by Patrick Nunn
4 Australia is currently moving north-north-east at a rate of 7cm (2¾in) each year, so fast (in geological terms) that the geocentric datum of Australia, defined by global latitude and longitude coordinates in 1994, was found in 2016 to be out by more than 1.5m (5ft) – see report accessed in September 2016 at www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-28/aust-latitude-longitude-coordinates-out-by-1-5m-scientists/7666858.
5 A billion is 1,000,000,000. By measuring its U-Pb (uranium-lead) proportions, a zircon grain from the Jack Hills was dated to 4.4 Gyr (4,400,000,000 years) ago, ‘shortly after formation of the Earth’ (Valley, 2014, Nature Geoscience, p. 222).
6 It has been proposed that these ancient stromatolites developed in very similar conditions to those found on the surface of the planet Mars, and that they may in fact exist there.
7 Probably the last word on Australian geology for many decades to come is the beautifully illustrated and explained volume Shaping a Nation: A Geology of Australia, published in 2012 to coincide with the 34th International Geological Congress in Brisbane (Blewett 2012). It is the heaviest single book in my library.
8 Australia is currently home to more camels than any other country on Earth. Introduced in the 1800s to work in the country’s deserts, initially for their exploration and later for supply trains to aid infrastructure development, feral camel herds have grown vastly and are now subject to periodic culling.
9 In the words of one nineteenth-century traveller, the stony deserts of Australia’s interior are ‘so desolate that it is horrifying even to describe [them] … truly the wanderer in its wilds may snatch a fearful joy at having once beheld the scenes, that human eyes ought never again to see’ (from Book 5 of Giles 1889: 317–318).
10 Quotes from an unpublished letter by Charles Sturt.
11 Properly Malakunanja II Rockshelter, also called Madjedbebe.
12 These dates were obtained using optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), a measure of how long an artefact has been buried (and unaffected by ionising radiation), and are actually 53,400 ± 5,400 to 60,300 ± 6,700 years ago (Roberts, 1994, Quaternary Science Reviews).
13 The Malakunanja artefact ages are actually 45,000 ± 9,000 to 61,000 ± 13,000 years ago (Roberts, 1990, Nature). These ages were also obtained using OSL (see previous note), and any doubt that they might be too old, perhaps because the grains of material being analysed had received insufficient exposure to sunlight (and ionising radiation) before being buried, was dispelled by subsequent analysis.
14 There are numerous studies that trace the evolution of stone-tool manufacture in Australia through time (e.g. Mulvaney and Kamminga 1999).
15 The age quoted for the Layer 30 hearth at Devil’s Lair was reported by Chris Turney and others (2001, Quaternary Research).
16 The mean age of this individual is 62,000 ± 6,000 years, so they could have been living as much as 68,000 years ago (Thorne, 1999, Journal of Human Evolution).
17 Research on the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of ancient Australians – including Mungo Man – was once thought to indicate that there was a race of people in Australia before Aboriginal people arrived, a suggestion that more recent work has conclusively dismissed (Heupink, 2016, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).
18 Actually radiocarbon dates on charcoal can mislead in some instances. This may be because the particular tree that was burnt lived a long time – perhaps several hundred years – so that the age determined for it may be out by this much. And then it is always a possibility that the people who burnt wood, particularly for cooking fires or in ceramic kilns, used wood that was long dead – like driftwood on a beach – so that the calculated age might also be significantly different from the time of burning. These caveats apply most commonly to younger charcoals, where a few hundred years might make huge differences to the interpretation of human prehistory, but much less when we are dealing with older, less precise radiocarbon ages.
19 Such ‘fire stick farming’ was a hallmark of Australian Aboriginal subsistence strategies. Not only did it reduce the build-up of (vegetation) fuel loads and drive away venomous snakes, but it subsequently stimulated the growth of new plants, including edible bracken, which attracted animals like kangaroos that could then be more easily hunted.
20 The original interpretation of early human agency was based on analyses of charcoal and grass pollen in Ocean Drilling Project (ODP) core 820, but revised subsequently when it became clear that El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) effects could produce the same kinds of change.
