u7 australian aboriginal 16pages 2012

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CIVILIZATION

AUSTRALIANABORIGINAL

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By Craig Benjamin

CIVILIZATION ON ASECLUDED CONTINENT

AUSTRALIANABORIGINAL



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Even as vast agrarian

civilizations began to appearin Afro-Eurasia and theAmericas, other parts ofthe world pursued moretraditional lifeways. In

Australia, Aboriginal peoplecontinued the foraging lifeof their ancestors untilEuropean colonists arrivedlate in the 18th century.



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The foraging life

For the first 240,000 years of our existence, all humans pursued nomadic

foraging for their survival. Around 11,000 years ago, some communities

began to adopt agriculture and live in one place. This “agricultural revolu-

tion” sent human history spiraling along different paths. In those regions

where agriculture appeared, population densities increased. Early agrarian-

era villages evolved into towns and cities, and by 3000 BCE complex

states started to emerge in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Over the centuries that

followed, the increasingly powerful leaders of these early states learned

to control larger regions and more and more resources, until huge agrarian

civilizations covered large regions of the Afro-Eurasian world zone and,

later, the Americas.

In many other places on Earth, however, humans continued to follow the

foraging, nomadic lifeways of our ancestors, neither adopting agriculture

nor building states and civilizations.

In regions dominated by agrarian civilizations, historical change began to

occur at a faster and more intense pace than in those parts of the world that

never adopted farming. In Australia, Aboriginal people continued to pursue

their perfectly adapted foraging lifeways until European colonists turned up

on the continent just 250 years ago.

Lifeways in the

Australasian world zoneThe Australasian world zone consists of the mountainous and heavily vege-

tated island of New Guinea, the vast continent of Australia, and the large island

of Tasmania, all located along the southwestern edge of the Pacific Basin. In

the jungles of New Guinea, first occupied 60,000 years ago, humans began to

occupy 60,000 years ago, humans pursued foraging lifeways until small-scale

farming started to appear around 5000 BCE. Hundreds of villages were built

in the forests close to the farms, but none of these evolved into towns or



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states, and power in these communities remained consensual rather than

coercive. Yet the agricultural practices pursued there were sophisticated:

New Guinea farmers appear to have understood the principles of crop rota-

tion, mulching, and tilling the soil long before Eurasian farmers did.

In Australia, the ancestors of the Aboriginal people arrived by sea from

South East Asia somewhere between 60,000 and 50,000 years ago. Even

at the height of the last ice age, when sea levels were lower, this migrationto Australia required the crossing of several wide ocean straits. So the first

Aboriginal people advanced boat-building and navigational skills that made

them among the most technologically sophisticated people on Earth at that

time. During the “Era of Agrarian Civilizations” (roughly 2000 BCE to 1000 CE),

the Aboriginal population probably numbered somewhere between 300,000

and 750,000, with the densest concentrations living in the southeast of the

continent. They spoke up to 750 different dialects but similarities suggest

that all of these languages had a common origin. Such a variety of dialects

might suggest a wide range of lifeways, but virtually all indigenous Austra-

lian communities engaged in very similar cultural practices.

Whether in the harsh interior of Australia, in the great tracts of eastern

bushland, or along the coasts, the overwhelming majority of Aboriginals

remained seminomadic foragers from the time they first migrated to the

continent until the arrival of Europeans at the end of the 18th century. Each

group had its own traditional territories, which were defined by geographic

markers like rivers, mountains, and lakes, and the well-being of these lands

was fundamental to the success of the people. Aboriginal foragers fished

with fishbone-tipped spears, hunted kangaroos with wooden weapons

like the boomerang or woomera (a spear-thrower), and used wooden and

stone digging sticks to access nutritious roots and insects living just below

ground. At sacred sites across the landscape, elders passed on oral creation

stories from the Dreamtime (or the Dreaming), when humans, animals,

and spirits all emerged and populated the land. Indigenous Australians cared

for their environments in the manner of foraging peoples everywhere,

although paleo-Aboriginals were unwittingly responsible for the extinction

of many large animal species in Australia, and their practice of “firestick

farming” (using fire to control vegetation and encourage habitats for certain

game animals) contributed to the eventual desertification of the continent.



