Let the Land Speak

by Jackie French

  Even the extraordinary Polynesian sea travellers would have found the Great Barrier Reef a major or even impossible obstacle. While it’s possible that Polynesian travellers did arrive here, and stayed, they don’t appear to have established their own separate nations, or gone back for more settlers, their journey becoming part of their culture’s oral history. Nor did they arrive in large enough numbers to make a significant contribution to either genes or culture.

  Gales guard the south

  European travellers found a different barrier. They would come from the west, driven by ‘trade winds’, the extraordinarily strong and reliable winds that blow eastwards towards southwestern Australia, and could be used to sail across the Indian Ocean relatively quickly to reach the rich trading lands north of Australia. But the lack of grass, easily found fresh water or safe harbours did not tempt them to land here. And south of Australia are the Southern Ocean and the ice. There are excellent southern harbours in Australia, but there are also legendary gales. Nor has the south any equivalent of the Inuit people in the northern polar regions who might have migrated north to Australia.

  So we are left with one major migration, as well as other smaller ones. People kept crossing the dangerous ocean to Australia, even if not in great numbers. Probably they always will, as long as there are humans and boats to sail in. My various ancestors, too, all came here by boat, of one sort or another, from many places, at many different times. All of them were fleeing persecution, or hardship, and dreaming of a better life, just as those refugees in the ‘first fleet’ may have been.

  Life at the end of the world

  Sixty thousand years ago, the north of this new land would have been similar enough to the one they had left for the new arrivals to survive reasonably well.

  Fish, shellfish, fruit bats and even some of the plants would have been familiar, as would be the dangers of massive crocodiles. But there were also beasts that would have been both strange and terrifying, like the giant snake (Wonambi naracoortensis), nearly a metre in diameter and about five metres long, and an emu-like flightless creature (Genyornis newtoni) that stood two metres tall and was twice as heavy as a modern-day emu, as well as thylacines or marsupial lions.

  Despite these dangers, it would have been a land of easy routes to travel along the coast with fish and shellfish, or through the lush land along the inland rivers. But when the first settlers arrived here, the Australian climate was already changing, becoming harsher, dryer, more erratic.10 The megafauna – the giant kangaroo or wombat-like creatures, as well as many others – were already becoming extinct, and had been from about 350,000 years ago.

  Australia was fast becoming a land that couldn’t naturally support any animal that was larger than a western red kangaroo. Over the next 60,000 years the land would change dramatically. Isolation, desertification and a dramatically changing climate would force both the people and their cultures to adapt.

  The rest of the world changed dramatically, too. In Europe, the Middle East, Polynesia and Asia over those 60,000 years, tribes migrated as glaciers grew and vanished, or as grasslands turned to desert. But elsewhere there was usually a choice: if the grass withered, the rivers dried up, or war like newcomers threatened you with spears, you could move elsewhere. About 16,000 years ago there were the vast Americas to migrate to, Hawai’i about 1700 years ago, or Aotearoa/New Zealand a thousand years ago, as well as the vast northern lands available as the glaciers of the last Ice Age melted about 15,000 years ago.

  Once you got to Australia, it was difficult to leave. Those fierce westerly and southerly winds and the vast reef that kept out possible immigrants also kept those who lived in Australia here, apart from the few trade routes in the far north, where you needed skill, detailed local knowledge, and experience to make the journeys.

  Australia is also, literally, the end of the liveable world. Once you reached Australia and found yourself facing new deserts, no matter how much further south you travelled there was no other liveable land to find.

  Humans are good at adapting – we are all descended from those who adapted and survived. The new Australian cultures would be as diverse as the continent, but they would have one thing in common: in a land of wildly varying climatic extremes, where a drought could last for decades, their land use would be designed to survive the worst years rather than make a surplus from the best.

  You adapted, or you died.

  * * *

  From fire to snow in forty minutes

  All lands have their own climatic dangers. Parts of Australia, however, arguably face more frequent as well as less predictable extremes than much of the rest of world. In 1984, at the end of a four-year catastrophic drought, a newly arrived German exchange student fought a bushfire on his first day here, watched hail, rain and a dusting of snow extinguish it, then survived a flash flood when the ice melted in an hour as the temperature rose to thirty-six degrees Celsius. Then his companion was bitten by a snake. Six weeks later, a tornado hit.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 2

  The Ice Age that made three hundred nations

  The new arrivals changed Australia. Australia also changed them. The physical environment always helps shape the culture and bodies of those who live there,1 although in those cultures that reject genocide it is currently politically incorrect to speak of racial differences, unless it’s for health reasons, where people with ancestors from a certain area may have inherited recessive genes that may lead to the death of their children, to increased cholesterol and heart disease, or to the inability to process milk, alcohol or broad beans. In Australia, with relatively little DNA or cultural input from beyond our shores, the land itself probably had a far greater influence than on most other cultures of the world.

  The first arrivals were likely to have been physically and culturally alike. They’d have used the same food-gathering techniques, probably the same tools, perhaps the same art. Even as clans migrated further away it would have been relatively easy to meet and trade, following the food-rich coastline or the rivers. Intermarriage and this easy access to each other may have meant that culturally they stayed similar for hundreds, even thousands of years.

