The Rise And Fall Of Ancient Australia

The long Aboriginal occupation of Australia witnessed spectacular changes. The rising of the seas isolated the continent and preserved a nomadic way of life as agriculture revolutionised other parts of the world. Over millennia, the Aboriginal people mastered the land’s climates, seasons and reserves. Traditional Aboriginal life came under threat the moment Europeans crossed the world to plant a new society in an unknown land. The meeting of the two cultures is one of the most difficult meetings in history. In his new and revised study of ancient and new Australia – The Story of Australia’s People – The Rise and fall of Ancient Australia – eminent Australian historian and author Professor Geoffrey Blainey has unlocked new insights into the complex and rich culture of ancient Aboriginal Australia. To discuss some of his discoveries, Geoffrey Blainey addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 6 May 2015.

THE RISE AND FALL OF ANCIENT AUSTRALIA

GEOFFREY BLAINEY

Thank you very much Gerard for the generous words. I wrote my first book in 1954. It was a book about mining on the west coast of Tasmania and it was called The Peaks of Lyell. I looked at it for the first time in many years and noticed that there’s one brief reference to Aborigines who spent large parts of the summer in the Mt Lyell vicinity. My reference says simply that the years pass by and only the Aborigines heard the roar of the surf. And then they vanished from the beaches.

Nowadays, we know much more about Indigenous Australians and their important and decisive role in Australian history. When I was young, so little was known about Aborigines – at least by European peoples. One of the problems was a lack of chronology. Historians were a sea without a timeline. But with the invention of radio carbon dating by the American Willard Libby, just after the Second World War, a new era opened in the study of Aboriginal history. I had no interest in the topic.

A colleague, John Mulvaney, was teaching Ancient History at Melbourne University. It was 1956 and he thought that he should also look at the ancient history of Australia. He arranged to conduct an excavation – only the second archaeological excavation ever conducted in Australia – from a landing near Mannum in South Australia, just upstream from Murray Bridge. There was a cave that Aborigines had occupied for obviously for a long period of time and where the remains of their fires and meals became layers of ash until the cave became so high that you had to crouch to be in it. Underneath was history.

In those days, people didn’t have much money and John Mulvaney had some ten people to take on his archaeological expedition. He was short of transport. I had a car and he asked would I come on the expedition. I transported six of the ten people. At the time, travel was simple. We stopped at Keith the first night and we reached Mannum the second day.

I didn’t at first take much interest in the excavation. I chopped the wood and looked after the fire and sometimes I cooked the meals; it was all very simple. But the excavation went on. It was done with incredible thoroughness – people were using toothbrushes and troughs so that nothing would be disturbed unnecessarily. Eventually, they sent away to the United States specimens of carbon. They found that the cave had been inhabited at least 5,000 years ago. This caused a mild sensation. I don’t think anybody realised that the Aborigines had been here so long. Some people thought they might have been here only in the Christian era.

John Mulvaney then went on to further work at a place called Kenneth Cave in central west Queensland. To his delight, his evidence from there pushed back the date for the first human occupation of Australia another 10,000 years. Mulvaney recalled that he received the message over the Flying Doctor radio while he was eating porridge in golden syrup. In our era of coffee shops and cafes you don’t see much golden syrup anymore. Then, in 1968, a remarkable event happened. Jim Bowler, from the Australian National University, was a specialist on sand dunes and how they moved and were formed. In south western New South Wales, at Lake Mungo, he found human remains, disturbed perhaps by the winds. The remains were eventually identified and dated. They were remains of an Aboriginal woman who had died perhaps 24,000 years ago and had been cremated.

At the time, that was the oldest known evidence of ceremonial cremation in the world. She was a young girl; a “gracile” was a phrase used to describe her. Bowler, perhaps two years later, found the remains of a man. The man had been ceremonially buried and had been dusted or painted in red ochre. There’s no ochre in the vicinity now so the ochre would come a long time away. Here was a ceremonial burial of great importance and in wider human history, not just in Aboriginal history.

