Chapter 2
First Australians: Making a Home, Receiving Visitors
In This Chapter
Finding our way to Australia with the first indigenous arrivals
Meeting the early explorers and traders who passed through
This is the chapter where you get to stand back and take the long, long view. While most of the rest of the book is chiefly concerned with the events that took place after British settlers started arriving in the late 18th century, this chapter looks at the almost unthinkably long period of human occupation of the Australian continent before that.
Indigenous Australians arrived multiple millennia ago. They developed a uniquely successful system of living that stood the test of time. Then, in the last few hundred years before British settlement, other visitors started turning up too. This is the chapter where you can get some sense of the world Indigenous Australians developed and maintained, and a feel for what was going on with the Macassans, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch later on.
Indigenous Australians
Australia is the driest, flattest inhabited continent in the world, a vast span of stony deserts with only a fringe of arable land clinging to the edges where the weather is milder and rain more reliable. But during the last Ice Age (around 40,000 years Before Present), the situation was much, much worse. Almost all the world’s fresh water was locked up in the enormous glaciers that covered the north of Europe, leaving scarcely any to spare for the Great Southern Land. The continent of Australia was a landscape desolate beyond anything we can picture now.
And yet — people lived here. These people had a complex culture, they traded, and they told stories and sang songs in hundreds of languages (see Figure 2-1). The people who sang those songs were masters of survival in the harshest landscape on Earth.
Settling in early
During the Ice Age, sea levels were much lower than today (all that ice had to come from somewhere, after all). One advantage of this was that it was a lot easier to walk to new places, as distinct from swimming. Australia and New Guinea were connected by a giant land bridge, which explains why these now-distant countries have so many plant and animal species in common. Nevertheless, it was still a long way over open water for prehistoric humans to get to Australia, so whatever else we may conjecture about the first settlers, we’re certain they knew their way around a boat.
No-one knows exactly when the First Australians arrived. The evidence is scanty and, at times, contradictory. Even genetic research is unable to resolve whether the Aborigines came in one big push or many successive waves. Like all humans, they originated in ancient Africa, but after that, their lineage is murky. Although they must have passed through South-East Asia on their way to Australia, they aren’t related to any known Asian population. Today, linguistic and genetic similarities exist between some Aborigines and the natives of New Guinea, but this is just as likely to be the result of (relatively) recent trade and intermarriage.
Who these first settlers were, where they came from, and why they came to Australia may always remain a mystery. All we know is, when the glaciers melted and the sea levels rose again, the Aborigines abandoned boating and stayed where they were.
In Tasmania, the people became further isolated still when the land bridge to the mainland vanished under the rising water. It’s a vivid image: Picture a populated fertile promontory with a thriving trade across a slowly eroding isthmus. One day, it’s a short swim to the local hunting ground, then a few years down the track it’s crossable by canoe . . . until, finally, the mainland recedes from sight, memories fade, and the Tasmanians are on their own for the next 12,000 years.
Figure 2-1: Aboriginal Australia pre-European settlement.
Exactly how long it took for Aboriginals to spread out over the continent is disputed (as is just about everything in this very remote period). Anywhere from a few thousand to over 10,000 years has been suggested. What isn’t disputed is that, despite the immense diversity of the continent (desert in the centre, tropical rainforest on the Cape, glaciers on the mountains of Tasmania), Aboriginals found ways to thrive in every ecological niche available.
Life in Aboriginal Australia
Find a carpenter’s tape measure. Pretend each centimetre equals ten years. Unreel the tape measure and look at the very first 22 centimetres — that’s the entire history of European settlement in Australia. Now (in a good long room and if your tape is long enough) unreel the tape measure to 40 metres — that’s a conservative estimate of the length of Aboriginal history (or 40,000 years).
The Europeans who first encountered the Australian Aboriginals observed that they had no agriculture, no domestic livestock and didn’t appear to wash. To the European way of thinking, this made them a primitive people, unchanged since the Stone Age. Those same Europeans might have asked themselves, when the wind killed their crops and their wells ran dry, how these ‘primitive’ people had managed to survive for so long in such a harsh landscape — without the aid of tinned food and sacks of British grain.
Evidence exists of trade and cultural exchange between Aboriginals and South-East Asians dating back thousands of years, so it can hardly be likely that Aboriginals were unaware of agriculture. They simply had no use for it in the dry, unfertile soils of their home. Agriculture was unsuited to the grasslands and deserts (some argue agriculture still is, despite all the modern fertilisers we can throw at it), so Aboriginal communities survived by hunting and gathering, managing resources extremely prudently — and maintaining their population at a sustainable level.