  The early spread of humans around Australia may have been relatively swift,2 with the new arrivals following the coastlines and large river systems into the lakes and lush grazing of the inland. Back then the dry lakes of today were full of water and were rich in fish, shellfish, ducks and other wildlife.

  By 30,000 years ago there were people in Arnhem Land, Cape York, the far south of Western Australia, southern New South Wales, Victoria and the south of Tasmania. By 20,000 years ago, Aboriginal people had settled over the whole of Australia.

  But one of humanity’s greatest challenges would change Indigenous societies, too, as well isolating them into many profoundly different cultures.

  The Ice Age carves up a continent

  From 25,000 to 15,000 years ago, glaciers covered parts of Tasmania as well as the Snowy Mountains in Victoria and New South Wales. As more water was locked up in the ice caps, the continent became drier. The archaeological records of places like Lake Mungo in southwestern New South Wales show how the lush lake country, with its frog hunts and fish feasts of 40,000 years ago, gave way to desert. The temperature dropped by about ten degrees.3 (It is worth comparing this to the doom predicted if our climate changes by 2–4 degrees with global warming.) New cold, dry winds blew. In many areas rain simply stopped falling, for years at a time. The seasons, the floods, the droughts, would have been increasingly hard to predict. As climate changes, the weather can be more erratic, as well as different.

  Survival was not easy. Possibly more than half the population died.4

  Our ancestors were the ones who survived dramatic climate change, as well as years of long winters from vast volcanic events. Homo sapiens adapted; others did not. (This is also worth remembering if you feel despondent about global warming. Our ancestors were very good indeed at coping with dramatic climate
change.)

  The Ice Age separated Australia’s Indigenous communities by glaciers and desert, as well as distance. Groups of survivors retreated to the southeast parts of Victoria and New South Wales, where rivers like the Murray still provided bounty; to southwest Western Australia and parts of the Pilbara, Kimberley, Kakadu and Arnhem Land in the north. Stories, tools and customs grew even more different, and distinct cultures began to evolve.

  The two-centimetre water rise that brings devastation

  By about 15,000 BC the world began to warm up. The Ice Age had brought disaster. The global warming brought disaster too. As ice melted, water flowed back into oceans. The seas rose and rich lands along the coast began to vanish. By about 12,000 years ago glaciers were melting all around the world. Sea levels rose at the rate of about a centimetre or two a year. This may not seem much, just as the sea-level rise of about 1.7 to 3.3 millimetres per annum over the past decade does not seem particularly dramatic either. And in many places, in most years, there may not even have been any visible changes. Then in one year there might be sudden and transforming disaster.

  The 1978 flood in our valley brought water within two centimetres of washing over the rise that slopes down to the creek flats. Most Australian east-coast rivers and creeks that flood have this lip, made from layers of deposited debris from uncounted floods, protecting the land beyond it. If this flood had been two centimetres higher the water would have surged down across the valley proper, covering perhaps sixty square kilometres in froth and floodwater and rolling boulders, just as it did in the flood in 1852. A two-centimetre-a-year rise can bring disaster.

  It is difficult to imagine the scope of chaos and tragedy that came with the melting of the Ice Age, from 15,000 to about five thousand years ago. In northern Australia, five kilometres of land inland from the coast could vanish in a year as protective coastal dunes were washed away. In the south, an entire kilometre of land inland from the Great Australian Bight might have disappeared in a single flood, a wall of salt froth crashing across the soil as the small rise that had held the sea back eroded in the storm.

  By the time the sea level more or less stabilised, one seventh of what had been Australia, an area the size of present Western Australia, was under the sea. Peninsulas became islands, low-lying islands and reefs disappeared below the waves completely and people starved.

  About 12,000 years ago Tasmania was cut off from the mainland, the rising waters creating Bass Strait and its islands. New Guinea was separated from Australia by rising seas about eight thousand years ago. The mountains along the Queensland coast became the tropical reef islands we know today. The seas kept rising steadily until about seven thousand years ago, then rose slowly for about another two thousand years.

  * * *

  The megafauna vanish

  By about 10,000 years ago, every creature taller than a human had vanished from the Australian landscape. The debate about how much humans contributed to their extinction by hunting or burning the landscape continues, with insufficient data so far to definitively decide on the relative contributions of humans and climate. But Australia is, and was, a diverse continent. The megafauna may have vanished for different reasons, or with different trigger points for extinction in different parts of the country. Assuming there must be a single answer perpetuates the myth that what holds true in one part of the country must necessarily work all over the continent.5

  * * *

  A changed land, a changed people

  About five thousand years ago the seas finally stopped rising.6 After so many thousands of years of periodic catastrophe there was now time to invent and create instead of struggling to survive. The tools that survive from that period have new designs: smaller, specialised awls to punch holes in cloth, adzes for shaping wooden objects, tools with handles to make them more efficient for heavy work. It is possible that a fresh wave of immigrants arriving from newly flooded lands to the north brought innovative tools and ideas, but the tools are distinctive enough to be native to Australia. Each area had its distinctive tool shapes and materials.