21 The 120,000-year date comes from the original study by Gurdip Singh and others in a chapter in the collection by Gill and others (1981).
22 Re-dating of Zone F suggests that its correct age is about 60,000 years old, in line with the earliest dates for initial human occupation of other parts of Australia. Still, it is possible that Zone F was produced by natural processes, uninfluenced by human activity.
23 Waisted stone axes are considered to represent a huge technological jump in stone-tool design that opened up new possibilities, particularly for forest dwellers, as most people in Papua New Guinea were 40,000 years ago.
24 Many archaeologists and others would favour a younger age, pointing out that the 60,000-year ages from Malakunanja and Nauwalabila are at the upper ends of the OSL ages for these occupations, and that there is evidence – discussed in Chapter 6 – which implicates humans in an Australia-wide mass extinction of megafauna within a few millennia beginning some 45,000 years ago. The most recent research at Malakunanja appears to confirm an age for the site’s occupation in excess of 60,000 years ago (Clarkson, 2017, Nature).
25 The key study is that by Heupink (op cit), who used improved DNA sequencing methods to re-evaluate the quite contrary yet influential conclusions of an earlier study. The latter analysed mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) – that which is passed through the maternal line – from 10 skeletons found in western New South Wales that dated from well before the European arrival in Australia in 1770. By comparing the mtDNA sequences in these individuals to those from modern Aboriginal Australians, it was found that most had much in common but that – critically – two of the skeletons contained mtDNA that was not diagnostic of Aboriginal people. It was therefore concluded that there had not been just one period of human arrival into Australia before 1770, but multiple waves that explained the genetic diversity. The more recent study re-examined much of the original skeletal material as well as some new material. The conclusions were staggering. Some of the original bones analysed were found not to contain any verifiable human DNA, begging the question as to how this might have allegedly been sampled 15 years earlier. But more importantly, it was clear that the indiscriminate handling of the skeletal remains by (non-Aboriginal) scientists had introduced some of their mtDNA to the mix, resulting in the non-Aboriginal mtDNA identified in the earlier study. The presence of an authentic Australian Aboriginal haplotype in at least one of the skeletons analysed proved enough to confirm that Aboriginal Australians have been isolated for most of the time – perhaps 65,000 years – that they have occupied the continent.
26 The figure of 14,000 years ago for the sundering of the last land connection between mainland Australia and Tasmania comes from research by Lambeck and Chappell (2001, Science).
27 The research was based on mitochondrial DNA and suggests that dingoes were introduced to Australia from Indonesia (Oskarsson, 2012, Proceedings of the Royal Society).
28 A possible introduction from India to Australia during this event was the microlith, a small stone tool used in arrowheads and spear-tips. Until the genetic studies showing contact with people from India about 4,230 years ago, the abrupt development of microliths in Australian cultures around this time had puzzled archaeologists.
29 A study of the Macassan trepang-processing station at Malara, Anuru Bay, Arnhem Land (northern Australia) found numerous remains of earthenware pottery, introduced from about ad 1637, which all derived from the port of Makassar in southern Sulawesi. Macassans
may also have introduced the tamarind tree to Australia. They certainly introduced numerous words that became part of Aboriginal languages along the continent’s northern fringes, and are probably responsible for integrating aspects of Islam into Aboriginal spiritual beliefs and rituals in these parts of Australia.
30 One of the main purposes of Kerguelen’s voyages in the Indian Ocean was to try and relocate ‘Gonneville’, a lush land apparently described from the region by Paulmier de Gonneville in 1504, but which subsequent research has determined to have been Brazil. Kerguelen’s premature enthusiasm for Kerguelen Island may have arisen from his belief that it was actually Gonneville.
