The Story of Australia’s People Vol. I: The Rise and Fall of Ancient Australia

By Geoffrey Blainey

The vast continent of Australia was settled in two main streams, far apart in time and origin.
The first came ashore some 50,000 years ago when the islands of Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea were one. The second began to arrive from Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. Each had to come to terms with the land they found, and each had to make sense of the other.

The long Aboriginal occupation of Australia witnessed spectacular changes. The rising of the seas isolated the continent and preserved a nomadic way of life, while agriculture was revolutionising other parts of the world. Over millennia, the Aboriginal people mastered the land's climates, seasons and resources.

Traditional Aboriginal life came under threat the moment Europeans crossed the world to plant a new society in an unknown land. That land in turn rewarded, tricked, tantalised and often defeated the new arrivals. The meeting of the two cultures is one of the most difficult and complex meetings in recorded history.

In this book Professor Geoffrey Blainey returns first to the subject of his celebrated works on Australian history, Triumph of the Nomads (1975) and A Land Half Won (1980), retelling the story of our history up until 1850 in light of the latest research. He has changed his view about vital aspects of the Indigenous and early British history of this land, and looked at other aspects for the first time.

Compelling, groundbreaking and brilliantly readable, The Story of Australia's People: The Rise and Fall of Ancient Australia is the first instalment of an ambitious two-part work, and the culmination of the lifework of Australia's most prolific and wide-ranging historian.

'Absorbing and important ... the first volume of an ambitious work on the peopling of this continent from its human origins to our own day...bold, rich, wise, authioritative and questioning.' Peter Stanley, The Age

'The Story of Australia's People: The Rise and Fall of Ancient Australia situates pre-invasion Aboriginal society as a triumphant culture with much to celebrate.' John Maynard, The Age

'Blainey has produced a book that all Australians could and, dare I say it, should read . . . I very much look forward to the next instalment of his bold, rich, wise, wry, authoritative and questioning trilogy.' Canberra Times
'This is the real story of Australia, at last.' Courier Mail

'Blainey delivers a brilliant narrative on Australia's settlement.' Australian Geographic

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
• Release date: Feb 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9781760141035

Geoffrey Blainey

Geoffrey Blainey is one of Australia’s best-known authors. Since 1968, he has been successively Professor of Economic History and Ernest Scott Professor of History at the University of Melbourne. In 1982–3, he was Professor of Australian Studies at Harvard University.

Book preview

PREFACE

This is a history of the Australian peoples during an exceptionally long span of time. They came ashore in two main streams, far apart in time and point of origin. The first arrived some 50 000 years ago and settled what is the present continent and the present islands of New Guinea and Tasmania too. At that time these lands were one. Before the last great rising of the seas a person could walk from the buttongrass plains of Tasmania to the Owen Stanley mountains in New Guinea, and even further. The second stream of immigrants, a wider and faster and very recent inflow, began to arrive from Europe at the end of the eighteenth century.

My history of the first stream, called Triumph of the Nomads, was published in 1975. Five years later my history of the arrival of the second stream, called A Land Half Won, carried the narrative, by now primarily a British story, almost to the year 1900. Somehow my intention of writing a final volume faded away. Two years ago, I resumed the work and read carefully both books, sometimes with astonishment and dismay. In various chapters they had been left far behind by new research and changing intellectual interests and – dare I say it – changing fashions.

I set out to resuscitate and invigorate both books, revising large sections which were now less topical or no longer accurate, and deleting others to make space for the results of new investigations. I added again and again to the new narrative. This volume consists of fifteen heavily revised chapters from Triumph of the Nomads and nine chapters, revised in different ways, from A Land Half Won. This revised work differs in many ways from its parent volumes, which were based on the state of knowledge and intellectual atmosphere of the 1970s.

In the last forty years, knowledge of the changing climates of prehistoric Australia has grown: it will grow even more. It is now my view that the great rising of the seas, which began long after Aborigines arrived, is the most important event in the human history of Australia. Nothing like it has happened since 1788. The rising of the seas also exerted a long-term influence that still affects us. Australia, through its isolation by the advancing seas, remained one of the few inhabited lands that did not share in that revolution centred on the domesticating of plants and animals. Some modern critics imply that the Aborigines themselves should have invented their own kind of agriculture. This failure, if it was a failure, was not primarily their fault. Major inventions are rare in human history. Most countries in the course of their long history borrow far more ideas and techniques than they themselves originate.