  The first arrivals were probably physically and culturally alike. But 20,000 years of adapting to climate change and different climates combined with the barriers of new glaciers and deserts gradually turned the original Melanesian immigrants into around three hundred separate and distinct tribal nations, each with their own lore, art and stories. There were enormous cultural as well as language variations, as you’d expect with such vastly different environments.

  Even today the myths persist that there is a single Indigenous culture of didgeridoos and bark humpies when there probably hasn’t been a single Indigenous culture for 60,000 years.7 By 1788, when the first European colonists arrived, the nations of Australia were as diverse as those of Europe or Asia. But then, as now, many or even most of the new arrivals saw only the similarities: spears instead of muskets, and the lack of palaces and uniformed armies of a physically acquisitive culture. The ‘indigenous Australian’ didgeridoo, for example, was only played in parts of the Kimberley and far northern Australia. Far from being a land of bark humpies, Indigenous Australians constructed a wide range of buildings, depending on what kind of shelter they needed.

  The Arrente people of Central Australia, for example, needed only shelters made out of grass and saplings to keep off the sun and wind. The shelters look primitive to anyone expecting a slab hut, but in that climate a slab hut seals in the heat. The Arrente buildings are strongly woven, and angled to let in the breeze. In the south of Western Australia the Nyungar people’s shelters were designed primarily to keep out the wind.

  In colder, wetter climates, more solid or insulated structures were needed. The Ngunawal people, who occupied the area of present-day Canberra and the Australian Capital Territory; the Ngarigo, who lived on the tablelands to the south; and the Walgalu, of the high country with its frigid winters, built solid huts made of logs and branches, with roofs and walls made of big sheets of stringybark. Indigenous Tasmanians spent about a quarter of each year in small villages of dome-shaped huts, well thatched with bark, grass or turf to keep off the rain, and lined inside with warmly insulating bark, skins or feathers.

  Pre-colonial Australia also had villages, such as the ones in the Lake Condah area in western Victoria8, where the Gunditjmara people’s settlements consisted of hundreds of huts. Each house had stone walls about a metre high, with a frame of branches and roof made of bark or rush. Every home’s doorway faced the same way. The villages were supported by ‘mobile agriculture’ (see Chapter 4) and fish and eel farming. Archaeologist Heather Builth, who discovered the remains of hundreds of huts, estimated that the Gunditjmara eel farms, more than seventy-five square kilometres of artificial ponds, could have fed up to 10,000 people. ‘Smoking trees’ were used to smoke and preserve the eels for export to other parts of Australia.

  Central Victoria also had several greenstone quarries. This hard volcanic rock could be flaked into chips and then ground to have a hard, sharp edge. These blades are as efficient as modern knives, and often stay sharp for longer.

  The more isolated the culture, the proportionately larger the effect of the environment. Indigenous Tasmanians were perhaps the most isolated of all, cut off for more than 10,000 years from the mainland by a dangerously wild strait. The demands of the physical environment almost certainly influenced their physique, too. Indigenous Tasmanian women, for example, had exceptional swimming skills, diving for crabs, crayfish, mussels, oysters and abalone and spending up to fifteen minutes underwater, or swimming two cold kilometres to offshore islands for mutton birds or their eggs. Skills such as these may well have been part of natural selection – those who could swim best were more likely to survive or be chosen as wives. Tasmanian women built the huts; mined ochre and rock for tools; hunted possums for food and skins; carried the spears, game and babies as the family groups travelled around; wove baskets of rushes or grasses; made shell necklaces; and gathered most of the food. The Tasmanians ate li
ttle or no fish, preferring fat-rich foods like seal and abalone, and avoiding shellfish in the frequent times when they may host toxic bacteria.

  The Indigenous nations of Australia were as diverse as the country they lived in, yet it’s only been in the past decade or so that they have been referred to individually – as the Yuin, Gunditjmara, Noonuccal and so on – rather than simply as ‘native’ or Aboriginal. The work of artists like Timmy Payungka Tjapangati may fetch tens of thousands of dollars, but even today their art is still mostly referred to as ‘Indigenous’, not art from Papunya Tula, or Ngaanyatjarra. Newspaper reports still talk of someone being ‘Indigenous’ or ‘Aboriginal’, even in places like Alice Springs where it’s relatively easy to identify which nation a person is from. (Yes, we do refer to ‘Europeans’, and it’s a useful general term, but I suspect that a book like French Women Don’t Get Fat wouldn’t have sold many copies if it had been named European Women Don’t Get Fat.)

  By 1788, when the first European colony arrived in New South Wales, the Indigenous cultures and way of life were as diverse as those in Europe, with arguably a higher standard of health, physique, medical knowledge and living than a peasant in England or Poland, or a crofter in Scotland. The European cities and large towns were squalid, where old age came in your twenties, if you survived that long. Periodic starvation was a fact of life in rural Europe. But in Europe, Asia and much of the rest of the world, you could save yourself and your family from starvation or squalor by taking your neighbour’s resources, either by taxation, if you belonged to a hereditary or religious elite, or by conquering them with army or navy.