The Biggest Estate on Earth

by Bill Gammage

  Murray men walked at least to the lower Barwon, linking it to the Darling,49 and Daly men at least to the Cooper.50 In 1835 Moore stated, ‘the natives are all aware that [Australia] is an island, and that the sea which Tomghin spoke of is the sea which bounds the north coast. I had no idea that their knowledge of geography had been so extensive and accurate.’5152

  Trade webs meshed thousands of kilometres, ‘among the world’s most extensive systems of human communication recorded in hunter-gatherer societies’.53 Dieri people east of Lake Eyre (SA) visited places at least 800 kilometres apart, desert people walked for months for Parachilna (SA) ochre. On the Finke in 1870 Christopher Giles found in a rainmaker’s bag ‘a curious example of extremes meeting. Here was a boy’s marble from Adelaide, handed on and bartered from tribe to tribe . . . and side by side with it a pearl shell from the extreme north coast, obtained originally most likely from the Malays.’54 Kimberley and Torres Strait shell and Daly River (NT) goods went through the Great Sandy Desert to the Nullarbor coast, and Papuan shell reached western New South Wales. Any item might go anywhere.55

  Songs and ceremonies were traded, sometimes travelling ‘a thousand miles in a very short period’.56 ‘Picked men may be sent to a distant tribe just for the sake of learning [a dance] . . .’, Walter Roth wrote,

  It may thus come to pass, and almost invariably does, that a tribe will learn and sing by rote whole corrobborees [sic] in a language absolutely remote from its own, and not one word of which the audience or performers can understand . . . That the words are very carefully committed to memory, I have obtained ample proof by taking down phonetically the same corrobborees as performed by different-speaking people living at distances upwards of 100 miles apart.57

  Eyre noted that new dances and songs went constantly ‘to distant parts . . . where a different dialect was spoken, and which consequently could not be understood where I heard them . . . the measures or quantities of the syllables appear to be more attended to than the sense’.58 From the 1890s the Molonga ceremony went round Australia, and Robinson reported that on the Lachlan,

  Italian melodies had been introduced and were sung by the native youth with considerable ability. These new corroborees had been passed with amazing celerity to distant tribes. The rapid communication of the natives in this respect is astonishing. At King George’s Sound the news of the Swan River Settlement was obtained from the natives long before it reached them [the settlers] through the ordinary channel and songs and dances of the natives even from the Hunter have been brought to Port Phillip and for aught to the contrary may have passed around the continent.59

  These continental systems let people everywhere use similar tools, techniques and protocols. Nic Peterson concluded, ‘one can speak of a common indigenous way of life, created in part by the systems of exchange that linked people indirectly with others, right across the continent’.60 Over wide areas people knew the land’s geographic, ecological and spiritual fabric. They knew that the Dreaming was universal, that how they managed country mattered to creation, that they were contributors to a greater whole.61

  Yet of all creatures they were most likely to unbalance creation, by increasing their population, so they limited their numbers. Long-term equitable resource use depended on this, otherwise sooner or later it would disintegrate, and in inevitable bad times people would confront catastrophe. Many laws and customs restricted family size, among them mobility, old marrying young, totem prohibitions and restrictions especially for women, abortion, dislike of twins, in extreme cases infanticide, and other ‘powerful regulatory mechanisms’.62 Local populations remained stable enough to stay within country. There were no population-driven conquests, and almost no territorial expansion: desert Walpiri and food rich Wiradjuri were rare exceptions.63 Naturally more people congregated on rich land, and some districts carried more people then than now,64 but they spread much more evenly over Australia, and nowhere were they crowded.

  This was deliberate. Even allowing for killing diseases which raced ahead of Europeans (ch 11), Australia had fewer people in 1788 than it could carry. Murray valley and Arnhem Land pioneers thought their districts could have supported twice the people they did, while Geoffrey Blainey estimated Tasmania’s 1788 population at about 4000 but its resources able to support about 70–80,000.65 In arid regions people could afford to leave permanent water and good feed for bad seasons.66 Everywhere population levels seem tuned not to ‘normal’ times but to harsh and erratic uncertainty, and not merely to bad times but to the worst times, such as giant floods or 100 year droughts, shorthand for the severest droughts of a drought-ridden continent. People apparently anticipated them, building up resources and limiting population. On the Darling

  there is no evidence of drastic reductions in population during droughts. More than likely the Bagundji had adapted themselves and their own population density to a situation where strenuous efforts could support most people during bad seasons and very little effort would support everyone during normal and good seasons.67

  Even in plenty people reserved sanctuaries and imposed bans to counter scarcity (ch 10). This is strikingly provident: most societies today, including people who call Aborigines improvident, can’t do it. Supporting fewer people than possible is a key feature of 1788. It made resources abundant.