The Aboriginals were careful not to damage the fragile web of ecological relationships that sustains life on this dry island, because they depended on the web for survival. (And, incidentally, they didn’t wash much because they were well aware that water was too valuable to waste — something all Australians have been learning recently.) When the Europeans landed, Aborigines actually had a better life expectancy than the colonists, as well as almost no instances of the ‘modern’ diseases — tooth decay, heart disease, tuberculosis and cancer. The effectiveness of their resource management (such as controlled burns to increase hunting pasture) gave them far more leisure time than the arriving agriculturalists, which equalled time to play, talk and dream. That’s right — the original affluent society.
This isn’t to make the mistake of romanticising the tougher elements of Aboriginal life. Records suggest that even infanticide (killing newborn babies) was carried out in some cultural or tribal groups to ensure sustainable population levels, and deaths from tribal warfare and feuds were relatively commonplace. Life was no picnic. Aboriginals needed to make hard choices and ruthless decisions simply to survive, as well as develop infinite resourcefulness and adaptability. But no-one can deny that, survival-wise, the Aboriginal way of life was a tremendous success. Aboriginals have managed to maintain a continuous culture through millennia, which is something no other people — anywhere — has achieved.
History without books
Above all, the prehistoric Aboriginals were masters of language. Historians estimate that up to 750 distinct languages existed on the Australian continent when the European settlers arrived (refer to Figure 2-1), which implies that the average person would probably have had to be fluent in quite a few different languages just to get along with his or her neighbours.
In Aboriginal society, age meant authority — in large part because of the copious survival knowledge acquired with the years. A culture with no written records had to preserve and pass on all ideas, arguments, technology and traditions from one generation to the next through the spoken word. It’s therefore no surprise that Aboriginal society was heavy on song, gesture, story and elaborate ceremony. Learning responsibility and the rules that govern stable society went hand in hand with acquiring the skills of food gathering and resource management.
Trading with the neighbours
Pre-European Australia was a very social place — it took teamwork to survive in such a challenging land! Tribes had complex kinship and trading connections over vast distances, and even overseas. (Many are surprised to learn that the Aboriginals were not ‘pre-contact’ at all when the First Fleet arrived — they’d been trading, intermarrying and presumably speaking with the Macassans of Indonesia for decades, and quite possibly centuries). As in much of the world at the time, the barter economy was a part of life.
Key items for trading included:
Pituri — a mildly narcotic plant, which the Aboriginals exchanged for Indonesian tobacco.
Pearls and pearl shells — useful as ornamentation and for magic rituals; these shellfish were farmed by northern tribes.
Stone suitable for tools.
Ochre — used heavily in ritual and ceremony.
No books, maps or made roads existed in Aboriginal Australia, and so these overland trading routes — sometimes hundreds of kilometres long — had to be memorised. Being able to navigate your way across a desert continent without cars, trains or even pack animals is no mean feat.
Visitors From Overseas
Although the British explorers like Cook and Flinders often get the credit for ‘discovering’ Aboriginal Australia, they were by no means the first. The Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch and (much earlier) the Indonesians all beat Britain to the flag. The waters around Australia were, from the 1600s on, a hotbed of navigators, explorers, traders — and sailors who were just plain lost.
Maccassan fishermen
Macassar was a port on the island of Sulawesi, part of what is today Indonesia, and the centre of a thriving trade in sea cucumbers (also known as trepang, or beche-de-mer). These were considered a pretty wild delicacy in China as an aphrodisiac — think an early version of modern-day Viagra (or perhaps don’t) — and they were plentiful in the shallow seas along the coast of northern Australia between Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory and the Kimberleys in Western Australia.
Because there was plenty of profit to be had from feeding heavy Chinese demand, every year from at least the 1720s on (but probably earlier) Macassan fishermen would sail their boats with the monsoon winds down to Australia. Here they’d stay for about half a year, catching, gutting, boiling drying and smoking trepang before sailing back to Macassar with a full cargo.
The Macassans camped onshore each summer, and built big fireplaces for large iron pots and cauldrons to boil the trepang. Afterwards, the trepang would be buried in sand to help them dry (if you’ve ever been in Australia’s top end during the sultry monsoonal summer months, you’ll understand why they had to be buried to get properly dried!) and then smoked in bamboo sheds that they’d built for the purpose.
Throughout their visits to Australia, Macassans interacted constantly with the local Aboriginals, who began to paint distinctive Macassan images — of the boats or of steel knives — in their rock art. Relations weren’t always rosy — outbursts of violence and retaliation occurred periodically — but for the most part, the interactions were punctuated by exchange. Tobacco, pipes, the new technique of dugout canoe-making, new words, steel knives and axes were all things Indigenous Australian tribes acquired from the Macassans (as well as smallpox, unfortunately). In turn, Macassans were given access to the trepang resource, and were allowed to take some Aboriginal women as wives.
