THIS CHAPTER
In this chapter, you get to stand back and take the long, long view. While most of the rest of the book is chiefly concerned with the events that took place after British settlers started arriving in the late 18th century, this chapter looks at the almost unthinkably long period of human occupation of the Australian continent before that.
Indigenous Australians arrived multiple millennia ago. They developed a uniquely successful system of living that stood the test of time. Then, in the last few hundred years before British settlement, other visitors started turning up too. In this chapter, I provide some sense of the world Indigenous Australians developed and maintained, and a feel for what was going on with the Macassans, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch later on.
Indigenous Australians
Australia is the driest, flattest inhabited continent in the world. The country is a vast span of stony deserts with only a fringe of arable land clinging to the edges where the weather is milder and rain more reliable. But during the last Ice Age (around 40,000 years Before Present), the situation was much, much worse. Almost all the world’s fresh water was locked up in the enormous glaciers that covered the north of Europe, leaving scarcely any to spare for the Great Southern Land. The continent of Australia was a landscape desolate beyond anything we can picture now.
And yet — people lived here. These people had a complex culture, they traded, and they told stories and sang songs in hundreds of languages (see Figure 2-1). The people who sang those songs were masters of survival in the harshest landscape on Earth.
Settling in early
During the Ice Age, sea levels were much lower than today (all that ice had to come from somewhere, after all). One advantage of this was that it was a lot easier to walk to new places, as distinct from swimming or sailing. Australia and New Guinea were connected by a giant land bridge, which explains why these now-distant countries have so many plant and animal species in common. Nevertheless, it was still a long way over open water for prehistoric humans to get to Australia, so whatever else we may conjecture about the first settlers, we’re certain they knew their way around a boat.
No-one knows exactly when the First Australians arrived. The evidence is scanty and, at times, contradictory. Even genetic research is unable to resolve whether Aboriginal people came in one big push or many successive waves. Like all humans, they originated in ancient Africa, but after that, their lineage is still quite murky.
Recent genome sequencing, for example, seems to indicate the one big push theory is correct. However, DNA testing of Aboriginal remains (estimated to be around 40,000 years old) found at Lake Mungo revealed they didn’t share ancestry with modern human beings. Some scientists have speculated that this means migration to Australia didn’t occur in one wave.
Aboriginal tribes of Australia / by Norman B. Tindale, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, M3 804eca/1788/1.
FIGURE 2-1: Aboriginal Australia pre–European settlement.
According to the genome research from 2016, Papuan and Aboriginal ancestors reached the supercontinent that included what would become Australia around 50,000 years ago, picking up the DNA of Neanderthals, Denisovans and another extinct hominin along the way. The same study indicated Papuans and Aboriginals then split around 37,000 years ago, long before the continents were finally cut off from each other around 8,000 years ago. Although they must have passed through South-East Asia on their way to Australia, they aren’t related to any known Asian population. Today, linguistic similarities exist between some Aboriginal people and the indigenous peoples of New Guinea, but this is likely to be the result of (relatively) recent trade and intermarriage.
Exactly how long it took for Aboriginals to spread out over the continent is disputed (as is just about everything in this very remote period). Anywhere from a few thousand to over 10,000 years has been suggested. What isn’t disputed is that, despite the immense diversity of the continent (desert in the centre, tropical rainforest on the Cape, glaciers on the mountains of Tasmania), Aboriginal peoples found ways to thrive in every ecological niche available.
Life in Aboriginal Australia
Find a carpenter’s tape measure. Pretend each centimetre equals ten years. Unreel the tape measure and look at the very first 22 centimetres — that’s the entire history of European settlement in Australia. Now (in a good long room and if your tape is long enough) unreel the tape measure to 50 metres — that’s a conservative estimate of the length of Aboriginal history (or 5,000 years). Some scientists argue that, based on archaeological evidence, Aboriginal people arrived in Australia at least 65,000 years ago.
Evidence exists of trade and cultural exchange between Aboriginal peoples and South-East Asians dating back thousands of years, so it can hardly be likely that Aboriginals were unaware of agriculture. They simply had little use for it in the dry, unfertile soils of their home. Agriculture was unsuited to Australia’s grasslands and deserts (some argue agriculture still is, despite all the water and modern fertilisers we can throw at it), so Aboriginal communities predominately survived by hunting and gathering, managing resources extremely prudently — and maintaining their population at a sustainable level. While they did grow crops of tubers such as yams, grain such as native millet, macadamia nuts, fruits and berries, their farming has been described as an activity rather than a lifestyle.