I met Jim Bowler occasionally but just for short conversations. I discovered he came from Leongatha and was born the same year I was. I asked him what part of Leongatha did he come from and he said they came from County Kerry and had a farm just outside Leongatha on the Melbourne road. I told him that I lived at Leongatha at the same time. In this tiny town, my father carried the Methodist banner so he didn’t have many Catholic connections. I don’t think Bowler went to the state school which I attended – a wonderful state school where we learned everything by chanting – three times three is nine and so forth. I still carry the chanting in my mind and will as long as I live. It means I can go to a shop and add up.

It was a remarkable discovery. Bowler was the sort of man who saw something unusual, a clue, and wondered about it. We think of the great prospectors of Australia as ordinary people but many of them had highly intellectual minds even though they were trained in no particular discipline. They looked for clues and wondered why certain clues, which were not expected, were there. I suppose that’s what Bowler did.

Almost in the space of a couple of years, the human history of Australia, which was believed to be so short, was pushed back 24,000 and perhaps 40,000 years. Now they say that the Aboriginal woman uncovered at Lake Mungo perhaps died 40,000 years ago. Many of us here are in the age group where we used to say Australia has had no history. One of the reasons we loved to go overseas was to see history. But here was history of an enormous length.

Here, suddenly, was a date, a great map of Australia but no events in it. Soon, however, the events were found. There have been no older burials, no older bones of Aborigines, found since then. Presently, people speak of the Aborigines being here 50-60,000 years. But there are great arguments about the evidence and the technology being used, but eventually we shall have greater knowledge. The study of Aboriginal history and knowledge is a boom industry.

Australia, of course, had many events which have only been unravelled in more recent years. In primary schools, there’s great interest in Aboriginal history. It is common to teach children that the Aborigines lived in harmony with nature. I suppose that’s good for little children if they’re going to be taught. But, of course, the Aborigines are human beings like us and no human beings live in complete harmony with nature. If technology is strong, you will alter nature and maybe do harm or maybe do good. There was the extinction of remarkable creatures in Aboriginal times. The evidence is now pretty clear that the diprotodont, the size of a rhinoceros, became extinct, the Aboriginals arrived here.

In so many parts of the world, the arrival of human beings was accompanied by the extinction of unusual species. It may be that the human beings didn’t actually cause the extinction. It may be that they were present when the climate was changing. Or something they did indirectly led to the extinction of creatures. That remarkable animal the Tasmanian tiger, the thalassic, could be seen 10,000 years ago in New Guinea. It could be seen in many parts of Australia 4,000 years ago, including on the Nullabor Plain. The last Tasmanian tiger was believed to have died in the Tasmanian Zoo in the 1930s. In my lifetime and the timeline of other people here it’s remarkable that such a creature should have lasted so long and eventually have gone. I was once on a government committee with Vincent Serventti the naturalist in north western Tasmania. A man in the audience said he believed he’d seen a Tasmanian tiger in the headlights in 1938, a few years after the official extinction. Vincent Serventi said the evidence was overwhelming that what he’d seen was one of the Tasmanian tigers.

Of course, Australia was so different 60,000 years ago and certainty 40,000 years ago. Australia was very cold. Canberra possibly had the temperatures in winter that Mount Kosciusko has today. In many parts of Australia, the vegetation was bleak. Current research is that eucalyptus, now so plentiful in many parts of Australia, was hardly to be seen in Australia 25,000 years ago. It spread when the climate became warmer. About 18,000 years ago, the seas began to rise. They began to rise all over the world. It was a period of global warming that would make anything predicted for the next 20 to 1000 years in Australia seem like a mere bubble on the sea. Here was an event on an astonishing scale.