The effects of this anomaly – a nomadic way of life surviving in a world that became sedentary – were often favourable for generations of Aborigines. In the end they were not favourable. Australian history since 1788 is unusual largely because two cultures, so far apart, had to confront and make sense of each another. It was not – and sometimes is still not – an easy marriage.

I remain deeply impressed with the ingenuity of traditional Aboriginal life. The ability of these people to survive the crises created by the great rising of the seas is also impressive; how they actually coped century after century with such crises can only be glimpsed. On some vital episodes of Aboriginal history I have changed my mind.* The experience of writing a history of the world affected some of my earlier views. New research by experts on Indigenous history has moulded some of my conclusions.

So much talent has poured into Aboriginal history, from researchers in the sciences and social sciences and humanities, that it is now the most innovative, exciting and controversial sector of Australian history. There is almost an annual avalanche of books and articles on facets of Australian history, both ancient and modern.

This book naturally reflects my interests and biases: it has more economic and social than political history, and embraces more military history than I had intended. The book is primarily for the general reader, keen to know. Some parts will interest specialists. I realise now that this present volume assigns, for better or worse, more emphasis to Aboriginal history than can be found in any general history of Australia so far published.

The book, like nearly all books of history, will be found sooner or later to have its share of faults, including factual errors and arguable conclusions. The blame for them will rightly rest with me. There would be many more faults but for the help I received. A list of acknowledgements and personal debts appears along with the main sources at the end of this book. More names will be found in the earlier editions.

I express my gratitude to John Day of Wangaratta, Victoria, who closely and critically read the manuscript when it was taking shape; to Marie Fels, who brought insights from her own research on the decline of Aboriginal population in the nineteenth century; to Jim Bowler, who kindly answered questions about his major discoveries at Lake Mungo; and to John Mulvaney, who had great influence on my earlier works on Aboriginal themes.

This volume carries the story of Australia to about 1850. A second volume, I hope, will complete the story up to the present decade.

Geoffrey Blainey

Melbourne, December 2014

* This new edition relies partly on recent research by archaeologists, anthropologists, prehistorians, zoologists, linguists and others who have studied Aboriginal history. My debt is set out in many of the following chapters and in the notes at the end of the book.

PART ONE The Sway of Sea and Fire

CHAPTER ONE

Fire by the lake

Long before the rise of Babylon and Athens, the early Australians had impressive achievements. They were the first people in the world’s history to sail across the seas and discover a liveable continent: in contrast, the other discoverers had probably walked in order to step foot on Europe, Asia and the Americas. These early Australians bred a procession of coastal and inland explorers; they produced their own Columbus, Major Mitchell and even Dr Livingstone. They found, during an incredibly long span of time, many edible plants, small quarries which they worked, new medicines and drugs and manufacturing techniques, and a miscellany of resources extending even to the ingredients of their cosmetics. They succeeded in adapting their ways of life to harsh as well as kind environments; and several large regions of Australia supported more people in ancient times than they have usually supported in recent times.

For several thousand years – perhaps longer – their material standard of living was relatively high. Indeed, if several of their most observant men and women had been escorted in the seventeenth century in a Dutch ship to Europe, and if they had travelled as guests all the way from Scotland to the Greek islands and had seen how average Europeans – not the rich – struggled to earn a living, they might have said to themselves that they had seen the third world and its poverty and hardships. By 1900, however, the typical residents in most of Europe were passing or outstripping the Aborigines in their material standard of living.

Aborigines also possessed vital knowledge which most British settlers, when they arrived, did not try to acquire. New settlers crossing dry plains died of thirst within a kilometre of hidden water which, with the aid of local knowledge, they could have tapped. Some died from exposure because they were unable to light a fire without the aid of a tinderbox or matches. Some died from starvation because they did not know that many kinds of plants were edible and because – without their firearms – they were unable to catch native animals. Some were ill, not knowing that they could be healed by the herbal skills of the Aborigines. Others concluded that a region was mean and hungry, not realising that in the course of four seasons it provided a wider variety of foodstuffs than a gourmet in Paris would eat in one year. The daily economic life of the Aborigines came, unjustifiably, to be pitied when it often deserved respect and even admiration. Other British settlers, however, respected the Aborigines’ skills and quickly learned from them.