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Music and dance were critical to the spiritual practices of Aboriginals. Both

men and women gathered together regularly to perform ritualized dance-

like ceremonies, accompanied by vocalists, percussionists, and musicians,

at large ceremonial gatherings called “corroborees.” Corroborees had to

be held where resources were plentiful, such as in the foothills of the Aus-

tralian Alps when the large Bogong moth swarmed between September and

November. By feasting on the moths, the people of the region were able to

hold big gatherings at which they exchanged ideas and information, formedmarriages, engaged with seldom seen acquaintances, conducted rituals,

and played games. Gifts were also exchanged, because gift giving was an

important way of cementing social relations within these larger networks,

using the principle of reciprocity to maintain strong ties. These corroborees

helped ensure survival and ongoing communal relationships through

exchanges of materials and ideas.

One exception to this nomadic lifeway was the Gunditjmara people of the

Murray-Darling Basin in the southeast of the continent, who appear to have

supported a sedentary culture through eel farming. The Gunditjmara are

an excellent example of an affluent foraging lifeway — a community thatlives in such a resource-rich region that it is able to abandon nomadism and

become sedentary while still pursuing foraging. Archaeologists have found

evidence of the remains of hundreds of permanent huts, 75 square kilome-

ters (45 square miles) of artificial channels and ponds for farming eels,

and trees used for smoking the meat to facilitate its transportation to other

parts of southeastern Australia. The Gunditjmara lived in large, permanent

villages and had powerful chiefs. In other words, even though they were

not agriculturists, they adopted many of the social and political features of

agrarian society. These discoveries have seriously challenged some of the

more traditional understanding of Aboriginal lifeways.

Despite this example of affluent foraging, and the relative proximity of

northern Australia to farmers in New Guinea and nearby islands, Australian

Aboriginals never made the transition to agriculture. A range of geographic,

climatic, and social theories, none of them wholly convincing, have been

promoted to try and explain the fact that when European explorers arrived in

Australia, the continent was populated entirely by foragers. The most likely

explanation is that Aboriginal Australians lived in a land of relative plenty,

and that with such an abundance of resources there was simply no attrac-

tion in abandoning a successful nomadic lifeway for a more demanding and

stressful lifeway based, for example, on the cultivation of yams and taro.

To this day some traditional aboriginal groups enjoy foraging and prefer the

taste of “bush tucker” (foraged foods) to commercial, processed foods.

So, although resource abundance and well-adapted technologies definitely

led to some local examples of affluent foraging, this alone was insufficient

to tip these communities over into full-scale farming.

Australian Aboriginal cave art

Australian Aboriginal rock art dates back to at least 40,000 BCE, and perhaps

earlier. Recent research suggests that there was no gradual evolution of

technique, but rather that artistic ability appeared suddenly and explosively.

Although specialists have been able to sequence chronologically the thou-

sands of known examples, aboriginal rock art sites tend to be dynamic and

represent images accumulated over thousands of years. In western ArnhemLand, local environmental and climatic changes are clearly represented in



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the art. A dry era is represented by depictions of extinct ancient crocodiles;

the subsequent wetter Estuarine-era art shows rising river levels, barra-

mundi, saltwater crocodiles, and the extraordinary Rainbow Serpent; and

the later Freshwater period features images of geese and goose feathers.

Sometime in the last 3,000 years, Aboriginal artists began painting X-ray

images of freshwater fauna, revealing the internal anatomy of various

birds and reptiles.

