Not an appealing lifestyle

It's fair to say that pre-colonial indigenous Australia had a PR problem in terms of their lifestyle which modern academia and education departments have spent the last 40 years trying to undo.  Out with the "primitive Stone Age nomadic life" and in with the "spiritual custodians of the land living in harmony with nature and each other for millennia, until Europeans ruined it."

True, there is the "who are we to judge on their quality of life when English kids were being sent to work in cotton mills for 14 hours a day so their little fingers could clean the deadly machinery?" argument.   On the other hand, at the risk of sounding all Pauline Hanson, the good thing about having stuff like writing, laws, national government and improving technology is that living conditions can be improved for everyone pretty quickly, when you put your mind to it.   

So, I've been perusing some anthropology sources lately, to remind me of what used to be noted commonly, even up to the later half of the 20th century, about some aspects of pre-colonial aboriginal life.   Now, Quadrant loves to cite this sort of material, often from the initial observers, but they can carry a question mark as to objectivity, so I've looked for later stuff.

Which led me to this issue - why didn't they have larger families, given the lack of contraception, girls marrying at a young age, etc.   This article "The Determinants of Fertility Among Aborigines" is from 1981, so I presume it is free of some earlier prejudices, and relatively sympathetic.   

All possible explanations are looked at, but these two aspects caught my eye the most:

 

 

Then there is the issue of male practices.  I mean, I knew a little about sub-incision of the penis, but hadn't realised that it was something of a repeat exercise for gaining blood for ritual purposes.  I thought it was supposed to be good to be a man in such societies, but didn't realise that it meant voluntarily cutting into your penis again and again: 

Now that I think of it, there is some irony that we usually associate the modern anti-circumcision movement with Left leaning types, who also are the most sympathetic to Noble Savage-isms, which has as part of its baggage sub-incision.  

As for the infanticide:  do we judge Sparta too harshly for killing the weak at a young age, or other societies which let unwanted babies die?  (It was quite a common practice in Japan in the feudal Edo period too, apparently.)

I would say we accept that different societies had moral systems which were influenced by their physical and intellectual environment - but we don't really dispute, if we are honest, that it's good that certain cultural practices are dropped.   Is it too much to ask that we be allowed to say the same about pre-colonial indigenous society here?