We usually condemn nomads as careless or improvident, perhaps because in our society the nomads traditionally are poor – the swagmen, gypsies, hawkers, seasonal workers, surfies, dropouts and indeed, in recent times, uprooted Aborigines. But the traditional Aboriginal groups mostly moved because they believed they were in charge of their future. We view personal possessions partly as a sign of our material success, but to Aborigines they were a burden. Somebody had to carry them. That their groups moved to new sites was an indication of their knowledge and skill. In moving camp and winning a living from a variety of botanical environments they faced reality rather than evaded it. In moving around they were not creatures of whim but of purpose; their wanderings were systematic.

Our present picture of a semi-nomadic society is dominated by the idea that it was deficient in foresight; but in fact it was characterised by an awareness of the future and by a keen ability to exploit the different seasons of the year. These people were nomadic because season after season they could utilise the intimate relationship between weather, the maturing of plant-foods, and the breeding and migrating habits of birds and reptiles, insects and marsupials. They were also nomadic in the daytime, walking far while collecting the day’s food. To call them ‘nomads’ arouses protests today, and some of these protests are justified; but ‘nomad’ is the only effective word in the English dictionary. To label these groups as semi-nomadic or semi-sedentary is to obscure how distinctive they were. Those who wish to erase ‘nomad’ from the vocabulary are almost denying the merits of that way of life. An alternative is to call them ‘hunters and gatherers’, a time-honoured description. But hunters and gatherers by their very nature are nomadic, being often on the move.

The way of life of these early Australians also had defects. One prospective difficulty was that, over countless centuries, they became isolated from the outside world. Through forces outside their control, they had almost no contact with a new and dynamic way of living and working, fighting and governing. That new life was based on crops and herds, granaries and specialist craftspeople, with strong rulers and professional armies controlling large states and territories. This new form of civilisation did not reach Australia but increasingly dominated Europe, India, China and most of the world. Britain eventually became a leader of this materialist, expansionist and yet restless way of life: Australia was outside it. A confrontation between the two ways of life was inevitable. It happened in Sydney in 1788; but that is jumping far ahead of a long story.

2

The lake lies on the hot plain in south-eastern Australia. The wide bed is edged by blunt cliffs, and from the centre of the lake you see the sun rise over high dunes of sand. The dunes form the eastern rim of the lake and follow the shore for perhaps 25 kilometres. Seen in the sharpened shadows when the sun is low, or traced as an outline on the edge of the blue sky, the rim of sand and clay resembles a long defensive wall. It has been known for more than a century as the Walls of China.

From the wide rampart of the wall the view is desolate in most seasons of each year. Though 100 kilometres to the south-west is the junction of two of Australia’s longest rivers, the Murray and the Darling, no expanse of water is visible from the ramparts of the Walls of China. When the westerlies blow, the only spray from the lake below is grit and dust; except in times of flood the lake’s only ripples are made of sand.

In July 1968, on the sandy shore near the dunes, bones were uncovered by Jim Bowler, a geologist from the Australian National University. A specialist in studying how sand dunes were formed, he was engaged in that research when he found what he was not searching for: a human skeleton and skull. The bones were in fragments and encrusted in carbon; it was eventually realised that they were those of an Aboriginal woman. Her body had been cremated and the bones had been crushed and then buried in a shallow hole scooped from the sand. This proved to be the most significant discovery, so far, about the human history of Australia.

3

The death and burial of the woman at Lake Mungo took place so long ago that the climate was different. Summer days then were much cooler and winter nights were frostier; the annual rain too was probably more plentiful and the rivers were wider. Whatever the exact blend of climatic conditions, the result was often a full lake. Today Lake Mungo is one of a chain of dry lakes, each with its sandy Wall of China on the eastern shore, and each lake linked to the next only during those rare times when the Willandra Billabong Creek actually flows. Some 30 000 years ago that creek – in effect a large billabong of the Lachlan River – often flowed across the plains towards the Murrumbidgee and Murray rivers. Even in summer it could flow, when replenished by the melted ice from the high country far to the east. For long periods the lakes were full, and the overflow streamed south to replenish the next lake. The overflow was essential to the marine life and the shore life, for it flushed out the salt and so supported the freshwater fish and the trees and shrubs along the shores.

In the interior of Australia the deserts were wider than they are today. The rainfall was lower, and the cover of vegetation was fragmented, and so more sand was exposed. For several thousand years the strong winds created sand dunes; even in north-east Tasmania lay a considerable region of sand dunes. The summers were actually hotter than they are today. Lake Mungo and its sister lakes were oases on the edge of the desert, and even they were shrivelling.

