Sceptic Watch: The First Australian Civilization

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Expansion is everything
These stars … these vast worlds which we can never reach
I would annex the planets if I could

— Cecil Rhodes (1853 – 1902)

Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970):
The men who advocate an unpopular reform are exceptional in disinterestedness and zeal for the public good; but those who hold power after the reform has been carried out are likely to belong, in the main, to the ambitious executive type which has in all ages possessed itself of the government of nations.
And this type has never shown itself tolerant of opposition or friendly to freedom.
(Proposed Roads to Freedom, 1918 / 2014)

Thomas Lawrence (1888 – 1935) [Lawrence or Arabia]:
There is a preliminary Arab success, the British reinforcements go out as a punitive force.
They fight their way … to their objective, which is meanwhile bombarded by artillery, aeroplanes, or gunboats.
Finally perhaps a village is burnt and the district pacified.
It is odd that we don’t use poison gas on these occasions.
Bombing the houses is a patchy way of getting the women and children. …
By gas attacks the whole population of offending districts could be wiped out neatly; and as a method of government it would be no more immoral than the present system.
(France, Britain and the Arabs, The Observer, 1920)

Jared Diamond (1937)

Nomadism, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and minimal investment in shelter and possessions were sensible adaptations to Australia's ENSO-driven resource unpredictability.
When local conditions deteriorated, Aborigines simply moved to an area where conditions were temporarily better.
Rather than depending on just a few crops that could fail, they minimized risk by developing an economy based on a great variety of wild foods, not all of which were likely to fail simultaneously.
Instead of having fluctuating populations that periodically outran their resources and starved, they maintained smaller populations that enjoyed

an abundance of food in good years, and
a sufficiency in bad years.

The Aboriginal Australian substitute for food production has been termed "firestick farming."
The Aborigines modified and managed the surrounding landscape in ways that increased its production of edible plants and animals, without resorting to cultivation.
In particular, they intentionally burned much of the landscape periodically.
That served several purposes:

the fires drove out animals that could be killed and eaten immediately;
fires converted dense thickets into open parkland in which people could travel more easily;
the parkland was also an ideal habitat for kangaroos, Australia's prime game animal; and
the fires stimulated the growth both
- of new grass on which kangaroos fed, and
- of fern roots on which Aborigines themselves fed.

We think of Australian Aborigines as desert people, but most of them were not.
Instead, their population densities varied

with rainfall (because it controls the production of terrestrial wild plant and animal foods) and
with abundance of aquatic foods in the sea, rivers, and lakes.

The highest population densities of Aborigines were in Australia's wettest and most productive regions:

the Murray-Darling river system of the Southeast,
the eastern and northern coasts, and
the southwestern corner.

Those areas also came to support the densest populations of European settlers in modern Australia.
The reason we think of Aborigines as desert people is simply that Europeans killed or drove them out of the most desirable areas, leaving the last intact Aboriginal populations only in areas that Europeans didn't want. …

Why did [Indigenous Australians] not develop metal tools, writing, and politically complex societies?
A major reason is that Aborigines remained hunter-gatherers, whereas … those developments arose elsewhere only in populous and economically specialized societies of food producers.
In addition, Australia's aridity, infertility, and climatic unpredictability limited its hunter-gatherer population to only a few hundred thousand [widely dispersed] people.
Compared with the tens of millions of people in ancient China or Mesoamerica, that meant that Australia had

far fewer potential inventors, and
far fewer societies to experiment with adopting innovations. …

European settlement reduced the number of Aborigines by two means.

One involved shooting them …
The last large-scale massacre, of 31 Aborigines, occurred at Alice Springs in 1928.
The other means involved European-introduced germs to which Aborigines had had no opportunity to acquire immunity or to evolve genetic resistance. …

Within one century of European colonization, 40,000 years of Aboriginal traditions had been mostly swept away. …

How, except by postulating deficiencies in the Aborigines themselves, can one account for the fact that white English colonists apparently created a literate, food-producing, industrial democracy, within a few decades of colonizing a continent whose inhabitants after more than 40,000 years were still nonliterate nomadic hunter-gatherers?
Doesn't that constitute a perfectly controlled experiment in the evolution of human societies, forcing us to a simple racist conclusion?

The resolution of this problem is simple.
White English colonists did not create a literate, food-producing, industrial democracy in Australia.
Instead, they imported … 10,000 years of development in Eurasian environments. …
Europeans have never learned to survive in Australia or New Guinea without their inherited Eurasian technology. …
The people who did create a society in Australia were Aboriginal Australians.
Of course, the society that they created was not a literate, food- producing, industrial democracy.
The reasons follow straightforwardly from features of the Australian environment.

(Yali's People, Guns, Germs, and Steel, Chapter 15, 1997)

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