Australian martial arts.

[Former castleva]

Now I doubt there are many to speak of,if only due to historical constraint but the thought crosses my mind.
Are there? Any evidence of them existing (having existed) ?

[blooming lotus]

i HAVE BEEN IN aUSTRALIA FOR ABOUT 2MTHS NOW. i KNOW THE ABORIGINALS HAVE BROLGA AND EMU AND POSSIBLELY EVEN SNAKE.....i WAS ON A LONG TRAIN JOURNEY RECENTLY AND GOT TO STUDYING PASSING KANGAROOS,,,I DON'T KNOW IF KANGAROO STYLE EXISTS..BUT THEY ARE GREAT BOXERS!!! ALSO GOOD JUMPERS...I'M SURE I CAN USE THEIR FLOW

[Former castleva]

OK.Thanks...
Are you OK?

[blooming lotus]

PEACHY :D THANKS

[Toby]

I don't know of any FC. I've heard that at one stage (ca. 20000? 10000? 5000? years ago) the aborigines were the most advanced race on earth. They had developed various tools to help their lives. Maybe they lacked hand to hand combat skills in favour of weapons? I know spears were (and still are) a favoured weapon. Tribal punishments are still occasionally inflicted on perpetrators (spear to thigh). Spears were also used in battle, e.g. intertribal and against white men, but we all know how that went. They also had a thing called a woomera, which was a long bit of wood that acted as an extension of the arm so you could throw the spear harder, faster and further. Like a hard sling.

Of course, there's also the famous boomerang. I doubt they were ever as good as modern boomerangs (either the tools themselves or the throwers). I do know that modern boomerangs are scary :eek:. Me and my friends were into them a few years ago. One friend had a fairly large one (probably over a foot long for each "arm") and it spun very fast and very heavy. There was no way you would try to catch it, and you didn't want to get hit by it. It also had a decent range. All this is gathered from memory, so it may be a bit off.

[Former castleva]

I see.Thanks for sharing.

The way it appears to me is that if they ever had any system,they would not have left little trace of that.
After all,it´s just a while ago (relatively speaking) that Europeans washed ashore&before that,all conflicts must have been intertribal.

[Toby]

I gather intertribal conflict was pretty much exclusively spear throwing.

[Toby]

One more thing - the Aboriginal tribes were not particularly nomadic, nor did they have any means of easy travel. No horses, camels, vehicular travel. So there were huge differences between tribes. The most obvious difference was language. I think there were 100s (1000s?) of Aboriginal languages. Other differences were due to environmental factors e.g. those near the coast vs those in the desert. Also those in the north (hot) vs those in the south (cold). They were the most advanced race at one time (i.e. 5000, 10000 or 20000 years ago) but then they sort of froze at that point and didn't experience any of the advances that the rest of the world did. So e.g. before 200 odd years ago, they would never have seen a wheel. So there were major cultural differences between tribes that may have precluded the development of martial arts. No cities, no buildings, no wars (except minor tribal conflict). Combine all these with the advent of European man and alcohol. Alcohol decimated the Aboriginal culture, and continues to do so. Things like language have all but died out because younger people aren't interested in the knowledge their elders have. Also, very short average lifespans (< 50?) mean there are few "elders" to pass on the knowledge.

[quiet man]

If you attack an Aborigin, he may hit you with a pair of twin didgeridoos.

[GeneChing]

Read this in the NYT science section this morning and was hoping there was some boomerang thread here somewhere to post it on. :cool:


Kaakutja, Perhaps the First Known Boomerang Victim (http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/10/18/science/first-boomerang-victim-australia.html?_r=1&referer=https://www.google.com/)

https://cdn1.nyt.com/images/2016/10/15/science/15TB-boomerang1/15TB-boomerang1-articleLarge.jpg
The skeletal remains of Kaakutja, an aboriginal man who scientists think was killed by a boomerang about in the 13th century.
MICHAEL WESTAWAY

OCTOBER 17, 2016
Trilobites
By NICHOLAS ST. FLEUR

To William Bates, the skeleton he found buried in Australia’s Toorale National Park in 2014 was crying out for help. Its mouth was wide open, and only its skull protruded from the dirt. The rest of its body was trapped beneath the eroding bank of the Darling River.

“As soon as I had seen him, I knew he was my ancestor,” said Mr. Bates, a cultural adviser of the Baakantji Aboriginal group in New South Wales. “I just started to cry, and I said ‘I’ll help you, I promise to help you.’”

Mr. Bates, known as Badger, went to get his wife, and together they noticed a gash across the skull’s right eye that stretched to the jaw. They didn’t know it at the time, but they had uncovered what scientists now think could be the earliest evidence of a person killed by a boomerang.

But at that moment, it appeared as if the person had been struck across the face by a metal blade. They named him Kaakutja, after the Baakantji word for “older brother,” and believed he was probably another victim of frontier violence from the time of British colonization.

They reached out to Michael Westaway a paleoanthropologist at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, to help excavate the skeleton.

https://cdn1.nyt.com/images/2016/10/15/science/15TB-boomerang2/15TB-boomerang2-articleLarge.jpg
A gash in the skull of Kaakutja was probably caused by a boomerang during combat.
MICHAEL WESTAWAY

“We said they could take him away and study him on the conditions that when they are done, they bring him back and we’ll give him a proper burial,” Mr. Bates said.

When Dr. Westaway and his team dug up Kaakutja’s remains, they found his body curled in a ball lying on its right hand side, facing upstream. They said it appeared as if the man, who was probably between 20 and 30 when he died, had received a ritual burial and was not hastily disposed of like a murder victim.

They noticed several wounds beyond the slash to the face, and performed a CT scan of the bones to better examine the damage. They also sent samples to Rachel Wood, a geochemist at the Australian National University for radiocarbon dating. To their surprise, the radiocarbon dating found that Kaakutja lived between 1260 and 1280, about 500 years before British colonizers first arrived in Australia.

To double check, they performed tests on the sand grains found embedded in the skull and sediment from the pit. The optical analysis they did would determine the last time the sediments were exposed to light, which would provide insight into when Kaakutja was buried. The analysis signaled that the burial most likely could have occurred between 1305 and 1525, also before the European arrival.

By dating the remains, they changed the interpretation of how Kaakutja met his end.

“It showed that the damage must have been done by another aboriginal person, presumably with a wooden artifact rather than metal sword,” Dr. Wood said.

https://cdn1.nyt.com/images/2016/10/15/science/15TB-boomerang3/15TB-boomerang3-articleLarge.jpg
Trauma sustained by Kaakutja, including (a) damage to the face from a sharp weapon most likely right before death, (b) mark on the jaw, (c) trauma to the arm, (d) a healed wound to the head, and (e and f) damaged ribs.
MICHAEL WESTAWAY

It was clear that Kaakutja was killed by a traditional weapon, but the team was puzzled by what that wooden weapon could have been. No one had ever seen trauma such as this in Australia’s archaeological history, they said. They started reading into the ethnohistory of the Aboriginals and looking at cave paintings for clues.

The literature directed them to two wooden weapons, the Lil-lil, a type of club, and the Wonna or fighting boomerang. Although closely related to the returning boomerang that people are most familiar with, the blade of the wonna is reminiscent of a saber and it was probably used for close combat.

“When it’s used as a fighting club, it’s like a battle ax essentially; it would have been a very fearsome weapon,” said Dr. Westaway, explaining why he believes the murder weapon was a fighting boomerang. “The blow to the front of the face was a rapid shock kind of blow.”

The thinking goes that during his final moments, Kaakutja was first struck on the right side of the face with the fighting boomerang, which probably would have taken out his eye and drawn a lot of blood. Then a second blow probably came to his ribs, breaking several of them and causing him to collapse. Kaakutja, now on all fours, was potentially struck a third time across the top of his arm, which hacked off part of the bone.

The researchers are not sure which strike was the death blow, but because they didn’t find any defensive wounds on his lower arms, they think the whole struggle was a surprise attack.

“This is the first time we’ve found evidence of someone possibly killed by a fighting boomerang,” Dr. Westaway said. “These hardwood weapons leave similar trauma patterns to steel weapons; that was unexpected.”

They published their analysis of the death of Kaakutja in the October issue of the journal Antiquity (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/the-death-of-kaakutja-a-case-of-peri-mortem-weapon-trauma-in-an-aboriginal-man-from-north-western-new-south-wales-australia/3E957293B27AB3CD1A30FA7F3DB2BC80).

Claire Smith, an archaeologist from Flinders University in Australia who was not involved in the study, agreed that the evidence supports the idea that Kaakutja was killed by a sharp-edged weapon, either a Lil-lil or a fighting boomerang.

“This research is important because it increases our ability to identify the types of wounds caused by the fighting tools of Aboriginal people in the past,” she said in an email.

After Dr. Westaway and his team gathered the data they needed to solve the murder mystery, they returned the remains to Mr. Bates and the Baakantji community. At the burial, Mr. Bates placed the bones on top of a kangaroo skin, covered them in dirt and leaves and performed a traditional smoking ceremony, so that together, some 700 years after Kaakutja died, they could lay him back to rest.

“We say his spirit made his remains come back,” Mr. Bates said. “We claimed him like a brother, and we kept our promise.”

[SevenStar]

All cultures have some form of folk wrestling. Coreeda was an aborigine wrestling art.