  Abundance was thus a precaution, but normal. People usually satisfied their material wants quickly, with less toil than all but privileged Europeans in 1788. It helped that they ate almost everything, many more foods than Europeans ate, perhaps a greater variety than any society on earth in 1788. Yet they ate nothing to scarcity or even short of plenty, and they could afford to prohibit food to host ceremonies for hundreds of guests, sometimes for months. Newcomers commented endlessly on plains rich with life, skies dark with birds, seas black with fish. In Tasmania Hardwicke reported places where ‘Kangaroo are very numerous and easily caught’ and ‘in great abundance’.68 From St Valentine’s Peak, Hellyer ‘saw kangaroos in abundance, and tracks of them in all directions’.69 Throughout a bush walk near Goulburn (NSW) one night in 1832, Govett heard possums grunting and saw glider possums flying.70 EPS Sturt thought the Murrumbidgee in 1837 ‘most beautiful . . . Every creek abounded with wild fowl, and the quail sprung from the long kangaroo grass which waved to the very flaps of the saddle’,71 and in the 1870s station hands could tickle fish from the river by hand, and shoot possums without leaving camp.72 ‘It is no wonder that the blacks were well-conditioned’, Alexander Le Souef wrote near Swan Hill (Vic) in the late 1840s, ‘for no native tribes could gain their living more easily, as their river was full of fish, and the country abounded in game, while quantities of small yams were obtained on the river flats, and the root of one of the large rushes was edible’.73 Near Bairnsdale (Vic) Angus McMillan saw a lake ‘alive with swans, ducks and pelicans . . . O n the north side of the lake the country consists of open forest, and the grass was up to our stirrup-irons as we rode along. The country was absolutely swarming with kangaroos and emus.’74 ‘I have always found the greatest abundance in their huts . . .’, Grey concluded. ‘In all ordinary seasons . . . they can obtain, in two or three hours, a sufficient supply of food for the day.’75 Even desert people got their food, medicine and shelter in 4–5 hours a day, and seemed to handicap themselves by performing ceremonies taking months to complete in places accessible only after heavy rain. In richer areas people needed even less time: for example Tiwi Islanders spent only about 20 per cent of their waking hours getting food. These were not people worried at where their next meal might come from.

  It is true that many accounts, notably of Sydney during the 1788 winter, report starving people. Newcomers assumed that this happened every winter, and was evidence that hunter-gatherers depend for food on the whims of nature, as Thomas Malthus was to claim (ch 10). Yet had the Sydney people indeed starved every winter, they would have gone somewhere else. That was one point of being mobile. Mobility saved the colonists too, when in their hunger they sent s
hips to South Africa, China, Batavia and anywhere they could think of for food, including 700 kilometres to Lord Howe Island to catch turtles. For months they had hauled fish every day, feeding over a thousand mouths. Not surprisingly, by winter they noticed that fish were becoming scarce. The starving Aborigines were people whose food they had taken.

  Abundance showed in physique, especially men’s. Sydney people were reported to be shorter and slighter than newcomers,76 and sometimes this was repeated of thin and ‘shrivelled’ people elsewhere, but Europeans often thought people well built. In 1829 Allan Cunningham described three men near Brisbane as ‘of the ordinary stature of the Aborigines of Moreton Bay (viz about six feet), appeared very athletic active persons, of unusually muscular limb, and with bodies (much scarified) in exceeding good case’.77 In 1884 Rolf Boldrewood recalled southwest Victorians as a fine race physically and otherwise, the men tall and muscular, the women well-shaped and fairly good-looking.78