About 20 000 years ago the vital flushing of the lakes diminished. As the centuries passed, and the lakes more often became very shallow or even dry, the freshwater mussels died. The beds of rushes on the banks wilted; waterbirds flew away to other swamps and rivers and did not return except when a rare flood arrived; and the sappy smell of lush grass was replaced by the acrid sniff of dust. About 15 000 years ago the lake was completely dry and rarely, if ever, visited.

In the wetter era – and it had lasted more than 20 000 years – the glow of the Aborigines’ small fires had been beaming across the water at night. That they often camped there and on the shores of nearby lakes is undeniable. Scraps and debris of their meals survive, thousands of years later. From the blackened remains of the food, archaeologists have been able to piece together some of the hunting and eating habits of these people.

In mud near the shallows the Aborigines collected freshwater shellfish, the shells of which have survived in fragments. In the late winter they raided nests of the giant emu and took the blue-green eggs. They captured the bettong, a small bounding animal about the size of a hare, and they hunted kangaroos, brown hare-wallabies, native cats called western quolls, hairy-nosed wombats and small birds. They also caught fish, and the fossil relics of their meals reveal that they caught golden perch weighing as much as 15 kilograms. The same fish, birds and animals formed a large part of the diet of Aborigines along the rivers of this region when the first white people arrived hundreds of generations later. Another animal was sometimes seen long ago when Lake Mungo was brimming: the Tasmanian tiger or thylacine.

On the surface of the ground, parallel to the dry beach, stone tools were also found and identified late in the 1960s. More tools were discovered in the circular charcoal-specked patches that had once been hearths; stone tools that could cut, scrape and pummel flesh and skin.

The young woman who had been burned and buried less than a stone’s throw from some of the hearths at the lakeside presumably belonged to a tribe inhabiting a large district. Normally she moved around the neighbouring countryside with a small group, according to the seasons. It would be fitting to describe precisely how, thousands of years ago, her life’s journey ended on the shores of the lake, but her journey had not ended. In 1969 her burnt and broken bones were uncovered, placed in a suitcase, and carried away to a research laboratory in Canberra.

She was given the name of Mungo One. As one-quarter of her bones and three of her teeth had survived she deserved a name; but the impersonal label of a laboratory exhibit was not appropriate for one who had lived her life in a tightly knit society. After an examination of her remains the anatomist A. G. Thorne was able to cull conclusions which were astonishing in their detail. She had been ‘fully-fleshed’ when cremated. The fire, however, held sufficient heat to singe only the bones of her back and neck. Before her half-cremated body was buried the skull and face had been deliberately hammered and crushed: from her cranium alone, 175 fragments were gathered in 1969. ‘In some instances,’ wrote Thorne, ‘the direction of the blow can be deduced.’ When, in the laboratory, the crushed bones were cleaned in a bath of weak acid, they emerged, in the anatomist’s words, as the remains of a young adult, ‘of gracile build and small stature’.

4

How long ago did she live her brief life? That was now one of the daunting questions in Australian history. In fact there had been no hope of answering it until the invention of radiocarbon dating in the United States, soon after the end of the Second World War. That scientific technique, though expensive to use, opened a new era in the history of Australia. While it did not provide a pinpoint level of accuracy, and admitted a considerable margin of error on each side of the specified date, it did provide for the very first time the prospect of a vital chronology. For there had long been a dateline, usually beginning in 1788, of the British history of Australia, and now at last arose the prospect of the first simple dateline of Aboriginal history.

Hitherto it had long been assumed that Aborigines were recent immigrants. It was sometimes assumed that they had arrived in Australia not long before the birth of Christ on the other side of the world. This idea had been shaken when John Mulvaney of the University of Melbourne announced that a riverside cave he excavated near Mannum in South Australia had been the home and hearth of Aborigines on countless nights since about 3000 BC. That revelation, the result of an expensive radiocarbon test made in 1959, was soon sidelined. Three years later in the Kenniff Cave in central Queensland, Mulvaney excavated evidence – fragments of carbon from former fireplaces – that Aborigines were living there even earlier. In effect he pushed back the antiquity of the Aborigines in this continent another 10 000 years. The news of the revised chronology, certified by radiocarbon testing in an English scientific laboratory, reached him through the Royal Flying Doctors’ radio while he was eating a breakfast of porridge and golden syrup at his camp near the cave.

The land at last had a human history that was long enough to arouse wonder. Australia could no longer be described by Europeans as a land with no history. It was six years later that Jim Bowler, with his discovery of the cremated and crushed bones at Lake Mungo, showed that the human history of Australia was even longer.

