The Australian nations’ language, tools, housing, food crops, art and other culture varied enormously. But their major differences from the European and Asian nations were markedly similar.
There were no armies, although there were warriors, and many stories of battles and raids for wives, or retaliation for broken laws. Yet there seems to be no history of all-out warfare between nations that was bitter enough to continue sporadically generation after generation, consuming enough resources to bring hardship or even death between battles. In much of the rest of the world especially desirable land was fought for, time after time. In Australia, areas of abundance, like the bunya nut groves of southern Queensland, or the waterlily harvests in the Araluen Valley where I am writing this, became the regular meeting places for many different clans to share the abundance, instead of fighting for it.
There was no royalty, no class of elite that ate while others starved. There were no accumulations of treasure, although beautiful items were valued. Apart from a tragic case of mental illness recorded by missionary Daisy Bates, there seems to be no cannibalism, despite the many archaeological finds in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and the Pacific of what look like ancient human bones other humans have feasted upon. The Indigenous Australian nations have no history of deep racial hatreds, like anti-Semitism and white supremacy, despite the major physical differences between various pre-colonial Australian nations, and no religious persecution, despite major differences in beliefs and a strong insistence within each nation that the law must be followed.
What was it about Australia, and its people, that made its cultures so different from so much of Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Polynesia?
CHAPTER 3
Cooperate or Die
Central Australia, 1990s
Fifty Indigenous teenagers sit in a small, hot library and silently stare at me. They’ve been brought here from outstations hundreds of kilometres away as part of an education project. We will create a story, I tell them. It will be fun. Who will suggest a character’s name?
No one answers. They glance at each other, and then at me.
I’m worried. I’ve given this workshop to kids around Australia, and in other countries, too. There should be hands waving in the air or voices calling out, telling, suggesting.
All I can hear are the sounds of fifty-one people breathing.
At last someone says, hesitatingly, ‘Yabba’.
The kids laugh. I assume that ‘Yabba’ is a local word, and wonder what it means. Later I find it was actually from ‘Yabba dabba doo!’, the cry of a character in the TV cartoon The Flintstones.
Okay, I say. Is the character Yabba going to be male or female? Human, animal, machine?
Again the silence, the quiet glancing around the room. For half a minute I think I’m boring them. But they don’t look bored. They look … polite.
They are, in fact, the most polite humans I have ever met. Over the next few hours we do create a story. It’s set in a Hungry Jack’s fast-food palace. (I had told them to choose a place where they’d love to be. I expected a waterhole, but they love Hungry Jack’s.)
It’s a good story, but each time, before anyone offers an answer, they check that no one else wants to speak first. They reassure themselves that I’m happy to keep going, that we are all working in a form of consensus I only vaguely understand. If I had yawned they may have politely left the room.
Don’t get me wrong. These kids argue with each other, and probably annoy the hell out of their elders at times, too. But they also come from a culture based on consensus and cooperation.
In arid Australia, if you don’t cooperate, you die. If you come up with a new idea that doesn’t work, you die. If you live in a desert where droughts can be thousands of years long, where survival may depend on finding the right ant colony with its fat ant eggs at exactly the right time – and not too often, in case you wipe the ants out – you tend to be very, very good at reaching consensus. A rebel doesn’t just risk their own life; they may kill the entire clan. You check, and recheck, then keep checking before you proceed at all.
These kids’ culture certainly has rebels, and violence, too. But most of the mythic rebels in their oral history are punished by exile. Exile in that environment is often fatal. A culture of cooperation does not necessarily mean it’s tolerant, or even non-violent. The harsher the landscape, the more necessary it is to work together, to cooperate,1 and to be absolutely certain before you do something differently, because different can kill you. If you live in a land where misreading the chance of finding the only water in a hundred square kilometres might kill you and your family, you become extremely good at cooperating, not just with each other but with the land.
The land of few languages
The population of Indigenous Australians at the time of permanent European settlement has been estimated at between 318,000 and 1,000,000, roughly distributed much as Australia’s present day population is, with most people living in southeastern Australia, and near the major rivers areas along the east coast and the Murray–Darling river system, as well as in southwest Western Australia.2
It was a land of about 300 nations and 250 languages, all but three of which came from one common proto-Australian language, Pama-Nyungan. (Most European languages are descended from one ancient language, Proto-Indo-European.) By comparison, nearby New Guinea, far smaller than Australia, has about 800 languages, not just dialects of the same language but ones so different that people on one mountain need a completely new language to understand their neighbours on another. In tiny medieval England, merchants needed to know ‘Anglo Norman’ French (a French dialect used in England) or Latin as well as the local language of Cornwall or Wales or wherever they were selling their wares; peasants from one village might find it difficult to understand someone from only twenty kilometres away. China still has about 292 ‘living languages’ that are spoken even today, a small fraction of what it must have had several hundred years ago. So why were there so few languages for a country as vast as Australia, especially one so culturally diverse, where deserts and mountains made travel difficult?
