by Patrick Nunn
More is known about a later period of pre-European contact: that between the Aboriginal peoples of northern Australian coasts and the Macassar people of Sulawesi Island (Indonesia), who came in fleets bent on collecting sea cucumbers (trepang) – a delicacy in great demand in China – beginning around 1637. Evidence of their cultural impact comes from the representation in Aboriginal (Yolngu) rock art of the distinctive perahu (vessels) of the Macassar but, despite setting up processing stations for boiling and drying the sea cucumbers, they left little long-term imprint on Aboriginal Australia.29
When we talk of isolation and contact in an Australian context, we need to remind ourselves of scale. The continent is vast, the great majority of its Indigenous peoples remained largely isolated from the rest of the world for tens of millennia, and the local contacts had generally localised cultural impacts; that is, at least, until the arrival in 1788 of the first group of foreigners bent on staying in Australia – the British.
To understand the context, it helps to step back a few hundred years.
It was 13 February in the year 1772 and two French ships – the Fortune and the Gros Ventre – moved cautiously through the morning fog in the southern Indian Ocean when, unexpectedly, land was sighted. This was a cause for celebration, for the ships’ commander, Yves de Kerguelen-Trémarec, had been charged by King Louis XV of France to find the land mass, Terra Australis, which many European thinkers of the time believed lay in the Southern Ocean. The land found by Kerguelen looked bleak and was clearly an island, uninhabited and obviously devoid of the economic possibilities the French hoped Terra Australis might yield for their benefit. But Kerguelen named it after himself and – despite failing to land – confidently declared it an outlier of Terra Australis and hightailed it back to France to report his landmark discovery to his King.30 Delighted no doubt that France had discovered what explorers from other European nations had hitherto failed to find, Louis sent Kerguelen back to his eponymous island to make its link to the fabled southern continent explicit. Unfortunately, no amount of imagination could colour this canvas, and Kerguelen returned to France in 1775, confessing the isolated island to be ‘as barren as Iceland, and even more uninhabitable and uninhabited’, and clearly no continent either, information that incensed Louis and led to Kerguelen’s imprisonment.
Where had this belief in a vast southern continent, Terra Australis, pregnant with economic promise for expansionist eighteenth-century European powers vying with one another to build the largest global empire, come from? As far as we know, the belief originated with the Greek mathematician Eratosthenes who – more than 2,000 years ago – calculated the size of the oikoumenē (inhabited world) to be just one-quarter of the size of Planet Earth. Since the Earth rotates uniformly rather than wobbling, he reasoned, the supposedly heavier continents must be evenly distributed. Thus there must be three other chunks of land of similar size elsewhere on the Earth’s surface that balanced the distribution of land and sea. The southern hemisphere was effectively unknown to classical scholars of this period in Europe, so they made maps showing a vast southern continent (named Antichthones), which they regarded as inaccessible because of the apparent impossibility of traversing the equatorial regions separating it from Europe.
While many such ideas became sidelined in Europe for about a millennium following the decline of the Roman Empire, they were enthusiastically rediscovered by Renaissance thinkers and aspirant explorers between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Some voyages of exploration at this time led to European discoveries of southern lands that were taken as corroboratory evidence of the existence of what became known as Terra Australis. These included the landing on Tierra del Fuego in southernmost South America by Ferdinand Magellan in 1520, the earliest written account of New Zealand by Abel Tasman in 1642, and of course Kerguelen’s incautiously overstated description of his eponymous island in the 1770s.
The shattering of the belief in Terra Australis, and the attendant abandonment of the Greco-Roman belief in Antichthones that underpinned it, came when Captain James Cook anchored the Resolution at Spithead (England) at the end of his second circumnavigation on 29 July 1775 and made haste for the Admiralty in London. Cook reported how his ships had repeatedly traversed the Pacific Ocean, from east to west and from north to south, and had found no trace of a large continental mass answering the description of Terra Australis. The verdict was accepted, and a chapter in the history of European exploration and understanding of the world closed.
Of course, the situation might have been quite different had the continent of Antarctica, which is located pretty much where Eratosthenes placed his Antichthones, been discovered earlier. But the dangerous seas and inhospitable climate in the southern polar regions put off many potential explorers, and it was not until the 1820s that anyone landed on the ice shelf surrounding this frozen southern continent. The realisation that it fringed a huge, ice-covered continent came decades later, by which time all thoughts of the oikoumenē as a serious explanatory tool for understanding the configuration of land and ocean on our planet had been abandoned.