  Similar descriptions come from arid Australia. For centuries people there weathered terrible droughts, albeit at times with real distress, but lived comfortably where today others cannot. In the Great Sandy Desert, Carnegie met two well-built men with ‘well-fed frames’.79 Deep in the 1895–1902 drought, the worst on record, Richard Maurice led two expeditions through the southern and central deserts. He saw few people, but those few were well fed and apparently under no stress. At Mt Gosse (NT) his companion William Murray remarked, ‘These blacks were fairly well nurtured and apparently do not lack food. With the exception of one, who was rather weedy, all were well developed and muscular.’80 Eyre wrote that men were

  well built and muscular, averaging from five to six feet in height, with proportionate upper and lower extremities . . . fine broad and deep chests, indicating great bodily strength, and are remarkably erect and upright in their carriage, with much natural grace and dignity of demeanour.81

  On the Cooper in 1845, where sixteen years later Burke and Wills became famous by starving to death, Sturt wrote,

  The men of this tribe were, without exception . . . a well-made race, with a sufficiency of muscular development . . .Of sixty-nine who I counted round me at one time, I do not think there was one under my own height, 5 feet 10¾inches, but there were several upwards of 6 feet . . . I am sorry to say I observed but little improvement in the fairer sex. They were the same half-starved unhappy looking creatures whose condition I have so often pitied elsewhere.82

  In thinking much less well of the women he was not alone, but few Australians today think the Cooper plenteous, nor the southwest Tasmanian coast, where Kelly was ‘accosted by Six Large Men, Black Natives, Each of them above Six feet high and Verry Stout’, and two days later by ‘a Stout good Looking Man about Six feet High 30 years of age . . . [and] an old Man about Six feet Seven Inches High’.83 Newcomers similarly described men and sometimes women near Melbourne, Brisbane and Darwin, in western Victoria, western New South Wales, southern South Australia, the Centre and north, and on Cape York. Big, well-fed people were typical.84

  Abundance, knowledge and mobility reinforced each other. In discussing human societies, some writers take mobility to reflect uncertainty about food, and sedentism to show its predictability, but in 1788 people were so mobile and so confident of getting food that only in harsh places did they bother to store it (ch 10). In better country they could live by their staples permanently, or nearly, yet they walked. After 32 years with Victorian people, William Buckley said that plenty was usual, scarcity rare, and most travel not from necessity but ‘as it suited our purposes, either for hunting, or for mere pleasure’.85 How often people travelled varied: Tasmanians moved more often in the east than in the west for example,86 and desert families more often than both. Everywhere people normally had more food than they needed.

  Soon after 1788 smallpox ravaged much of Australia, killing perhaps half the people it met,87 especially the very young and the very old, the future and the past. Some researchers think the disease came from the north, but Watkin Tench’s denial may be deliberately ironic: ‘It is true, that our surgeons had brought out variolous matter in bottles; but to infer that it was produced from this cause were a supposition so wild as to be unworthy of consideration.’88 The plague spread far, and came again in 1828–30. It hit hard. Knowledge was lost, families amalgamated, totems re-assigned, boundaries re-located. More women than men died, so men may have taken over women’s places and rituals.89 Survivors suddenly had more resources but more work, since the Dreaming still required every inch of country to be cared for. Newcomers may have seen mere relics of more precise land management, but so sacred a gift, so intricate a weaving of country and soul, could never be given up. Instead survivors toiled harder to keep Law and country alive. In their terrible predicament they may have turned even more to their closest ally: fire.

  HOW WAS LAND

  MANAGED?

  6

  The closest ally

  For countless generations people have stared into safe fire. The dancing flames mesmerise, the warm glow is a friend. Not so that other fire, heralded by haze, smoke, red lines in the scrub. That fire is implacable, alive. It roars, races, leaps, kills, devours. On 17 January 2003 a fire burnt over 70 per cent of the ACT. It killed four people and destroyed over 500 houses and many public buildings, including ACT Forests HQ and Kambah Fire Brigade Station. It ripped trees 70 cm across into the air, and dumped into a back yard a garden shed complete with tools and shelving from so far away that no-one could find where it came from. It killed 95 per cent of wildlife in southwest ACT parks, including over 500 kangaroos and wallabies. It was stopped only by a fire scar left on 24 December 2001.1

  People could not have survived such fires in 1788. Had they faced the Black Saturdays and Ash Wednesdays white Australia has suffered, most must have died. Any uncontrolled fire menaced: a day’s fire might eat a year’s food. Latz observed of central Australia,