Bowler’s discovery was exciting, not so much when he found the charred bones as when they were assigned a date. The first radiocarbon tests on the bones indicated that the woman was alive some 24 000 years ago. Various carbon-encrusted shells, which seemed to be the remains of a fireplace at the same site, were far older. Such an early date provoked arguments; but in the following decade the weight of learned opinions was that the young woman had been alive maybe 30 000 years ago, with a margin of error of about 2000 years before or after. Following a period of academic research and intense debate the date of her death was extended back even further. It is now likely that she was alive about 40 000 years ago.

Bowler later discovered more bones in the windblown sand dunes. They lay only about fifteen minutes of walking from the spot where he discovered the cremated bones. The new find inspired more research and eager speculation. He was at first believed to be about fifty years old. The acute wear on his teeth – much grit was chewed when meals were cooked on a fire in the sand – helped to determine his age. His height was not easily calculated, but the current conclusion is that he was, at about 170 centimetres, far taller than the woman found nearby. No older human bones have been found in Australia in the period of nearly half a century that has elapsed since Bowler’s momentous discoveries.

The research at Lake Mungo provided evidence of an ancient culture. The man, at the time of the funeral rites, had been sprinkled or anointed with red ochre, a precious colouring carried from an ironstone quarry far away. Here was the earliest evidence in the world of an important funeral rite: the cremating of a body.

A saying slowly gained currency after the dramatic news from Lake Mungo became known across the nation. The Aborigines, it was proclaimed, possessed the oldest living culture in the world. The saying, while imprecise and open to confusion, conveyed a truth. Though most Aborigines now live in cities and towns and practise or believe in only parts of that ancient culture, they feel proud to belong to it. They feel an affinity with the ancient people who cooked the golden perch in hot embers on the shore and saw the sun go down millions – yes, millions – of times.

5

As the millennia passed, the climate deteriorated. Dust storms were fierce, and the lake became shallow and even dried out at times. Occasionally the desert encroached and then retreated a little. The world, from about 26 000 to 18 000 years ago, was in the concluding phase of the long glacial or Pleistocene epoch. The ice near the two poles became thicker. Arctic icebergs drifted far into the temperate zones, often floating as far south as the Azores. At the other end of the globe, icebergs often floated to the southern coasts of New Zealand and even could be seen occasionally near the Tasmanian coast, where they eventually melted. During this phase of increasing cold, the temperatures in the lowland valleys near the present Canberra were probably about the same as those recorded in our time on the highest mountain in Australia, Mount Kosciuszko. At the height of the latest ice age one-quarter of the land surface of the globe was covered with ice, but in our time the ice covers only one-tenth.

When the human race first entered Australia the sea was almost certainly colder and its level was certainly lower. The colder water and lower seas were causally connected. The seas shrank as the ice sheets became thicker in the far north and south of the globe. During part of the latest ice age the level of the sea was about 130 metres lower than it is today. Because of the rise or fall of the continental shelf or the effects of sedimentation, earthquakes or local tides, it is dangerous to offer a global generalisation about the average level of the seas, but the evidence is overwhelming that in every ocean the sea was lower. The Australian beaches where waves broke some 20 000 years ago are now far beneath the surface of the sea. All the beaches of today were then on dry land, far from the ancient shore. We do not know, however, whether the first people came ashore at a time of low or middling sea levels.

Most of the narrow sea lanes which have dominated naval strategy and carried commerce since the time of the Roman empire were dry. It was possible to walk from mainland Asia to Japan. A boat was not needed to cross from India to Sri Lanka. The narrow straits between the island of Sumatra and the Asian mainland were probably forest – they certainly were not sea. Indeed, Borneo was part of the Asian mainland. So too was North America; there was no Bering Sea, and the present Alaska and north-eastern Siberia were joined by land. It was probably too cold for human beings to live in that region, and the present evidence suggests that North America was uninhabited until a period of global warming about 12 000 or 15 000 years ago.

Twenty thousand years ago, animals could walk with dry feet from Trinidad to South America. They could walk across what is now the North Sea. It was possible to walk from Yorkshire to Denmark and Estonia, providing the rivers could be crossed and the marshes skirted. Today fishing vessels occasionally trawl from the bed of the North Sea the flint tools made by early humans. At the other end of Europe the Mediterranean was smaller, and was more a chain of big lakes rather than one vast sea, though it was still open to the Atlantic Ocean. The site of Venice on the Adriatic and the site of Odessa on the Black Sea were many days of walking from what is now the seashore. Our custom of indicating altitude by specifying that Canberra or London is so many metres above sea level subtly implies that the sea level is stable.

