BOOK REVIEW
DARK EMU Bruce Pascoe
Web Publication by Mountain Man dot com Australia

"There is nothing new in the world
except the history you do not know" ...

~ Harry S Truman

---

"It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble,
it's what we know that ain't so ...

~ Will Rogers

Introduction to this review

The Wiki article (July 2018) on the History of Agriculture in Australia provides the summary statement:
From the time of British colonization of Australia in 1788, Indigenous Australians
were characterised as nomadic hunter-gatherers who did not engage in agriculture,
despite evidence to the contrary.

Dark Emu argues that this characterisation is false, and that the historical evidence demonstrates that the First People were an agricultural society building houses and villages:

“If we look at the evidence presented to us by the explorers
and explain to our children that Aboriginal people
did build houses,
did build dams,
did sow, irrigate and till the land,
did alter the course of rivers,
did sew their clothes, and
did construct a system of pan-continental government
that generated peace and prosperity,
then it is likely we will admire
and love our land all the more.”

(Bruce Pascoe)

This book should be read in all Australian schools, and by all Australians. It is about the historical truth of the pre-colonial Australian society that we, as individuals, communities, and a nation, do not yet know. The messages to be found within this book represent a paradigm change in the way we view Pre-Colonial Australian society.

It appears to me that the author Bruce Pascoe is the discoverer of this history we do not know, but he tells us that the First People have obviously known this for the last two hundred years. The First People themselves in the Uluru Statement state that, among other things:

"We seek ... truth-telling about our history."

Dark Emu is the truth-telling book for all Australians:

Here is how I would summarise it at the moment:

The First Australian People
built houses and villages and dams;
they sowed, irrigated, and tilled the land;
they ground seed, baked bread and stored produce;
they harvested fish, eels, birds and kangaroo with ingenuity.

Pre-Colonial Australian society was agricultural.
The propaganda of a hunter-gatherer society is false:
an expedient mistruth (a common lie)
that justified the British Imperial "land-grab".

I would suggest that Bill Gammage's "The biggest estate on earth: how Aborigines made Australia" should also be consulted in order to provide additional context. (See links below).

The Australian First People were grinding seed to make bread more than 30,000 years ago, which is on par with the earliest known European seed grinding society. So perhaps on Australia Day we can celebrate the fact that the land and country of Australia has given rise to the world's first farmers and bread-makers.

P.R.F. Brown
Editor
Mountain Man dot Com
Southern Winter of 2018

Sample of references

Page 15:

"As he [Thomas Mitchell] crosses the Australian frontier, he describes what he sees:

"The grass is pulled ... and piled in hayricks, so that the aspect of the desert was softened into the agreeable semblance of a hayfield ... we found the ricks or hay-cocks extending for miles." [3]

And later:
"The seed is made by the natives into a kind of paste or bread. Dry heaps of this grass, that has been pulled expressly for this purpose of gathering the seed, lay along our path for many miles. I counted nine miles along the river, in which we rode through this grass only, reaching to our saddle-girths, and the same grass seemed to grow back from the river, at least as far as the eye could reach through a very open forest." [4]

[3] Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia, Thomas Mitchell, 1848/1969, p.90

[4] Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Thomas Mitchell, 1839, Volume 1, pp 237-238

Dark Emu: Revising Australian Pre-Colonial History

We are at the beginning - not the end - of understanding pre-colonial history...

The following listing of the evidence is largely sourced from a review providing quoted material from the book. (See Mat's Review of Dark Emu Aug 11, 2014). The listing has been ordered by various categorisations of the evidence. At the conclusion of this section, for those who would rather listen to videos of some of the public presentations of Bruce Pascoe, a list of online resources has been gathered together.

Houses and villages:

* [Quoting explorer Charles Sturt:] [I]n walking along one came to a village consisting of nineteen huts... Troughs and stones for grinding seed were lying about... The fact of there being so large a well at this point... assured us that this distant part of the interior... was not without inhabitants.

* WORKSHOPS: [M]ost of the tool workshops associated with these constructions, as well as the constructions themselves, still do not appear on the archaeological register of Aboriginal Affairs Victoria.

* HOUSE & CAKE in Sturt's Desert: Sturt's new house, roast duck and cake!

* HOUSES for 40 PEOPLE: On seeing houses built to accommodate forty people in groups of fifty or more both explorers resort to words like huts or hovels to describe buildings which in rural Ireland would have been called croft houses.