Eighteen thousand years ago, you could have walked from Yorkshire to Estonia or Latvia. There was no North Sea. You could have walked from Bali to Beijing. If you lived in Australia 18,000 years ago you could walk from Sydney to Port Moresby – there was no Torres Strait. If you lived in Sydney 18,000 years ago you could walk to Hobart, there was no Bass Strait. In Sydney 18,000 years ago, if you stood where the Opera House is now there would be a river well below making its way out to sea through North Head and South Head to eventually reach the sea well to the east. Adelaide of course was a long way from the sea. Melbourne was a long way from the sea. If you were an Aborigine, and you made a barcoo canoe in Melbourne – there was of course no Port Phillip Bay – you could paddle the canoe along the Yarra River close to the Mornington Peninsula through Port Phillip heads. There was no sea, and you then south west to the Barwon River that joined you from Geelong until before long the Tamar River joined you from Tasmania.

The Tamar River was a mighty river, much stronger than the Yarra, because in the summertime the snow and ice was melting in the highlands of Tasmania and filling the Tamar River. The combined Yarra, Barwon and Tamar rivers went south west and eventually reached the ocean west of King Island. Perth was relatively close to the sea but not on the sea, nor was Fremantle. Darwin was a very long way from the sea. Brisbane was fairly close to the sea but nowhere near it. Australia was so different.

It must have been a remarkable event, the rising of the seas, which went on for thousands of years and ended about 6,000 years ago. You get some idea of how quickly the sea came in around Townsville where the grading of the land was relatively gentle. The sea came in about 10 metres a year. That means in 10 years the sea encroached 100 metres. And that continued. How many special sites, how many hunting grounds, how many places where Aborigines gathered vegetables were inundated forever. Every Aboriginal group that lived by the sea lost all or part of their land in the face of this great event. To my mind, and a lot of people don’t agree with me, it is by far the most important event in the history of Australia. The rising of the seas which began 18,000 years ago is the most important single event in the human history of Australia. Nothing since 1788 can compare to it in the magnitude of its effects.

And so, bit by bit, the climate became warmer, the map of Australia changed, people moved inland and further inland. How they got along with one another one doesn’t know. We’ll know much more about that in time. We also have no idea what will be invented as the key evidence of this period is buried beneath the ocean. Yet, you can’t be sure that someday somebody will find a technique to find campfires or some remains, even the tiniest remains, on the ocean floor. This will give us clues to this astonishing event in Australian history.

The rising of the oceans meant that Australia was cut off from the world. It was cut off from New Guinea, Timor was much further away than previously it had been, Asia was much further away, though not completely cut off but made relatively isolated.  While this was going on – the last phase in the Middle East and, later, in other parts of the world – a mighty revolution was occurring called the neolithic revolution. One way of describing it is to call this the gardening revolution. Human beings began to domesticate plants and animals, to domesticate and grow grains. They began to domesticate sheep, goats and so forth. It’s a remarkable event in human history and some ways I suspect is more important than the industrial revolution.

Previously, hunters and gatherers, as Aborigines, were nomadic. A lot of scholars don’t like the word – they think it’s derogatory. But it’s still the best word. If you want, you can say semi-nomadic. But nomadic, I think, is the best word. Here were people who, with great knowledge of their own environment, moved around systematically according to the seasons, planting food and killing game, birds and fishes. They did it all with great skill. I admire what others have found out about that society, how skilful it was and the good standard of living they had in good years by the standards of the time.

We don’t know enough about Aboriginal climate. A remarkable article appeared in December 2014. It came with just enough time to squeeze it into my book. The drilling of ice in the east Antarctic tells you a lot about the climate in parts of the Pacific not too far away. A team of geophysicists and other scientists reported that Australia in the twelfth century of the Christian era was very dry, especially the eastern half of Australia. On top of that dryness came a drought, which began in 1174 – about the time of the Crusades – a drought that lasted 39 years. I don’t know how the Aboriginal population would have fared in such a drought. In some areas, they would have managed with access to fish in the sea, but inland it must have been catastrophic. Some people say that the Aboriginal population perhaps reached a million about 1788. I have great doubts about that. If a climatic event like that hits people who can’t hoard food, who collect food daily, the effect on their population must have been dramatic and traumatic.