Australia had relatively few languages for the same reason that it had no real indigenous ‘cuisine’. There are many indigenous foods and cooking methods – and delicious ones – but no cultural equivalents of the French pot-au-feu, English cakes, Beijing duck, or the exquisite Thai foods that balance sweet, sour and crunchy. Australia can be a generous land – in most seasons, in relatively ‘undeveloped’ areas of bush where native tubers and fruits haven’t been exterminated by sheep, cattle and feral animals, it only takes an hour or so a day to find enough food to survive and dry wood for a fire, as long as you know exactly what you are doing. But it is an erratic land. Droughts can last for years, or decades. Flood can cover square kilometres two or even three times in a single year. Fire, flood and drought are constant whispers on the wind.
This is a land where survival is an art3, where you eat the food that is available, which often means focusing on one particular food – fish, or yams, mutton-bird eggs or bush tomatoes – rather than combining many ingredients into one dish. And this is also why there are few languages.
This is a land where in many areas you had to move from place to place, so you didn’t exhaust the food supplies, and left enough seeds, yam roots, frogs or bandicoots for the populations to build up again – to be ‘fat’ populations, to use a concept from Australia’s north. When desperation means you need to travel to find food, it helps to be able to communicate with your neighbouring nations. In a ‘boom and bust’ land, where a plenitude of bogong moths, bunya nuts, frogs or turtle eggs doesn’t come every year – or even in a regular pattern – it makes sense for nations from hundreds of kilometres away to join in the feast, and you tend to learn your neighbours’ customs, and their language.
How to get along
Mutual reliance on and cooperation with your near and far neighbours are good tools for surviving a country of extr
emes; different languages are a barrier to communication and cooperation. While the New Guinea nations battled, the Australian nations traded, sometimes for useful items like the tools of ‘Darwin glass’ from an ancient meteor, as sharp and long-lasting as any European implement that had been invented up until the new metal technologies of the 1960s, or for flint, or the large Cape York baler shells that contain a strong fish hook when you carved off the brittle bits of shell, which were prized as far south as the Great Australian Bight. The Gunditjmara’s greenstone tools from central Victoria have been discovered more than three hundred kilometres from the mines where the stone was quarried, and were probably traded with people who had marriage ties or other social links with the miners.
But most trade was of ceremonial items like feathers, shells or various coloured ochres, such the red and white shades mined from the huge Wilgie Mia mines in central Western Australia. While the red and yellow ochres mined in the Murchison district in Western Australia were also prized for their purity of colour, the trade itself was more important than the item traded, a cementing of cooperation and exchange of knowledge.
Most, if not all, Indigenous cultures had and have complex and diverse kinship traditions and systems. Kinship ties (which may be different from the Western notion of kinship, and far more complex) govern your relationships, and potential marriage partners. The complex web of kinship meant that property crimes were rare. Most things could be borrowed, or taken, within the web of kinship. The relatively recent concepts of socialism and communism, giving physical security to those who needed it most, are pale ghosts compared to the strength of traditional kinship ties, benefits and duties.
But possibly the greatest bringing together of cultures and peoples was at the many regional festivals where clans from hundreds of kilometres around would celebrate and enjoy seasonally abundant foods. The Durrubul, Guwar, Njula, Quandamooka, Noonuccal, Kombumerri and Yugambeh people of southeast Queensland had their great cycad and bunya nut harvests and feasts. In summer, people came from as far away as the Bundaberg region or the Tweed River to feast on bunya nuts in the Bunya Mountains, while in winter huge groups met to hunt the sea mullet in Moreton Bay.
In summer the Ngunawal, Ngarigo, Walgalu and Yuin of the New South Wales south coast moved to different places to hunt, or to attend the rich bogong moth feasts at places like Jindabyne, Gudgenby or Omeo. Scouts travelled into the mountains and sent smoke signals when the moths arrived. About five hundred people from different nations travelled hundreds of kilometres to feast on the moths and to arrange marriages and conduct corroborees and initiation rites.
The Palawa clans of what is now Tasmania gathered together for elaborate kangaroo hunts – not just killing and eating them, but complex ceremonies that celebrated their ancestral past, with songs and fire-based management practices that provided the lush open grasslands that trigger kangaroo breeding. (Unlike most animals, kangaroos can stop their unborn foetuses developing until there is sufficient food for the young to feed on. If you want kangaroos to breed, you need to provide the mothers with enough lush grass to feed their joeys before they are born, not after.)
In the Araluen Valley of southeastern New South Wales where I live now, clans joined from as far as the Snowy Mountains and the far south coast to feast on duck and waterlilies, roasting the roots and stems and making cakes from the pollen and seeds. Young women were instructed; young men competed in sports and endurance feats. Indigenous Australia did have battles, but they tended not to be an entire nation against another. Ceremonial battles were more important than real ones.
A land without armies
Ceremonial trade and travelling hundreds of kilometres to join with other nations for feasts and games are excellent cultural adaptations to survive in a harshly variable land, where flood or fire might mean you needed to seek refuge far away. But these traditions leave you vulnerable if your continent is invaded by Europeans.
The English of 1788 were shorter, smellier, less robust, and mostly led far harsher lives than the Indigenous people whose land they claimed. But they had made an art form out of war, using much of their culture’s resources to produce items like muskets, gunpowder and other weapons, as well as a class of people – soldiers – whose sole job was to fight its wars.