Even though its first recorded circumnavigation took place in 1802 –1803, Australia was never seriously taken to be Terra Australis – it stretched too far north and not far enough south. But for Matthew Flinders in 1814, this was evidently as good as it was going to get, so he named the land Australia. By this time, a British settlement had been established for 26 years at Sydney Cove, today part of Australia’s largest city. Britain had declared Australia to be Terra Nullius (no-one’s land), available for the taking, a ruling used to justify land grabs and the displacement or worse of Indigenous Australians from places their ancestors had occupied for millennia. As is the case with any large-scale cultural contacts, those between Australian Aboriginal peoples and European settlers were varied, but dominated by ones that were confrontational in which the former generally lost out. Yet within the first 100 years or so of European arrival in Australia, there were also instances where settlers learnt to respect Aboriginal peoples’ wisdom and familiarised themselves with it. In several instances this led to written compilations of contemporary Indigenous knowledge, including many of the stories described in Chapter 3.
Colonisation and globalisation both played a role in the subsequent subordination of Aboriginal cultures in Australia, and it is inevitable that much of the traditional knowledge they possessed before 1788 – which had been accumulated over tens of millennia – has been forever lost. Yet the part of it that remains is sufficient to allow the impartial observer insights into the impressive scope and longevity of ancient Aboriginal wisdom, foremost perhaps among that to which we, as a species, have authentic access today.
When we look back in time from the high point that human culture has attained, it is tempting to suppose that our early ancestors lived simple lives, most of which were spent acquiring sufficient food to feed themselves and their dependants, and that they had no time for what we today might describe as leisure pursuits. Half a century ago, this view pervaded much scientific thinking about early human history, but in recent decades there has been ample cause to re-evaluate such ideas. One example is provided by the inescapable conclusion that, as discussed in Chapter 1, the ancestors of the first Australians must have crossed a succession of ocean gaps as much as 70km (43 miles) across in order to reach Sahul (Australasia) from Sunda (South-east Asia). Such trips could not have been accidental or unplanned. To have succeeded, they must have required knowledge of watercraft construction and navigation, and even – you would think – some anticipatory planning for surviving when a foreign shore was reached. Such enterprises required cooperation between people, with particular individuals being assigned different roles. This would have entailed language and a degree of human cognition comparable to our own for people 65,000 years or more ago – something that Western science once viewed as impossible.
Another area in which scientists have traditionally underestimated the ability of our ancient ancesto
rs concerns their artistic abilities. Until the challenges associated with reliably dating rock art were effectively overcome some 25 years ago, claims of its great antiquity were invariably treated sceptically. Yet with the advent of radiocarbon dating using accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) techniques capable of determining the age of tiny quantities of carbon, it has been demonstrated that surviving rock art in parts of Africa and Europe was created more than 30,000 years ago.31 Survival is of course key and it undoubtedly requires a particularly fortuitous series of events to preserve rock art this long. In Australia, the oldest dated rock art is a charcoal painting that fell face-down from the ceiling of the Nawarla Gabarnmang rock shelter in Arnhem Land and was then buried beneath cave sediments for 26,913–28,348 years. Mud dauber wasp nests built over the head-dress of a ‘mulberry-coloured human figure’ painted on a rock face in the Kimberley region allowed determination of a minimum age for the artwork of 16,400 years ago,32 the earliest dated image currently known in Australia.
It is, however, certain that earlier Australians created rock art and that this was part of a range of symbolic expression that may even have come with the first arrivals. In support of this, worn ochre crayons made some 40,000–60,000 years ago have been found at both Malakunanja and Nauwalabila, although it is unclear what they were used for. Yet from here it is only a small step towards supposing that, in addition to their maritime and artistic accomplishments, the first Australians used language in a similar way – to celebrate and codify their culture and to accumulate an oral record of their history. It is generally supposed that at most only a few languages would have been spoken by the first Australians (perhaps even just one), but that as time went on and their descendants spread across Australia, the numbers of different languages increased. At the time of the first record, around the start of the nineteenth century, a group of languages known as Pama-Nyungan (PN) was spoken across about 80 per cent of Australia, while non-PN languages were spoken only in parts of its north and north-west.