The domestication of plants and animals, is the domestication of people. Anybody that keeps a cat or a dog knows that. It’s a two-way relationship. It imposes a work discipline on people. You have to plant each year, you have hoard the seeds, you have to either fence off your gardening plot or you have to guard it. The gardening revolution was accompanied by a political revolution, the two went hand in hand.

The political revolution consisted of a division of labour with people becoming specialists, priests, farmers and so forth. Professional soldiers for the first time, powerful rulers and territories infinitely larger than previous territories developed. We know that in Aboriginal Australia, in 1788, there were two or three hundred of what Aborigines like to call “nations”, and I think there is some merit in the word. “Tribes” is a word that previously was used. But here were people in relatively small groups, with no powerful rule, no professional army, and the effect was unmistakable. The organising ability of people who had undergone the gardening revolution increased enormously, along with the power to conquer a country or a group. There was no way in the end that a nomadic people living in their relatively small political units could defeat a country which had undergone the gardening revolution.

This business was a great problem in Aboriginal Australia where Aboriginals had never gone through the gardening revolution. In some ways they were lucky; in some ways the quality of individual life might have been better in the old hunter-gatherer days, a more interesting life. On the other hand, your economic power and your military power were much smaller. If you look at the history of the countries near Australia, the gardening revolution came to New Guinea thousands of years ago. Not only all kind of plants were cultivated in village gardens, but also pigs. The gardening revolution came to New Zealand less than a thousand years ago. It was not a sophisticated form of a gardening society but it was definitely a gardening society. It came to the Torres Strait Islands, but it didn’t come to Australia.

It’s much easier for a society that has gone through the gardening revolution to cope with another society that has also had the gardening revolution, than to cope as a nomadic society. The nomadic society is so difficult to understand. My belief is that, in 1788 in Sydney, when the nation which had just invented the steam engine came face-to-face with representatives of hunter-gatherers the contrast was immense. We’re all descendants of hunter-gatherers, but here were Aborigines occupying a large section of the earth and they come face-to-face with people who had not only gone through the gardening revolution but through other revolutions; people who had the steam engine and the political organisation that goes with the hoarding of food and so forth.

My view is that there is no way in which these two people meeting each other in Sydney in 1788 could have understood each other at first. This would have been so even if you had brought out – instead of the convicts and marines from the British Isles – the great philanthropists and scientists, the great women and men of the British Isles and set them ashore in Sydney Cove and sent them all over Australia and they met the cleverest Aborigines, the most humane, and you put them side by side. How, at first, could they understand each other, even if they had a common language?

They had different attitudes to food, relationships, families and to land. It was a great gulf and to some extent our nation is still in the shadow of that gulf. A large part of the gulf has been narrowed but we are still in the shadow of that gulf. Interestingly, it was much easier for the British coming to New Zealand to negotiate with the Maori’s because the Maoris had been through the gardening revolution. You couldn’t have had a treaty of Waitangi within Australia at that time. How would you negotiate it – and among the various Aboriginal groups who were not necessarily allies with one another? There was no way you could have drawn up a treaty which both would understand.

I was part of the Constitutional Convention in 1998 in Canberra. There were a considerable number of Aboriginal representatives there, many of them eloquent and I think all of them republican There was one representative from the Torres Strait, the gardening society, Mr George Mye. George Mye was puzzled that they thought he should be seated next to Aborigines because he was a not a Republican. And he made his speech, which was not much reported and a great pity. He said the great thing in the history of the Torres Strait islands was the coming of the Europeans. He called it, as they do, the coming of the light. In 1871 the London Missionary Society, then a mixture of Anglican and Congregationalists largely from London with enormous influence across the Pacific Ocean, sent missionaries from the Loyalty Islands to the Torres Strait islands. Before long, the Torres Strait islanders were members of the London Missionary Society. You couldn’t imagine something like that happening in Aboriginal society.