This too may have evolved as a response to the land the colonisers came from. In ancient Greece, for example, men tended to go to war in winter, when there was little agricultural work that could be done, and go back to tend their land in spring and summer. (There were of course many exceptions, like the fifth century BC siege of Athens by the Spartans, or the siege of Troy.) The early European winter, before the snow falls, is a good time to march – it keeps you warm, especially if there is a good autumn harvest behind you to keep you fed. If you look at the warfare patterns of Europe, even as recently as World War 1, you see wars occurring after a good harvest.
Cold winters don’t necessarily create armies, nor do climatic extremes always create cultures of cooperation, but they may well be major factors in their development. England has its autumns of Keats’s ‘mists and mellow fruit fullness’, but as Australian backyard vegetable and fruit growers know, in this country there is no ‘off season’: you can be harvesting different crops at any time of the year, and in a harsh climate – especially before dams and watering systems – you needed to keep harvesting all year to get enough to feed your family or to make a living.
This was a land of raids and battles. War was not an Australian art form. The Indigenous nations would fight the invaders but mostly as raids by small bands of men rather than a gathering of clans to push the invaders out. Van Diemen’s Land bushranger Musquito, for example, a Dharug or Gai-Mariagal man from New South Wales, formed a gang along with another Aboriginal man named Black Jack and they led raids against white settlers and storekeepers from 1824 to 1832.
The Australian spears of early colonial times were fearsome weapons, but only when wielded by experts. A musket, on the other hand, is relatively easy to load, to fire, and to hit your target. An hour’s practise is enough to learn the rudiments, as opposed to many years with spears. A skilled loader could load them again within a minute. (If you are not skilled, it can take an hour, and then you have to clean the thing.) Often two men worked together: one to fire, and one to load. But each time you cast a spear, you lose it, unless it can be retrieved.
The newcomers were far better equipped for long periods of warfare then the Indigenous nations, not just with weapons, but able to retreat to fortified positions, houses, small police stations built for just that purpose, or in the case of whalers and sealers – who may be guilty of much of the Australian genocides in the early 1800s – in their ships. Australian history is sadly rich in accounts of ‘retaliation’ raids by soldiers or vigilantes, attacking undefended camps of women, children and old men.
At Twofold Bay on the south coast of New South Wales, Yuin men continued to defy the sealers who came hunting their animals and kidnapping their women. But by the 1830s, disease and guns had killed so many that in one group of the Yuin (a clan of the Kundigal people) there were only seventy or eighty left out of a community of several hundred who had been living there ten years earlier.
The most successful resistance campaigns seemed to be in northern Australia, with leaders like Jandamarra of the Bunuba in the Northern Territory, who from 1894 to 1897 waged a guerrilla war against police and settlers in revenge for attacks on his people, or where the Tiwi islanders effectively routed the colony set up on Melville Island in 1824, and the Iwaidja people fought against the second northern colony, Fort Wellington, established in 1827 at Raffles Bay. (Scurvy, fevers, ‘night blindness’ from a lack of vitamin A, and starvation also helped – no one could work out how to grow vegetables in the tropical climate, much less harvest the abundant wild food around them.)
It may also be significant in their success that these northern cultures had faced threats from outsiders before, like the trepang fisherman from what
is now Indonesia. Although the encounters with the trepang fisherman were often friendly, with some Indigenous men travelling to Macassar and back as part of their ship’s crew, other confrontations were violent. The northern nations were also close enough to hear firsthand accounts from what are now Indonesia, Timor and Malaysia of what happened when you didn’t fight off would-be colonists.
But there are far more accounts of help than conflict: of Indigenous people gathering stringybark to roof the newcomers’ huts, helping harvest corn for a share of the cobs, warning of floods that would come in the next few weeks or months, and guiding settlers and explorers to good grazing land and waterholes. Cooperation and consensus and the expectation that others would follow legal and kinship duties had allowed Indigenous nations to survive 60,000 years of climate change and erratic seasons. Ironically it now helped in their dispossession.
The first recorded Indigenous blood spilled by an Englishman was in June 17704, when Captain James Cook shot and wounded a Guugu Yimithirr man while the Endeavour was being repaired after being wrecked on the Great Barrier Reef. The Guugu Yimithirr had shared fish with the newcomers. When the crew of the Endeavour had caught more turtles than they could use, a group of Guugu Yimithirr men asked if they could have some. Mr Banks refused; the Guugu Yimithirr took this as a declaration of enmity. They set alight the dry grass around the English camp, burning a piglet and the blacksmith’s forge, then set fire to more grass where the Endeavour’s fishing nets and linen were drying. Cook ordered the men to fire a musket and small shot, then the captain shot one of the ringleaders. He didn’t think he had badly wounded the man, but they never knew for sure.
Over the next two hundred years, muskets, black powder and shot, and the more sophisticated weapons that supplanted them, and a culture with a permanent fighting force whose sole job was to battle enemies as well as police to keep order, would win against spears and a culture of cooperation.
Let the Land Speak Page 4