Such a history of language development and diffusion laid the foundations for Australian Aboriginal cultures to encode important observations of natural phenomena in their oral traditions, and also to develop methods of passing these on from generation to generation in ways that proved both effective and sustainable. While (as we shall see shortly) many observations were recorded in ways that were readily understandable hundreds or even thousands of years later, other observations were mythologised, perhaps because they might otherwise have seemed too implausible – and therefore unimportant – to later generations. Thus was born the Dreaming (Tjukurrpa),33 the rich and varied world of the mind within which Aboriginal people’s culture has long been grounded, and which is believed to exist in parallel with the tangible one and renders the past ‘far beyond the memory of any person, but conserved in the collective memory of the whole community’.34
Before the advent of literacy, the Dreaming of Aboriginal Australians served the same function as a library does for literate people today. It contained ‘books’ that could be read only by those who had been taught to ‘read’ them. Among those books were technical manuals explaining the practicalities of surviving in Australia’s harsh environments, where to find water and food, and how to teach your children and grandchildren to read. Yet in the Dreaming Library were also books of geography that explained the character of the landscapes with which a particular community had interacted and the changes they periodically underwent. These changes might also be recounted in the history texts in the Dreaming Library, emphasis being placed on memorable events that tribal ancestors had witnessed: events that may have included volcanic eruptions, meteorite falls, extreme waves, prolonged droughts and – central to the stories in Chapter 3 – the drowning of once-dry lands along Australia’s coastal fringe.35
Reading a book on the shelves of the Dreaming Library required one to listen to a person who kept the books in their minds. Such people would be those who were older, and who had once been inculcated with this knowledge by their elders. Ethnographic information suggests, quite plausibly, that there were formalised processes in Aboriginal peoples’ cultures for teaching younger people how to read these books and retain the information in their minds, ready one day to pass on to their own offspring. These processes manifest themselves most commonly as adults having a cultural responsibility to pass on the ‘law’ to youngsters. Yet it is clear that in Indigenous Australian cultures there are also inbuilt mechanisms to ensure that the law as transmitted is accurate and complete; omissions or errors in content could have fateful consequences for subsequent generations. Take as an example that a man (A) teaches the law through a series of traditional stories to his son. It is then incumbent on A’s daughter’s son, who is taught the law through a different patriline, to check that his maternal uncle (and his children) has the stories right.36 Such cross-generational checks for accuracy and completeness ensured – as far as possible – that each successive generation had the stories correct and was therefore as well equipped as possible to survive.
The innate conservatism of Aboriginal peoples’ cultures in Australia is also likely to have played an important role in the effective multi-generational transmission of tribal law. Many Aboriginal people expressly state the imperative of telling a story the correct way, something that not only ensures its content is accurate, but also that the ownership of the story (and with it the responsibility to pass it on through the patriline) is made explicit. Particular family lines often have their own stories. While these may be heard by others for whom they are not principally intended, those people do not own these stories and understand that they have no right to retell them.
Many books were read (from memory) out loud, and some were supplemented by performance (dancing and clowning).37 Sometimes the stories in the books were sung, the tunes of the songs prompting the singer’s recollection of the words.38 Rock art was used to reinforce such messages, to be enduring reminders (or mnemonics) of key details from which observers with sufficient base knowledge might then reconstruct the rest of the narrative. Other forms of Aboriginal peoples’ artwork had similar functions;39 an extraordinary map of waterholes in the central desert, initially thought to be a purposeless, solely artistic design, is shown in the colour plate section.40 This map illustrates the purpose of much Aboriginal art – as an essential aid to surviving in a harsh land.
For hunter-gatherers to survive in Australia, particularly through times of more than usual climate-driven stress, they needed to intimately understand the environment they occupied and the full spectrum of livelihood possibilities it represented. Probably this was a lesson Aboriginal societies learnt the hard way – that anything less than intimacy might invite disaster, perhaps in the form of the death of an entire community through starvation or thirst. So the landscape and the climate shaped culture, forcing it to be conservative rather than innovative, and in doing so it ensured that formidable bodies of traditional knowledge – the Dreaming Library – were taught anew to every new generation as comprehensively and as accurately as they had been to previous ones.
The wisdom that underpinned the traditional ways of Aboriginal Australians was something that European colonists of Australia were generally slow to acknowledge.41 Like colonising people in other situations who were certain that their ways of interacting with environments in order to feed themselves were superior to those of the colonised – and who had the weaponry to support this view – most of the new arrivals in Australia after 1788 became contemptuous of Aboriginal knowledge.42 They were resolute in their belief, for example, that the kinds of seasonal interactions with temperate landscapes that had been developed in their native Europe were applicable to Australia. And why should this not be so?
The answer lies in the fact that ‘Australia is the only continent on Earth where the overwhelming influence on climate is a non-annual climatic change’ – the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO).43 This means that for the vast majority of the continent, annual (seaso
nal) cycles of change are dwarfed by those superimposed by ENSO. When, every three to five years or so, Australia enters an ENSO-negative phase (an El Niño event), drought affects most parts. In the distant past, successions of such droughts were sometimes severe enough to force temporary Aboriginal peoples’ abandonment of Australia’s driest inhabited parts.44 Today they entail water stress on farms, especially within the broad transition zones separating the wetter coasts from the parched interior and, increasingly, water shortages for people in the country’s densely populated urban areas. Conversely, when Australia is affected by an ENSO-positive phase (a La Niña event), things frequently become much wetter than usual; often the dry centre of the continent is given several prolonged soakings, sometime sufficient to bring forth plant life in places where one might otherwise never have suspected it to be lying dormant. From this long acquaintance with the vagaries of the Australian climate, its Aboriginal inhabitants evolved land-use practices and techniques for accessing water that were unfamiliar to European colonists, many of whom inevitably undervalued or ignored them. A couple of examples illustrate the point.
It was natural for many of the earliest Europeans to judge the potential of Australian landscapes for agricultural production through the lens of their experience. One key analogy for some of the earliest British observers of Australia was the presence of the grassland areas along its east coast. On 1 May 1770, James Cook and others made an excursion onshore from HMS Endeavour