George Mye said that if you go to the Thursday Island and see the very handsome cathedral on the hill, the Quetta Memorial Cathedral (no longer a cathedral), in front of it is a monument to celebrate the coming of the light, the great event.  Of course the Torres Strait islanders ceased to be the London Missionary Society and they became Anglicans. The Queen was the head of the Anglican Church and the Islanders thought the Queen was an important part of their culture. I don’t want to generalise too far, but those are the kinds of differences you see in people who’ve gone through the gardening revolution. Then there are differences that we don’t fully understand.

The coming of Europeans to Australia turned out in many ways to be a tragic meeting. The dividends are now coming to the Aborigines, especially in the last 40 years, but the early history of the British in Australia was in many ways tragic. They believed at first, from both sides, they might get on. The more benevolent governors, whether in South Australia or New South Wales or elsewhere, believed that if they could only teach the Aborigines to farm and teach them to read and write they would fall in with this civilisation. But the Aborigines had no interest in the economics of the civilisation which came to them.

Some people say the Aborigines weren’t intelligent enough to take advantage of this opportunity but there’s no evidence of that whatsoever. At some schools Aborigines were at the top. But after a while they left. The parents called for them or they thought something interesting was going on elsewhere and they left. And everywhere, the schools did not have anywhere near the success that they hoped for, to teach Aboriginals to farm. Occasionally, they took great interest in it, then before long it wasn’t interesting. They had a way of life that they knew and all their traditions surrounding it and they wanted to keep it. This is remarkable, isn’t it? That the Aborigines didn’t clamour to belong to Western society, except for the food. There was no real political movement in Aboriginal Australia to become part of this society. The Maoris got the vote in 1867 and wanted it in Australia. Until the 1930s there’s no articulate Aboriginal movement wanting the franchise except perhaps a little in South Australia. Many Aborigines had the vote in Australia at a time when they were said to not have the vote.

So here was this sad position. Many Aboriginals were killed by Europeans’ action, although the number of Aboriginals who were killed by fighting is relatively small compared to the number killed by diseases to which they had no immunity, whether small pox or diarrhea or measles. The evidence is overwhelming that the great decline in Aboriginal population, the tragic decline that took place between 1788 and about the 1920s, was due to diseases to which Aboriginals had no immunity. I The sad thing is that large numbers of Aborigines today believe that their population declined largely through killing. The understanding of history from the two main streams in Australia is still got a long way to go.

To my mind here are two key events in Australian history which ultimately as a nation we should keep in our mind. The first event – the rising of the seas – was a colossal event that transformed Australia. It gave Australia its current present map, and made the land in many places much more habitable and much more productive. At the same time, because it represented the isolating of Australia from places which were once contiguous with Australia not completely isolated from the world. The rising of the oceans largely isolated Australia at the time when the world was changing rapidly.

The second event was that the Neolithic revolution, or the gardening revolution, of such profound importance around the world did not come to Australia. In economic and political terms, the Aborigines suffered although in cultural and spiritual and other terms they may have gained. So there’s one event that did happen of enormous importance in understanding our history. And there’s one event that didn’t happen. My hope is that the Aboriginal Australians, whether in 50 years’ time or 100 years or 200 years’ time, will see Australian history as one and will have intense interest in that long period of Aboriginal history stretching back 60,000 years. My hope is that they will know a lot about it and will also have greater knowledge than at present of that period of Australian history that began in 1788. And we’ll see what those two parts have in common and in what ways they are different. My own view is that the only real path to reconciliation in Australia is to realise how difficult it was when these two cultures and these two people, so far apart, were brought together in 1788.