31 The rock art on sandstone cliffs in the Serra da Capivara National Park in Brazil has been dated to far earlier than the time at which it is generally assumed people first arrived in the Americas. Archaeological research suggests that people were in this area more than 20,000 years ago, which would mean that the orthodox view of the first Americans arriving from easternmost Asia across the Bering Strait to create the Clovis culture in the modern USA about 14,000 years ago, has to be wrong. This is not a popular view in some quarters, as you might imagine, and has led one group of non-partisan archaeologists to wonder whether ‘there is some sort of curse that affects the common sense both of archaeologists making the discoveries, and their colleagues, at the announcement of an age older than 14 000 cal BC’ (Boeda, 2014, Antiquity, p. 928).
32 These types of wasp construct mud nests that petrify after they are abandoned. The example referred to was built by wasps of the species Sceliphron laetum and came from a rock shelter near the King Edward River Crossing in the Kimberley.
33 Tjukurrpa is the word of the Pitjantjatjara people of central Australia for the Dreaming and is widely used as a standard translation. Other words for the Dreaming are Ungud (Ngarinyin people of the Kimberley), Wongar (Yolngu people of Arnhem Land), Altyjerre (Arrernte people of central Australia), Bulurru (Djabugay people of north-east Queensland) and Kulhal (Yaraldi people of South Australia).
34 From p. 357 of David Rose’s insightful 2013 article on the phylogenesis of the Dreamtime, published in Linguistics and the Human Sciences.
35 The range of books in the Dreaming Library were reported in much the same way in 1906 by the French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep, who found that they included ‘des fragments d’un catéchisme, d’un manuel liturgique, d’un manuel d’histoire de la civilisation, d’un manuel de géographie, mais beaucoup moins d’un manuel de cosmographie’ (1906: cxiv), translated as ‘fragments of a catechism, a liturgical manual, a history of civilisation, a geography textbook, and to a much lesser extent a manual of cosmography’.
36 ‘This kind of system, often labelled in Aboriginal English as the “owner-manager” relationship, requiring a story to be discussed explicitly across three generations of a patriline, constitutes a cross-generational mechanism which may be particularly successful at maximising precision in replication of a story across successive generations’ (Nunn and Reid, 2016, Australian Geographer, p. 40). If you are unclear still, then imagine three generations A, B and C. Grandfather A teaches stories to his son B, who teaches them to his son C. B’s sister gets her children Y (who learnt the stories from their paternal grandfather X) to talk to A about B’s and C’s knowledge of the stories. Thus A, B and C all discuss the stories with Y, whose role is to ‘manage’ the stories within three generations of his mother’s patriline. It works in the other direction as well. X, Y and Z all discuss their knowledge with B, who also has a role as a knowledge manager. Thus there is formalised cross-checking of stories across three generations of two patrilines. When a grandfather (A or X) dies, the role of knowledge manager also passes on; in the case of patriline A-B-C, which is managed by Y, the death of A will mean that patriline B-C-D is now managed by Z (Y’s child). At each generational stage, an ‘owning’ patriline has its stories checked by a ‘managing’ maternal relative – the ‘owner-manager’ relationship. I am grateful to Dr Nick Reid for this illustration of how cross-checking of Aboriginal knowledge transmission across generations worked.
37 Australian Aboriginal performances that combine song, dance and performance are known as corroboree(s).
38 For Aboriginal stories, it is likely that ‘song rhythms and tunes have a conventionalizing effect on the transmission of ideas in song form’ (Berndt and Berndt 1996: 387), ensuring that detail is not changed or altered as stories are told anew to successive generations. Many of us today remember tunes we last heard a decade ago before we recall the associated lyrics.
39 The point is made neatly by Elizabeth Cameron, who wrote ‘Australian Aboriginal symbols are visual forms of knowledge that express cultural intellect. Being classified by a Western interpretation of “art” devalues thousands of years of generational knowledge systems, where visual information has been respected, appreciated and valued’ (2015, Arts, p. 68). She goes on to explain that ‘Aboriginal creativity’ was never considered by its creators to be primarily aesthetic, but rather in service to pragmatic ends.
