of the four patri-couples.
Another category of people is defined as the kurdungurla; the children of the women of the patriclan.In the Gulf and Top End regions, the kurdungurla are known as the tjungkayi.Their role is to act as 'managers' or 'policeman' for the kirda, their Country, sacred sites, sacra, and ceremonies (including land management).The two roles of kirda and kurdungurla bring complementary but different responsibilities for Country in the classical system.The kurdungurla had to ensure that the kirda returned seasonally to their Country to perform their ceremony to hence contribute to maintaining the balance of nature, whereby all species were healthy and fertile.

Precluding and managing conflict
Graham and Brigg state that 'wars of conquest are unknown' (2023, 591) on the continent.Ted Strehlow hypothesised (1970) that the religious system in Central Australia precludes the conquest of peoples in other Countries or wider regions.Because people are religiously empowered through their own specific Country, would-be aggressors are unlikely to have the right Dreaming or totemic relation to many of those Countries to execute appropriate ceremonies.In a sense, people are politically impotent outside their clan estate because they are tied through religious belief to their own Countries, including through being obligated and empowered to always return to perform reproductive rituals in their Country rather than other Countries.
Thus, to expand upon Graham and Brigg's (2023, 592) reference to place as an 'ontological compass', each person is kin to their Sacred Site, the primary element of Aboriginal geography and land tenure.This generates a complex relational interweave based upon sacred sites as the fundamental building blocks of Countries and people-land relations.Some Ancestral Beings travelled away from their Country making further sites, thus extending the relational and diplomatic web by binding distant groups (and multiple estates) together through a common Dreaming.In effect, a range of clans along a given 'songline', or pathway of an Ancestral Being, are brought into a direct sibling relationship.
Thus, over thousands of years, life became a pattern of maintaining one's own Country but with people also regularly travelling further abroad for social and ceremonial motives.This travel was facilitated by the skin classificatory system which, in a remarkably comprehensive set of diplomatic possibilities, renders all people as potential kin.Therefore, if I am a Jakamarra man (as I am through connections and responsibilities conferred upon me by Aboriginal people), other Jakamarra men of my generation are brothers.My 'right-skin' (lawfully appropriate) spousal partner is Napaljarri, so other women of the same generation are in a sister-in-law relationship with me, and all their brothers I will count as my brothers-in-law.Through the application of appropriate skin system protocols, then, diplomatic relations, travel and trade are enabled over thousands of kilometres.This fractal diplomatic system supports processes for settling grievances.Despite the diversity in traditional dispute resolution processes, a common principle appears to be one of equalising emotions as quickly as possible once they become disharmonious, so that the normality of peaceful relationships can be restored swiftly to the camp and wider polity.The first part of this process, and an essential protocol of diplomacy upon arriving at a camp in someone else's Country, saw visitors wait outside the camp whilst one of the camp's leaders inquired about the purpose of the visit.The visitor's presence was then discussed with the wider camp residents to ascertain whether anybody held a grievance with the waiting visitor.If no issues emerged, the camp leader may bring out a piece of smouldering firewood from the camp, representing an invitation for the visitor to enter (Thomson 1932).But if there was a grievance, then the issue had to be resolved before the visitor was allowed to enter and be welcomed into the camp.
Minor disputes or grievances, both within or among groups, could be settled through reintegrative shaming or other interventions by adjudicators, who are referred to in Aboriginal English as 'peacemakers', 'blockers', or 'JPs' (from 'Justice of the Peace'), and whose role was to try to quell arguments.But in more serious cases, structured duels were conducted with adjudicator(s) and seconds, the latter usually being biological or skin siblings of the proponents who would substitute for them if they were injured and assist in the management of the process.These duels would occur at a recognised fighting or 'square-up' ground, and in these cases, the role of adjudicators became arranging a 'square-up' fight.The extent of weaponry and allowable injury were proportional to the severity of the grievance.Once the duel was over, the protagonists would drop the matter entirely and resume appropriate social relations.The diplomatic role of peacemakers in such processes was respected and fundamental to social organisation (See Brigg et al. 2017;Elkin 1931).