* BIRDSVILLE: Several villages were located near Birdsville, south-west Queensland, where today the remoteness and inhospitable nature of the land is mythologised as the desolate Outback. Many Australians find it hard to imagine the area as a once productive and healthy environment for large numbers of Aboriginal people.

* EXPLORERS TAKE (shelter in) HOUSES: Mitchell is sensitive to the quality of the houses but insensitive to his occupation of someone else's residence. He occupied empty houses on many occasions and liberties of this kind were likely to have ruptured the relationship between white and black more severely than any action other than physical attack.

* TOWNS on the DARLING RIVER: On the Darling River, explorers saw similar towns to those seen by Sturt and Mitchell and estimated the population of each to be no less than a thousand. Peter Dargin estimated the population of the region as 3,000 but the journals of Sturt, Mitchell and others reveal that they passed many such populous villages.

* MALLACOOTA HOUSE: At Mallacoota in 1842 Joseph Lingard met two Aboriginal men and, 'made bold to go into their retreat, which I found to be like a house inside'.

* HOUSES WERE SOLID STRUCTURES: [Robinson] reported that the walls and rooves of the beehive, or kraal, type were so substantial that they were strong enough 'for a man on horseback to ride over'.

Agriculture: sowing, irrigatation and tilling of land:

* NINE MILES OF STOOPED GRAIN: Explorer Lieutenant Colonel Sir Thomas Livingstone Mitchell wrote that he "rode through nine miles of stooped grain" Mitchell's fellow explorers describe it as looking exactly like "an English field of harvest" where the grain had been stooped for ripening.

* MASSIVE YAM FIELDS (Vic): Mitchell describes seeing massive fields of murnong stretching as far as he could see. * MASSIVE YAM FIELDS (WA):Lt. Grey in Western Australia was halted by yam fields "that stretched to the horizons". The land was tilled so deeply that he could not walk across them.

* Hillsides of Melbourne terraced for yam daisy agriculture. (Isaac Batey, early farmer)

* HARVESTING IMPLEMENTS:Many northern Australian museums display long, knife-like implements, which usually bear legends such as 'of unknown use' when in fact they are juan knives - long sharp blades of stone with fur-covered handles, which the explorer Gregory described the Aboriginal people using to cut down the grain.

* CACHES: King, on the doomed Burke and Wills expedition, found a storage of grain in an Aboriginal house, which he estimated at four tons.

* MOUNDS: [T]he mounds proved to be gigantic ovens for the cooking of the compung rush.

* HUNDREDS OF MILLSTONES: ... Sturt's description of the evening whirring of hundreds of mills grinding grain into flour.

* YAM YIELDS: "After studying Aboriginal yields from yam daisies it is easy to imagine a potato farmer turning over part of his farm to yam, thus avoiding the need to use fertiliser and herbicides."

* YAM PRESERVATION: The only yam plants to be found today are on railway verges and other lands fenced off from livestock and where no superphosphate has been used.

* OZ DESERT SEEDS: Latz says that, 'the nutritional value of the seeds from the desert species is equal to or better than that of the cultivated grains'.

* MURNONG aka YAM DAISY: A 100g sample of Microseris lanceolata tubers would provide 3-4 times the energy level of a 100g potato.

* TWO MAJOR CROPS: yams (as well as other root vegetables) and grains.

* Norman Tindale... estimated the milling techniques to be around 18,000 years old, an age which, if it is true, re-writes the history of world agriculture.

* FIRE-STICK FARMING: Daryl Tonkin, long-term resident of the country near Drouin in West Gippsland, remembers the catastrophic fires of 1939, which he attributed to the increasing reluctance of the Europeans to burn and the habit of leaving the heads of felled trees unburnt. [Edward Curr:] '[T]he blackfellow was constantly setting fire to the grass and trees... he tilled his land and cultivated his pasture with fire'. [Tim Flannery:] As the term firestick farming suggests, the Aboriginal use of fire resembled agriculture in some ways: it yielded certain crops at certain times, suppressed weeds and was carefully contolled...

Dams, alter the course of rivers, fish-traps, eel husbandry:

* The detective work behind the Budj Bim eel traps World Heritage bid: Determining how the Budj Bim traps operated was made difficult after European alteration of Lake Condah’s water flows through installation of drainage channels in the 1880s and 1950s. Luckily, heavy winter rains in 1977 revealed how some Aboriginal-made channels fed water and eels into natural depressions that Coutts termed “holding ponds”. In addition, numerous C-shaped basalt block structures, averaging 3-4 metres across and representing house foundations – possibly clustered into villages – were recorded in the same area as the fish traps. /// Working at the same time as Coutts was Harry Lourandos, a PhD researcher from the University of Sydney. Lourandos examined Robinson’s journals in detail and investigated a huge Aboriginal fish trap at Toolondo, 110km north of Lake Condah.

* Lake Condah network of fish traps: Traditional owners pushing for a 6,000-year-old network of eel traps in south-west Victoria to be included on the world heritage list will find out next month if the Australian government has accepted their bid. The traps were built by the Gunditjmara people to manage eels in Lake Condah and nearby Darlot Creek and are among the earliest surviving examples of aquaculture. Known as Budj Bim, the site received national heritage listing in 2004

* Decription of a weir across a river with an extremely inventive fishing trap. (Kirby) * [I]f they were houses, and if the channels were a fishing system, then around 10,000 people lived a more or less sedentary life in this town.

* Brewarrina Fish Traps: The traditional custodians of the fish traps are the Ngemba Wayilwan (or Wailwan) people. Nearby Aboriginal groups include the Baranbinja, Morowari, Kula, Naualko, Ualarai, Weilwan, Kamilaroi, Kamu and Paarkinlji people. It has been estimated that the region supported a population of about 3,000 people prior to European settlement. The river people generally settled along the main rivers in summer and moved to regular campsites located in drier country during the winter months.

* WATERCRAFT & FISHING: The early history of Australia is crowded with references to Aboriginal watercraft and fishing techniques. Yet Australians remain strangely impervious to that knowledge and the Aboriginal economy in general.

* Some Lake Condah fishery sites were seriously damaged after John Howard, Australian Prime Minister at the time, panicked farmers into believing they'd all be ruined by Native Title claims.

Sewing their clothes:

* Possum Skin Cloak [Smithsonian Institute]: For generations, every aboriginal infant born in southeastern Australia was swaddled in a possum skin pelt covered in symbols explaining their family ties, their lands, and their place in the larger community. The cloak, worn every day and slept in every night, grew with the child; over the years, more possum pelts, loaded with descriptions of new stories and new relationships, were attached to that first panel. And when the person died, the cloak became a burial shroud, depicting a full life story. This vital tradition disappeared in the late 19th century, as British colonization of Australia led to the demise of aboriginal culture. Only five original cloaks have been preserved—including one stored in the Natural History Museum.

Construction of a system of pan-continental government:

* CULTURE more than 60,000 years old?: [T]he skills employed to bring about the longest lasting pan-continental stability the world has known must be investigated because they might become Australia's greatest export. Of all the systems humans have devised to manage their lives on earth Aboriginal government looks most like the democratic model.

* LANGUAGES: [Linguist Terry] Crowley admits that Australian languages are probably 40,000 to 60,000 years old, but even at 10,000 years they would be older than most other world languages.

Other considerations

* EARLY HISTORICAL REVISIONISM IGNORED: Rupert Gerritsen's important work was similarly bound and, for want of Australian interest, had to be published in London. Both his work and Dargin's are indicative of Australia's nonchalance to important considerations of Aboriginal culture.

* GLOBAL PATTERN: The reluctance to credit engineered fisheries to colonised peoples, and thus underrate their sovereignty of the land, is not peculiar to Australia.

* COLONIAL PROPAGANDA: The underestimation of Indigenous achievement was a deliberate tactic of British colonialism.

* DISPOSSESSION of COUNTRY: The belief that Aboriginal people were 'mere' hunter-gatherers has been used as a political tool to justify dispossession.

ABUNDANT EXAMPLES of CEMETERIES

* SEDENTARY SOCIETY: Burial within cemeteries is another of the indicators of sedentism recognised by archaeologists and abundant examples are provided in explorers' journals.

World's First Bakers?

Australian Museum: CUDDIE SPRINGS ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE, NEW SOUTH WALES Cuddie Springs is an important archaeological and paleontological site, located near Brewarrina in central north New South Wales. About 40 km south of the Barwon River and 15 km west of the Macquarie River it forms a shallow enclosed basin (3 km diameter), away from the natural drainage.

Google A large area archaeological excavation at Cuddie Springs:
Pleistocene seed-grinding implements from the Australian arid zone
RICHARD FULLAGAR & JUDITH FIELD

Seed-grinding technologies in prehistoric societies have been linked to the development of agriculture and complex societies (e.g. Smith 1995) and the increased incidence of seed-grinding implements to the earliest evidence of sedentism around 12,800 b.p. (although grinding slabs for processing tubers have been identified at Wadi Kubbaniya in Egypt as early as 19,000 b.p.: Hillman 1989; Wright 1994).

///

The presence of a range of morphological types known to be associated with seed processing at Cuddie Springs provides strong evidence for a seed-grinding economy around 30,000 b.p.

However there have been more recent developments, here is one:

Madjedbebe - How old is this [61,000 years?]

Australia's First Miners

Mining by Aborigines – Australia's first miners: NSW Dept Primary Industries.
Ochre was traded widely from the main ochre quarries. Aboriginal groups travelled from Cloncurry in Queensland to the Yarrakina ochre mine at Parachilna in the Flinders Ranges in South Australia to exchange shields for the special iridescent ochre mined there. Other groups from NSW exchanged light spear shafts for the prized ochre. Aborigines also came from Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, carrying 25 kg blocks of the Yarrakina ochre over distances of 1000 km on their return journey. Ochre from near Mount Rowland in Tasmania was mined by Aboriginal women using stone hammers and wooden chisels. The ochre was then packed into kangaroo-skin bags for transport. The Wilgie Mai mine east of Geraldton in Western Australia was a major operation with a mining face of between 30 and 15 metres wide and up to 20 metres deep. The red and yellow ochre from the mine was excavated by men using heavy stone mauls and fire-hardened wooden wedges up to half a metre long. Pole scaffolding was erected for working at different heights. Several thousand tonnes of rock were removed from this mine. Wilgie Mai is considered ‘a place of fabulous wealth’ by Aborigines in the west and ochre from the mine was used in a huge area of Western Australia and may have been carried as far as Queensland. The Rumbalara deposit 200 km south of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory has also been a large producer of ochre. During the Second World War, the ochre from Rumbalara was used for the manufacture of camouflage paint.

A Central Australian Ochre Mine: NICOLAS PETERSON' AND RONALD LAMPERT, ANU
ABSTRACT. An ochre mine still used by Warlpiri men in central Australia is described, and its relationship to trading networks, mythology and control over access is discussed. The paper also examines the methods of mining and processing the ochre, and describes some task-specific stone tools used in mining. Many similarities are apparent between this mine and two famous large ochre deposits, Parachilna and Wilga mia, neither of which is currently in use. It is of particular interest for three reasons: there are stone tools used specifically for quarrying the deposits; the entire mine is an underground chamber; and it provides ethnographic evidence on the complexities of the control of such valued resources.

Useful External Links:

ON-LINE Public Presentations by Bruce Pascoe

2018 July (Pub) - A real history of Aboriginal Australians, the first agriculturalists | TEDxSydney: Indigenous writer and anthologist Bruce Pascoe draws on first-hand accounts from colonial journals to dispel the myth that Aboriginal people were hunters and gatherers and "did nothing with the land that resembled agriculture". In this powerful talk, Pascoe demonstrates a radically different view of Australian history that we all need to know – one that has the potential to change the course of Australians' relationship with the land. [12m 33s]

2018 May - Traditional Aboriginal Land Management Practices: CFA (Country Fire Authority) [09m 09s]

2018 April - The world's first bakers.: AUSTRALASIAN PERMACULTURE CONVERGENCE [28m 45s]


2017 November, Aboriginal culture and history: Stephen Murray-Smith Memorial Lecture 2017, State Library of Victoria [41m 05s]

2017 Feb - Australian Aboriginal History: Australia Sustainable Living Festival in Melbourne [04m 54s]

2017 March - Australian Aboriginal History: Spot Fire 1 – Bruce Pascoe 'Aboriginal Agriculture' [1hr 01m]


2016 June - Aboriginal agriculture - maintaining a culture over millenia: Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, Reconciliation Seminar Series, [53m 31s]

2016 November - Farming the Land as if it was Australia: Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation (NSW) [42m 54m]

2016 November - Future Food Part 1.: South Australia [1hr 00m]

2016 April - "From the Mission to the Outpost: Social Engineering Through Art": Lin Onus Oration 2016 [27m 47s]

2016 April - Land Cultures: Aboriginal economies and permaculture futures: Daylesford, VIC [41m 11s]


2014 October, Aboriginal Agriculture: WAW Gathering [14m 14s]

2009 NAIDOC Week - Not Hunter Gatherers: Art Gallery of NSW, [15m 21s]




REVIEWS and Summaries of Dark Emu

REVIEW with Extensive EXTRACT: Decolonising agriculture: Bruce Pascoe’s ‘Dark Emu’:
Australia's colonial history has characterised indigenous people almost exclusively as nomadic hunters. This exclusive extract from Bruce Pascoe’s ‘Dark Emu’, reveals a long history of indigenous agriculture, a history that predates the pyramids, but which was omitted from the history books.

REVIEW with Summary of Evidence: Mat's Review at Goodreads (NOTE: The data presented in this review has been re-presented above in categories)
Here are some quotes that jumped out at me: [Quoting explorer Charles Sturt:] "[I]n walking along one came to a village consisting of nineteen huts... Troughs and stones for grinding seed were lying about... The fact of there being so large a well at this point... assured us that this distant part of the interior... was not without inhabitants.

SMH March 2003: For nearly 8000 years, the Gunditjmara people in the Lake Condah region of western Victoria farmed eels
They modified more than 100 square kilometres of the landscape, constructing artificial ponds across the grassy wetlands and digging channels to interconnect them. They exported their produce and became an important part of the local economy. And then white settlers arrived and all they left of the Gunditjmara's thriving industry were several hundred piles of stones that had formed the foundations to the people's huts. Since the 1970s, archaeologists have suspected that the stone remains in the Lake Condah region were evidence that the local Aborigines had lived in villages. But it was not until an eight-year research project was carried out by a Flinders University archaeologist, Heather Builth, that the real importance of the remains became clear.




Other Sources

The Strehlow collection of sacred objects:
A large collection of sacred objects were amassed over decades by anthropologist Ted Strehlow. This is an extremely interesting article, authored by Dr John Morton.

First Nation Habitats and Villages before and after slaughter & displacement
Recent researchers, including Bruce Pascoe, have described how many First Nations nations/tribes lived in villages or towns, while many others lived in villages for most of the seasons. Once the peoples were displaced from 'country' by European colonists, many were forced into exclusively hunting and gathering, therefore building shelter that served the purpose of this transient lifestyle.

Bill Gammage: The biggest estate on earth ABC News:
Before white settlement, some of the local landscape looked like parkland. Author Bill Gammage explains the complex systems of land management used by Indigenous Australians. [06m 59s] 2017 Feb

Bill Gammage: The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines made Australia
This book argues that Aborigines made Australia in 1788, by using fire or no fire to distribute plants, and plant distribution to locate animals. People made a plant community such as grass or open forest a favourable habitat, associated such communities to link feed to shelter, and used these associations to lure and locate animals. This put every species on ground it preferred, while people knew where their resources were, and subject to Law could harvest them as they chose. They could make paddocks without fences, because in Australia, almost uniquely, the only large predators to disturb prey were human. People were not aimless hunter-gatherers; they planned and worked hard to make plants and animals abundant, convenient and predictable. They depended not on chance, but on policy. (17 October 2013)

WIKI: Wurdi Youang stone arrangement:
The stone arrangement takes the form of an irregular egg-shape or ovoid about 50 m (164 ft) in diameter with its major axis aligning east-west.[3] It is composed of about 100 basalt stones, ranging from small rocks about 200 mm (8 in) in diameter to standing stones about 1 m (3 ft) high with an estimated total mass of about 23 t (23 long tons).[4] There are three prominent waist-high stones, at its western end, which is the highest point of the ring. The purpose, use, and age of the arrangement are not known. It has been suggested by scientists studying the arrangements that it could be as old as 11,000 years (based on carbon dating at nearby sites[9]), which would make it the oldest astronomical observatory in the world.

Uluru Statement: "We seek ... truth-telling about our history."

Arnaldo Momigliano was one of the foremost ancient historians of the 20th century. Above he provides a number of general rules by which we may assess the merit of Bruce Pacoe being recognised as a first rate historian. It seems to me that Pascoe has actually set forth the historical truth by focussing on the historical evidence. Although this historical truth is new to most of us, because we have been educated erroneously in the matter, it is not new to the First People of Australia. In the Uluru Statement they see this newly discovered historical truth as part of a necessary "truth-telling" process.

The Australian First People are also the children of farmers, who were dispossessed of their farm lands and "country" by the Colonial invasion and settlements.

Here are some additional resources ...

Henry Reynolds

Australian Frontier Wars: Keith Windschuttle and Henry Reynolds on Lateline

Australian Frontier Wars: Keith Windschuttle and Henry Reynolds at the National Press Club

The Australia Day Controversy: Henry Reynolds - "Political Correctness or Common Sense"?

McGuinness, Windschuttle and Quadrant: The attempt to revise the history of the massacre of Aborigines on the British colonial frontier in Australia, by Bob Gould

Australian Prehistory: Draft Timeline

75,000 - Toba supereruption: global volcanic winter 6-10 years, possibly a 1,000-year cooling episode.

65,000 to 50,000 - [African origin of modern humans] The most significant "recent" wave took place about 70,000 years ago, via the so-called "Southern Route", spreading rapidly along the coast of Asia and reaching Australia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_African_origin_of_modern_humans#South-Asia_and_Australia

65,000 - (or earlier) First Australian People arrive (from North?) When the north-west of Australia, which is closest to Asia, was first occupied, the region consisted of open tropical forests and woodlands. After around 10,000 years of stable climatic conditions, by which time the Aboriginal people had settled the entire continent, temperatures began cooling and winds became stronger, leading to the beginning of an ice age

60,000 - Ice Age beginning

40,000 - 50,000 Mungo Man: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Mungo_remains

40,000 - First Australian People arrive in Tasmania

30,000 - Oldest seed grinding stone, Cuddie Springs (Italy, Europe similar date)

26,500 to 15,000 - Last Glacial Maximum: drought, desertification, sea levels 150m lower than today.

26,000 to 15,000 - Australian Megafauna extinction

18,000 - ice age ends.

******

13,000 - 'Conflict' increasing territorial conflict possibly due to sea level rise and new competition for land and resources. (1)

12,500 - Neolithic Revolution: wide-scale transition of many human cultures from a lifestyle of hunting and gathering to one of agriculture and settlement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution

12,000 - Sea-level rise covered Tas land bridge, inhabitants isolated until European settlers

11,700 - End of the Pleistocene Epoch (began about 2.6 million years ago) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene Start of the Holocene Epoch

******

10,000 - Present day Australian climate established.

10,000 - Earliest shell middens (SW SA and SW Vic) [4]

9,000 - Dampier Archipeligo; stone houses, shell middens and a grinding stone

8,000 - Artwork Ubirr Kakadu of thylacine and zaglossus (long beaked echidna)

6,000 - Sea levels stabilised to near its present levels

5,000 - Arrival of the dingo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingo

4,000 to 3,000 - Intensification (Great Intensification Debate in Australian Archaeology)

4,000 - new art style of 'x-ray- (1)

3,500 - (Europe/Asia) The Wheeled vehicle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel
3,300 - (Europe/Asia) Bronze Age; smelting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Age

3,000 - 'Increased Territoriality' - population increase, sea levels peak, unpredictable climate (1)

2,000 - 'Consolidated Settlement '- Villages emerge across south-eastern Australia ... Aquaculture develops and there is evidence of gardening. Complex social and religous systems [last section 'The Great Flood'] (1)

1,000 - 'Trade and Exchange' - Extensive trade routes develop across the country ... resources and tools. (1)

300 - 'New Arrivals' (2) - Indonesian fishermen (Maccasins ? ) ... then Portuguese, Dutch, etc (1)

SOURCES:

(1) Scott Cane (2013): First Footprints
(2) https://australianmuseum.net.au/indigenous-australia-timeline-pre-contact
(3) WIKI
[4] Shell Midden Chronology in Southwestern Victoria: Reflections of Change in Prehistoric Population and Subsistence?
Author(s): Michael C. S. Godfrey
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40386820

Australian Prehistory: Bibliography [DRAFT]

Geoffrey Blainey (1976): Triumph of the Nomads: History of Ancient Australia

Henry Reynolds (1981): The Other Side of the Frontier : Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion

Tony Swain (1993). A place for strangers: towards a history of Australian Aboriginal being

Harry Lourandos (1997): Continent of Hunter-Gatherers: New Perspectives in Australian Prehistory

Jennifer Isaacs (2006): Australian Dreaming: 40,000 Years of Aboriginal History

Rupert Gerritsen (2008): Australia and the Origins of Agriculture

Bill Gammage (2011): The biggest estate on earth : how Aborigines made Australia,

Henry Reynolds (2013): Forgotten War

Scott Cane (2013): First Footprints - The epic story of the First Australians

Bruce Pascoe (2014): Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture Or Accident?

Index | Terrestrial Nativity: | Dreamtime Resources