The Aboriginal people of western Arnhem have their own more spiritual

sequence for the rock art. They attribute the oldest images to the Mimi people,

who they believe inhabited the land during the Dreaming, before the Rain-

bow Serpent created the people. The Mimi taught the Aboriginals how to

survive in the region, and then became spirit beings. Aboriginals themselves

created the more recent art. The Wandjina paintings of the Kimberley depict

the powerful creator spirits, who control the elemental forces of nature

such as the wind, storms, and floods. These gods are shown in human form,

but with large bodies outlined in red, having huge dark eyes and no mouths,

and wearing halos of clouds and lightning.

Paleolithic lifeways in theEra of Agrarian Civilizations

Tasmania, a large island off the south coast of eastern Australia, was once

connected geologically to the mainland. The experience of Aboriginal

Tasmanians provides valuable insight into the reason foraging lifeways per-

sisted for so long in Australia. Once sea levels rose and isolated Tasmanian

populations, smaller, simpler social structures quickly appeared there.

Archaeology shows us that some technologies that existed earlier in the

island’s history, such as the use of needles and other bone tools, and

fishing, seem to have vanished in the thousand years or so before the arrival

of Europeans. One reason might be that innovating — and even preserving

— complex technologies is much harder to do within small, isolated popula-

tions simply because collective learning is much more limited. But we

should not necessarily think of these changes as signs of technological

decline, for they might also have represented clever adaptations to climatic

changes and to trying to survive in social isolation. Abandoning fishing

and focusing instead on acquiring foodstuffs richer in fats, including seals

and seabirds, might have been a smart ecological choice.

The same is true of all the Aboriginal communities isolated from the rest

of the world on the vast Australian island-continent. It would be a mistakesimply to think of Aboriginals as somehow stuck in a Paleolithic time warp.

Archaeological research in Australia reveals a long history of innovative

adaptations to changes, including climate change. The rock art we discussed

above clearly shows us that lifeways changed profoundly in response to

changing climate conditions. The experience of the Gunditjmara suggests

that the transition to sedentism was occurring in Southeast Australia in

ways similar to that which preceded the emergence of agriculture in other

parts of the world like the Fertile Crescent. There is also evidence that

the Aboriginal population might have doubled or even tripled during the last

2,000 years before the arrival of Europeans. New types of tools appeared

during this period, notably fishhooks made of shells in regions where fishingbecame more intensive. There is also growing evidence of increasing inter-

connections over large areas: Materials from southern Queensland, and

stone axes from the Mount Isa range, turn up in sites in southern Australia.

Ochre mines in western Australia produced so much ochre that interregion-

al trade, rather than local demand, must have driven production.

When we consider the lifeways of Australian Aboriginals during the Era

of Agrarian Civilizations, we are not so much observing humans trapped in

Paleolithic times as communities practicing sophisticated adaptations to

a range of environments and changing climates. We don’t know how this

culture would have evolved had Europeans not arrived suddenly to interrupt

the flow of collective learning and historical change.



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Sources

Bellwood, Peter, and Peter Hiscock. The Human Past: World Prehistory and

the Development of Human Societies. London: Thames and Hudson, 2005.

Callaway, Ewen. 2011. “First Aboriginal Genome Sequenced.” Nature,

September 22. http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110922/full/

news.2011.551.html.doi:10.1038/news.2011.551

Edwards, W.H. An Introduction to Aboriginal Societies. 2nd ed. Sydney:

Social Science Press. 2004.

The Encyclopedia of Aboriginal Australia: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander

History, Society, and Culture. Edited by David Horton. Canberra: Aboriginal

Studies Press, 1994.

University of Copenhagen. 2011. “Aboriginal Australians: The First

Explorers.” Science Daily . September 22. http://www.sciencedaily.com/

releases/2011/09/110922141858.htm

Image credits

Australian Aboriginal sculpture,

National Museum of Australia

A 1930 photograph of an Australian Aborigine

© E.O. Hoppé/CORBIS

Aboriginal rock painting of Dreamtime figures

© Charles & Josette Lenars/CORBIS

Aboriginal rock painting of barramundi fish

© Charles & Josette Lenars/CORBIS

u7 australian aboriginal 16pages 2012

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