40 The story of this map is told by anthropologist and linguist Donald Thomson and refers to a time when he was camped with the Pintupi at Labbi-Labbi on the edge of the Sandy Desert in 1957. ‘And on the eve of our going, [Aboriginal informant] Tjappanoŋgo produced spear-throwers, on the backs of which were designs deeply incised, more or less geometric in form. Sometimes with a stick, or with a finger, he would point to each well or rock hole in turn and recite its name, waiting for me to repeat it after him. Each time, the group of old men listened intently and grunted with approval – “Eh!” – or repeated the name again and listened [to me] once more. This process continued with the name of each water hole until they were satisfied with my pronunciation, when they would pass on to the next. I realized that here was the most important discovery of the expedition – that what Tjappanoŋgo and the old men had shown me was really a map, highly conventionalized … of the waters of the vast terrain over which the Bindibu [Pintupi] hunted’ (p. 62 in Thomson, Geographical Journal).
41 Many European Australians in the nineteenth century found it difficult ‘to appreciate that Aboriginal hunter-gatherers, whose material culture seemed to them so primitive, had a sophisticated artistic life, not to speak of one of the most complex systems of social organization in the world, and a religious life to which the older and more privileged members of society devoted a great deal of their time’ (Ross, 1986, Oral Tradition, p. 232).
42 There was ‘a comforting colonial conceit that the Aborigines made no use of their land’ (Henry Reynolds in Foreword to Gammage 2011: xxiii).
43 The quote is from p. 81 of Tim Flannery’s influential (1994) book The Future Eaters, and was the first popular expression of this fact – and of the decades of its increasingly obvious nature being ignored by settlers. Flannery also makes the observation that the nomadism practised by Aboriginal Australians was ‘an adaptation to tracking the erratic availability of resources as they are dictated by ENSO’ (p. 283), something manifested in the characterisations of Australia as a land of ‘droughts and flooding rains’, a place where long-term averages are consequently better represented by medians rather than by means (see colour plate section).
44 A good account of the two responses to drought stress by the Ngaatjatjarra (Ngatatjara) Aboriginal people of the Western Desert was given by Gould (1991, Oceania). ‘Drought escape’ involved the temporary abandonment of the worst drought-stricken areas and resettlement in distant ones where more water was available, often areas where kinfolk lived. ‘Drought evasion’ was often employed when the likely duration of a particular dry spell was considered shorter rather than longer; it involved the relocation of groups within their home area, usually congregating in places where there was a relatively dependable water supply. Gould argues that such drought-response strategies may elsewhere have been key to stimulating the domestication of plants.
45 See Cook (1893: 244).
46 Observation made by Sydney
Parkinson (1773: 124) on 27 April 1770.
47 This account is from pp. 136–137 of Haygarth’s (1861) Recollections of Bush Life in Australia.
48 From pp. 412–413 of Thomas Mitchell’s (1848) Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia.
49 The assumption that Australia was in fact Terra Nullius in 1770 when James Cook first saw it was overturned in 1992 by the High Court of Australia that ruled – by a six-to-one majority – that the Meriam people, who had brought the case, were ‘entitled as against the whole world to possession, occupation, use and enjoyment of (most of) the lands of the Murray Islands’. This ruling opened the way for the introduction of native title into Australian law and has led to numerous instances of title being restored to groups of Aboriginal landowners.
50 Quote from Flannery (1994: 282). While nomadism was characteristic of most Aboriginal groups until post-colonisation, there is clear evidence that some groups that found themselves stranded by postglacial sea-level rise on offshore islands responded by both increasing their consumption of coastal-ocean foods and becoming more sedentary. This transition is demonstrated by the discovery of ‘stone houses’ on islands in the Dampier Archipelago (Murujuga), which date from more than 8,000 years ago, and by changes in the subjects of its rock art.
51 Among the worst bush fires in recent Australian history were those on 7 February 2009 (Black Saturday) in Victoria, in which 173 people died and nearly 3,000 houses were destroyed. In south-east Australia, bush-fire incidence is projected to increase strongly by 2100, with longer fire seasons as a result of higher temperatures. Besides posing direct risks to livelihoods and property from burning, bush fires in Australia are also implicated in increased exposure of urban dwellers to atmospheric pollutants.
