Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to focus attention on Australian Aboriginal cognitive skills in their cultural context. The intention is not to provide a review of all cognitive research findings about Aborigines: The total body of research work, with a few exceptions, has been assessed by psychologists themselves as “grossly inadequate” (Kearney & McElwain, 1976). In a more recent comprehensive summary, Watts (1982) tabulated research studies of Aboriginal cognitive abilities from 1967 onwards, and concluded that the majority had simply contributed to an overwhelming emphasis on “deficit” (compare McShane & Berry, Chapter 15).

The intent here is rather to assemble available research evidence relating to Aboriginal cognitive skills and expertise. Initially this will involve sifting or “noodling” through earlier research findings (in certain parts of central Australia, Aborigines, venturesome whites, and passing researchers are known occasionally to go noodling: This entails painstakingly searching through the deserted mullock heaps for small opals that may have been overlooked by the opal miners who originally created the mullock, or mining refuse). Such research noodling can sometimes yield gemlike evidence of value suggesting that Aboriginal cognitive proficiency may have been adequately sampled in certain circumstances but may not have been recognized as such within the interpretive framework of the time or of particular researchers.

More recent research studies which have specifically identified and analysed cognitive skills valued within Aboriginal contexts will then be considered. Such research has been characterised by recognition of Aboriginal cognitive competence, in contrast to earlier perceptions of cognitive skill variations as intellectual deficits, and has also been due to the reconceptualisation of cognition in terms of context-sensitive processes or operations instead of inherent properties or capacities.