Portuguese and Spanish navigators
In the 1400s and 1500s, Portuguese and Spanish ships established a trading supremacy throughout the world, with colonies and ports established in Asia, India, China, Africa and both North and South America. It was only a matter of time before they started looking around in the part of the world where Australia was, too. Spanish and Portuguese navigators went looking — and almost discovered Australia.
The Spanish were already prominent around the rim of the Pacific Ocean — in the Philippines, Chile, Peru, Mexico and California — while the Portuguese were in and around the Indian Ocean with stations at East Timor, Aceh, Goa and east Africa.
A Portuguese fellow by the name of Pedro Fernandez de Quiros led an expedition to find the ‘unknown southern land’ in 1605, and in 1606 he thought he’d found it — but it turned out to be the Pacific island of Vanuatu. Heading back, disappointed, the fleet got separated in a storm and de Quiros’s second in command, a Spaniard, Fernando Torres, led the bulk of the fleet to the Philippines.
En route, Torres was the first to find a passage between Papua New Guinea and Australia (the strait is now called Torres Strait). Torres and his fleet saw the northern part of what is now Queensland (Cape York) but he didn’t realise it — assuming it was just another island, Torres sailed on.
Lost Dutch traders and wandering explorers
Most of the trade, loot and riches that came from the New World of North and South America in the 1400s and 1500s were divided up between Portugal and Spain. However, in the 1600s a new heavyweight started muscling itself in on the global scene. This was Holland, which had managed to fight a successful war of independence against the Spanish.
In the 1600s, the Dutch began running successful trade operations of their own, setting up new trading stations and pioneering new navigation courses. One of the new routes ran right past the western coast of Australia — sometimes too close. The history of Dutch encounters with Australia can be summed up with a loud ‘bump’ noise, followed by a surprised ‘What was that?!’ and ending with ‘Oh — Australia’ (or rather, ‘New Holland’).
The Dutch dominated much of the shipping trade in and around Europe, distributing the spices and goods that Portugal was bringing in to their ports. The Spanish, well and truly miffed at the Dutch not wanting to be governed by Spain anymore, decided to cut them out of this trade at the start of the 1600s. The Dutch retaliated by smuggling in some secret Portuguese maps of the world and setting off to establish a little trading supremacy of their own. At this they were spectacularly successful. They moved especially into the East Indies (modern-day Indonesia), setting up a trading company with an administrative centre in Batavia (modern-day Jakarta). The Dutch soon established a monopoly in the European trade of cloves, nutmegs, cinnamon and pepper, from which they made bucketloads of money.
Setting up an administrative centre in modern-day Jakarta created one problem for the Dutch: The time it took to sail from Europe to the East Indies was incredibly long. If you think 24 hours is a long time to put up with flying in a plane from Amsterdam to Jakarta, imagine multiplying it by 364. A round-trip in a 17th-century sailing ship took a year. Then, by accident, the Dutch discovered the roaring forties. This was a powerful circuit of winds that blew all the way round the world but further south than just about anyone had been. The Dutch found that after rounding the Cape of Africa they could continue south and then get a nice little ripping wind to blow them all the way along to Indonesia.
The only snag with this was that the Dutch had to know when to turn north again and sail up to the East Indies islands. Before a method of measuring longitude had been developed, knowing exactly how far along one had been blown was difficult. A lot of guesswork was involved. Mistakes were made. If the Dutch ships went too far they ended up running into the west coast of Australia before they made the port of Batavia. Sometimes, the Dutch ships ran aground and were even shipwrecked. Other times, they just ran alongside the Australian coastline, mapping it and looking out for signs of commodities for which to barter or that would make the place worthy of further investigation. Here, they drew a blank.
The comment of Dutch explorer Jan Carstensz sums up a whole series of disappointed Dutch traders and navigators with regards to what they thought of New Holland (modern-day Western Australia): It was ‘the most arid and barren region that could be found anywhere on the earth; the inhabitants too are the most wretched and poorest creatures that I have ever seen’. For traders wanting fancy things to take back to Europe, the ‘walking lightly on the earth’ style of Aboriginals appeared wretched and poor.
When he made his way up the east coast of Australia, British explorer James Cook had a different impression of Aboriginal life. He saw past the lack of tradeable material abundance in Aboriginal cultures and actually declared them the most contented — because most self-sufficient — of all peoples he’d encountered anywhere, including Europeans and Brits. But when Britain came calling in the late 18th century, Australia appealed to it for reasons other than trade (see Chapter 3).