  After several very good seasons the amount of flammable material can build up to such an extent that a single wildfire, initiated in the height of summer, can sweep over huge areas of the desert destroying everything in its path. When good rains do not follow these fires, the effect on the flora and fauna (and even the soils) can be devastating. If this situation had arisen in the past it is hard to imagine how Aboriginal people could have survived.2

  This situation rarely arose. People had to prevent it, or die. They worked hard to make fire malleable, and to confine killer fires to legends and cautionary tales. But a great challenge was a great opportunity. Fire could kill, but fire or no fire could distribute plant communities with the precision of a flame edge (ch 3). Fire could be an ally.

  Most Europeans never saw a bushfire until they reached Australia. They thought any they saw horrific. A few were. Augustus Gregory recalled ‘a party of three natives were destroyed by a fire of their own lighting—the fire closed round behind them in the scrub, and their only means of escape lay in their going through the flames the consequences of which act cost them their lives’.3 Lightning or enemies could start conflagrations, and periodically people lit hot clean-up fires. Mitchell saw ‘All the country beyond the [Namoi] . . . in flames . . . from the time of our arrival in these parts, the atmosphere had been so obscured by smoke, that I could never obtain a distinct view of the horizon. The smoke darkened the air at night, so as to hide the stars.’4 On the Murray, Sturt saw where fire had scorched trees ‘to their very summits and the trunks of those which had fallen were smoking on the ground’.56

  Most fires blackened ground and charred trunks, but few scorched canopies. In Tasmania in 1823 James Ross found the Shannon’s banks ‘completely burned but a few days before by the natives. All the underwood was destroyed . . . and the whole surface of the ground was without a leaf . . . To this practice of burning the bush . . . may be attributed the general openness of the forest land in the island, and its usefulness for pasture’, but he added that the flames were ‘checked by the fresh and green parts of the upper br
anches’.7 In the Blue Mountains Jean Quoy found

  vast forests where you walk beneath very pleasant domes of verdure. We noticed that all of these were blackened right up, a circumstance due to the fact, the natives liking to set alight the grasses and brushwood obstructing their way, the fire often catches the fibrous bark of the largest trees, which then burn without their trunk being in any way damaged by it and without injuring the vegetation of their tops.8

  Off southwest Australia in December 1792 Claude Riche described a blazing field, but it went out overnight.9 Near Hobart in January 1802 Francois Peron saw

  on all sides the forests . . . on fire. Their savage inhabitants . . . had withdrawn to a lofty mountain, which itself looked like a huge pyramid of flame and smoke . . . the fire had destroyed all the grass, and most of the bushes and small trees had met with the same fate; the largest trees were blackened almost to their summits, and in some places had fallen under the violence of the flames and huge blazing heaps had been formed of their remains,

  yet he walked behind the fire up to unburnt huts on the summit, and next day the fire was out.10 It was nowhere near the ferocity of Hobart’s 1967 fires, though lit in summer. Ian Thomas notes that all Peron’s fires were in cool north-easterly conditions, and none lasted more than a day.11

  These men were fleeting visitors. James Kelly was thought a good bushman. Off Macquarie Harbour (Tas) in December 1815 he wrote,

  The Whole Face of the Coast Was, on fire and Lucky it Was for us it Was on fire, for the Smoke was so thick We Could not See a Hundred yards a Head of the Boat, on pulling into the Narrows at the Small Entrance Island We Heard a Large Number of Natives Shouting and Making a Great Noise as if they Were Hunting Kangaroos.

  Next day this fire too was out.12 In New South Wales in 1814 Evans wrote that the Blue Mountains ‘have been fired; had we been on them we could not have escaped; the Flames rage with violence through thick underwood, which they are covered with’. He recorded more fires next day, but walked close behind the flames.13 He could not have done so behind any of Australia’s recent big fires. West of the Bogan Mitchell saw ‘that much pains had been taken by the natives to spread the fire, from its burning in separate places. Huge trees fell now and then with a crashing sound, loud as thunder, while others hung just ready to fall . . . We travelled five miles through this fire and smoke.’14 The fire was hot enough to burn trees, but not to link ‘separate places’, or to prevent riding among them.