if the word was once applied to original/indigenous inhabitants of any place on earth, that sheds a new light on the question:
what about the original inhabitants was unoriginal? Perhaps the word is indicative of a second (or any other than the first) run of civilization? Why would this word have vanished, and why would it have “stuck” vestigially in Australia alone?
We don't know what is true about the past and what isn't true... So for the sake of argument, let's pretend the biography of Rev George Oliver is true, that he actually lived as a human and the dates of his books are correct.
If we accept this premise then we can say he lived during the transition from Holy Roman Empire's final collapse/the Napoleonic War/the Georgian to Victorian transition/the
Congress of Vienna's creation of modern states, etc. Quite a fast-changing time.
We can also accept that he established the general school education system in Lincolnshire/East Midlands (as opposed to technical education) and organised getting many Lincolnshire churches built/converted. This at the behest of the Tennyson/Cheyne Row (Chelsea) set.
A culture creation job of that scale - even in rural (and industrialising) Lincolnshire - is quite a large job. It's also a job whose results are going to be passed on to future generations. He's the educational and theological equivalent of a Joseph Banks or a John Rennie (elder or younger).
So, was he the same as the aborigines he was tasked to enculturate? (Spellchecker is highlighting my word 'enculturate'. I blame a Lincolnshire education for that.)
He says - see above - 'our remote ancestors, the aborigines'. The full sentence is:
The city (he means Lincoln) is surrounded by vestiges of the
highest antiquity, in the form of stone idols and
tumuli, which are daily disappearing before the
progress of agricultural improvements ; and every
memorial of our remote ancestors, the aborigines
of the soil, will soon have entirely passed away,
and become as though they had never been.
This implies that he thinks, or knows, that he himself is descended from England's aborigines. But given the scope of his role and what we can trace of the management he was reporting to, Oliver seems to be already more enculturated, already much more educated, already trusted to spend somebody's budget on building (or converting) a lot of schools and churches. Certainly than the farmers he is moving among.
So where did he get his education? And his reputation as a trustworthy doer? (He's quite controversial among Cambridgeshire/Lincolnshire freemasons for setting up a fraudulent branch of the Masons but that's a separate issue to marketing Christianity and education into the rural masses of Lincolnshire. He does not seem to be accused of doing that fraudulently.)
He got his power from somewhere, though his biography suggests he was just a normal lad edumacated by his dad mostly - if I remember correctly.
The problems I have with the Younger Oliver educated by his dad scenario are:
- I don't think the physical evidence supports a gradual, if swift, 18th-19th century transition from rural eastern England to industrial-in-parts eastern England. I think the physical evidence supports a depopulation event followed by slow, then ever-quickening repopulation event (visible to Stukeley, de la Pryme, Byng and, in a way, Oliver).
- The evidence in eastern England histories - including Oliver's - and eastern England landscapes suggests 'medieval' practices and structures were operational much closer to his time than we think.
- Also the Holy Roman Empire seems so distorted and so... diminished... in English history that it suggests folks have been fiddling with the facts to downplay Roman influence at the time.
- There is also too much stuff that suddenly appears in the early 19th century that you would expect to have been commented upon - and actually destroyed - much earlier. Grimsby serpent mound - documented by Oliver - is one example. But the tumuli he refers to in Lincoln (and others he refers to around Lincolnshire) are others. So are large trenches that are now gone.
- Similarly, you see a large number of near sterile elites transforming into hyper-reproductive elites. As if fertility were new. Or, perhaps, as if not eating your children was new.
I've evidenced some of these problems and speculated about better fits for the evidence in various pieces at
IHASFEMR | The Reformation was a Reformatting. And
IHASFEMR | Add a Thousand Years.
My suspicion is that our understanding of this era has been disabled. Specifically, we look at the era during which the aborigines of Australia were being 'discovered' - and we look at the same era when the artifacts of the aborigines of England were being documented, and we think it is the era of the Industrial Revolution. I wonder it is perhaps an era of latter-day Romans. In the references to aborigines we may be seeing the result of humans having been transported around the globe as slaves and material resources - as they seem to have been by at least the Romans. It's worth reading books like
Dark Emu to appreciate that aboriginal Australia may have been - in places - a well-tended, gardened Australia when 'discovered'.
Perhaps the transportation was being done to help knock the savagery out of us and to get work done where latter-day Romans considered it needed to be done. As I pontificate about this, I recall that transportation was still being practiced as Oliver wrote. I am proposing that transportation may have started earlier than we think and that the Romans may have ended later than we think. Lionel Casson's
Travel In The Ancient World is a mind-expanding orthodox display of evidence of long-distance travel and freight transportation in the orthodox Roman past.
Part of our disability may be that transport options once available in the past have been hidden from us. In addition to the many discussions of transport technology on this forum, we can add that Rev George Oliver apparently never rode a horse. Even if he had, how he got around Lincolnshire on behalf of the Tennysons - and, in my opinion, got around Devon and Yorkshire too - is its own transport technology enigma.
Turning to why Australia has aborigines and England doesn't... Possibly Australia kept its aborigines because it is so very big, so short on surface water and so very distant from sources of immigrants. Contrast that with eastern England, whose aborigines were easier to reach, to re-educate and easier to mass-immigrate over.
I've gone on... To summarise: I suspect these writers - in Australia and England - were latter-day Romans - or close descendants thereof - and they were looking at a human geography that was radically different to what we have been told it was.
Edit: Changed Treaty of Versailles to Congress of Vienna.
Ok. So with that definition in hand, if we dissect the word into subject and prefix:
