As you might expect, Sydney is starting to look pretty darn festive for Friday’s Olympic kickoff. I dare say the games are a bigger deal here than they were for Atlanta in `96 or will be for Salt Lake City in `04. I say this because Australia, in stark contrast to America, is a country that is basically ignored. It’s chock full of wonders of every sort, but is tucked away nicely on the other side of the world. Often it’s hard for the rest of us to even remember its there. Even the Olympics itself, despite having chosen Sydney as its 2000 home, has left Australia out. The five Olympic rings symbolize five competing continents: Asia, Europe, Africa and North and South America. What happened to Australia? Australians win more Olympic medals per capita than any other nation in the world and they don’t even get a freaking’ ring. Hello? Is anyone bloody listening? Well, of course we’re not, at least not normally. But now Australians get two weeks of the world’s attention, and to be sure, they will savor every minute of it. Finally, they get a chance to showcase their beloved homeland to the rest of the world as the safe, prosperous, cosmopolitan and downright beautiful country that it is. But even in a nation of the overlooked, one group of people stands out (or, I guess, doesn’t stand out) as the most neglected. I refer to Australia’s natives, the Aborigines. And frankly, it’s a shame, because they are some of the most fascinating people in the world. Ironically, for a long time being ignored was the best thing Aborigines had going for them. It wasn’t until 1770, 278 years after Columbus, that Europeans even realized the Australian continent was there. At that point, Aborigines had inhabited Australia for an amazing 60,000 years. That’s long enough to make the Aborigines the longest single sustained culture ever. It also makes them the world’s first seafarers. In fact, it makes them the first seafarers by a margin of about 30,000 years! How Aborigines accomplished this before behaviorally modern humans existed, no one knows. Nor does anyone know how they figured out the aerodynamic complexities of the boomerang 10,000 years ago. Aboriginal cave paintings have been found that look avant-garde next to those in Lascaux. The most amazing things about Native Australian culture are the things it didn’t have – elements considered foundational everywhere else: metal tools, clothing, pottery, urbanization, permanent dwellings, farming, food surplus, property, domesticated animals and government. Even their concept of time was wholly dissimilar. Aborigines explained their world with something called Dreamtime, a temporal paradigm so different from our own that it didn’t even have the words “today” or “tomorrow.” Of course, the imperialists that colonized Australia regarded the absence of things like agriculture and governing bodies, indeed any deviation from European norms, as an indication of savagery. But, quite the opposite, in many ways these perceived deficiencies allowed Aborigines to enjoy a standard of living that many of us today can only dream of. For example, without governments and property, war simply did not exist. In fact, crime or violence on any level was extremely rare. Further, despite an absence of farming or domesticated animals, the Aboriginal diet was varied and much more nutritious than the average American diet today. Their hunting and gathering practices were perfectly suited to the harsh Australian environment, a point made clear by many failures with European farming methods, and were much easier on the land than farming and herding. For 60 millennia, Aborigines lived a comfortable lifestyle that didn’t tax their environment. This is what really gets me. Aborigines lives had more leisure than we have. Despite the absence of modern transportation, microwaves, individually wrapped cheese and metal, they worked less than 21st century Americans – much less. Aborigines met their needs so easily, early English colonists commented that they seemed lazy. Lazy! If only the English were smart enough to afford laziness in Australia’s punishing environment. Imagine the aborigines’ amusement watching white people’s extensive, yet floundering efforts to impose their clumsy, materialistic way of life to a land that they had mastered a long time ago with far less. Of course, any amusement would have been short lived as white people began to rapidly and cruelly ravage Aboriginal culture. Two hundred years of racism and indifference by whites has caused damage that 60,000 years of living on the harshest continent on earth couldn’t. Today, Aborigines take first place by a mile in a range of Australia’s most dire statistics, from suicide rate to infant mortality. In my stay, the most frequent mention of Aborigines in the media has been in reference to epidemics of petroleum sniffing. Certainly, Australia’s natives have lessons to teach about human ecology and the mindlessness of modern consumption-crazed society that should not be overlooked. In fact, I’d suggest learning more about them-that is, if you’re not too busy.