Fractal diplomacy
Diplomacy beyond individual camps and contact with visitors (and thus in more regionally extensive forms) operated through Men's Councils and Women's Councils.These events were usually held at separate grounds amongst many groups.They became critical in addressing wider regional issues involving a number of tribal or language groups, including problems that could affect the harmony of numerous clans such as the dying out of a descent group and how a nominated person(s) could make a succession claim to maintain the management of its Country sacra, or a widespread environmental disaster such as a coastal tsunami polluting wells, or a prolonged drought in the interior.Perhaps in a good season matters could include an inter-tribal ceremonial festival accompanied by initiations.At these Council meetings (usually on special grounds, often bora grounds in Eastern Australia), shared group protocols of respect, procedural oratory, and bringing matters to some sort of consensus were paramount.
To extend the above findings drawn largely from Central Australia, consider the operation of governance, diplomacy and dispute resolution for Southeast Queensland where a different yet resonant four-skin system prevailed (with named matri-moieties).This system encompassed peoples on the upper Brisbane, Stanley, Burnett, and Mary Rivers, with much of what we know of this system told to Dr Winterbotham at the University of Queensland in c1959 by Gaiarbau or Willie McKenzie, a Yinibara man (aka 'Jinibara') born c1873.Gaiarbau described a Tribal Council of about 10 men with a head man, or muningburum.When the wider tribe had to be informed, chastised, or was required to discuss a serious issue or decision, the muningburum would orate at night in a large base camp, with a loud voice, for long hours, his throat sustained with honey water.This oratory (referred to in Aboriginal English by some as 'broadcasting'), became more intense in inter-tribal gatherings (e.g. at the regional Bonyi festival), where numerous muningburum from different groups took turns at diplomatic speaking about regional issues on behalf of their groups (Langevad 1982, 73).
Gaiarbau explained that it was the duty of each member of the Tribal Council to keep order in their own clan group.When at times their capacity was limited by a transgressor belonging to a skin group for whom it was inappropriate for a Councillor to discipline (e.g.jalua mother's brother, or damangaa wife's mother's brother), he could call for assistance from the muningburum, who was not subject to such behavioural restrictions due to his important role.This lower level of governance of a Camp Council (as opposed to the overriding Tribal Council) could only deal with local minor clan issues (Langevad 1982, 73-74).
Gaiarbau also describes inter-group dispute resolution procedures for those matters requiring 'square-up' in some detail, with the muningburum taking a lead organising role.The number of men to participate varied with the scale of the dispute but equal numbers were arranged on each side.Participants were carefully chosen based on their skin identities, as men in certain skin relations were forbidden to fight one another, e.g. a dispute between a Barung man and a Bunda man (classificatory brothers-in-law), had to be referred to their Camp Council for settlement.Spears were first thrown at 70 yards, then closer for boomerangs and finally up close with clubs.The muningburum decided when it was appropriate for the fight to end.After retiring to the camp, everybody became friendly and content and performed ceremonies together.Gaiarbau also stated that tribes did not raid each other, with all matters being settled on a dispute resolution ground.Accordingly, the usurpation of another's territory never occurred and sentries or similar were not used to guard territory (Langevad 1982, 60-62), The Aboriginal governance and diplomacy system of Southeast Queensland thus displays similar structural principles to those in Central Australia.In both cases, harmonious relations are maintained at different scales of the socio-geography including through decision-making Councils and prescribed protocols for airing and settling grievances.At a larger regional scale in Southeast Queensland, contemporary Aboriginal people say they identify as Goories, and that they belong to a wider Goori society from Hervey Bay to Cape Byron and inland to the top of the Great Dividing Range (encompassing Southeast Queensland), generating a wider polity of multiple language groups who once travelled to interact at large feasting events involving several thousand people in one location.
The fractal diplomatic systems of Aboriginal Australia thus generated multi-faceted identities and ways of forming polities at different scales to address particular socio-political needs and challenges dependent on broad contextual factors and circumstances.In the current Anthropocene era of panicking cries for reversion to sustainable stewardship of the planet, much can be learned by all cultures and so-called nation states from the classical environmental, religious, and political order that was sustained by the Aboriginal civilisation for 65,000 + years.This is the fundamental message of the Graham and Brigg (2023) lecture.

Notes on contributor
Professor Paul Memmott AO, School of Architecture, University of Queensland, is a trans-disciplinary researcher (architect/anthropologist) and has been the Director of the Aboriginal Environments Research Centre (AERC) for some decades at the University of Queensland.Memmott's field of research encompasses the cross-cultural study of the people-environment relations of Indigenous peoples with their natural and built environments, including Aboriginal housing and settlement design, Aboriginal access to institutional architecture, Indigenous constructs of place and cultural landscapes, vernacular architecture, Native Title, and social planning in Indigenous communities, homelessness, and family violence.Memmott has received the Officer of the Order of Australia Award 'For distinguished service to ethno-architecture and anthropology, to Indigenous housing and cultural heritage, and to tertiary education'.His career has spanned over 50 years.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.