A map of Australia in that epoch would not be recognisable at first to our eyes. The continent was much larger. Even 20 000 years ago the women and men of Lake Mungo, by walking south, could have travelled all the way to Tasmania. If they set out to walk north they could have reached New Guinea, though hostile groups might have eventually blocked their route. The present Torres Strait and the Great Barrier Reef were dry land at that period. What are now the mouths or estuaries of the main rivers were then far from the ocean. If the hunters of Lake Mungo had heard of the ocean and if they decided to visit it they would have walked downstream until eventually they reached the Murray River and followed it far past its present mouth. At that time the big coastal indentations of our map were less prominent: the Gulf of Carpentaria did not exist – it was partly occupied by a lake.

The sites of Melbourne, Adelaide, and Darwin then were probably further from the sea than Canberra is today. Perth, Hobart and Brisbane were probably some days of walking from the nearest beach. If an opera house had been built on the jutting point of land in Sydney it would have looked down on a dry gorge; and anyone who walked along that gorge might have taken several days to reach the sea. Twenty thousand years ago the landmass of Australia and New Guinea occupied perhaps an additional one-seventh of territory which the rising sea was later to drown. But any estimate of how much present-day Australia was drowned floats on a raft of guesswork.

6

Aborigines witnessed the rising of the sea; they witnessed volcanoes erupt. On the wide basalt plains near the southern border of South Australia and Victoria the eruptions of at least a dozen volcanoes were doubtless witnessed by Aborigines, according to the geologist Bernard Joyce.

At least two volcanoes in relatively recent times emitted lava. Mount Napier and Mount Eccles both stand on the plains to the south of Hamilton, and when they erupted their lava glided like molten snakes across the plains. One flow of lava from Mount Eccles was only about 150 metres wide in places but extended for about 50 kilometres. Aborigines were probably living within sight of these volcanoes when the lava flowed, for the western plains were fertile, the game was plentiful, and a variety of edible roots and greens and grains could be harvested.

As the same kind of volcano exploded within a day’s drive of Mexico City, and was observed minutely, we have some idea of what might have happened in south-eastern Australia. At Parícutin, in Mexico, the tremors began in a cornfield on 5 February 1943. A fortnight later, a small fissure was observed in the cornfield – it made a hissing noise and began to emit smoke, sparks and dust. By the following morning a volcanic cone stood about 9 metres high, and by noon its height had trebled. The noise of the eruptions could be heard 300 kilometres away. It finally ceased in 1952, after nine years.

On the pleasant plains of western Victoria the explosion of Mount Eccles and Mount Napier must have been frightening for those Aborigines who fled to safety or saw the eruption from afar. At night the rim of the cone and the flank down which the lava flowed could have been a fierce red.

While these two volcanoes released ash as well as lava, three other volcanoes were essentially loud explosions of ash, leaving one or more craters which in time were filled with water. Mount Schank, erupting after countless generations of South Australian Aborigines had lived within a radius of 80 kilometres, emitted its clouds of hot ash and a trickle of lava perhaps 18 000 years ago. Not far away, Mount Gambier violently erupted less than 5000 years ago – and is the most recent volcano in the continent. Further to the east, the crater of Tower Hill was the result of an explosion occurring between 5000 and 6000 years ago. The rims of these craters can be seen, in the course of two hours of driving, along the coastal highway between Adelaide and Melbourne.

Such explosions were usually preceded by warnings. Aborigines had time to leave. On occasions, however, they might have had to abandon an old man or woman too feeble to walk rapidly. Kangaroos, wallabies and most birds would have taken flight, though slower creatures such as koalas and wombats would have been trapped. The sight of the explosion of hot ash was perhaps more frightening than the noise, the sound of which was probably not unlike the firing of artillery or the clap of thunder.

Meanwhile a rising rim of ash, like the edge of a saucer, was formed around the scene of the explosion, and from the crater came the acrid smell of gas and perhaps the taste of sulphur. As more and more ash was hurled upwards the wind carried it away from the crater and dispersed it on the trees and grasslands. Then, as now, the prevailing winds along that line of coast were westerly, and drove forward a shower of hot ash, burying the grass, stripping leaves from trees, and creating a wasteland of ash and dead or dying trees.

How eruptions affected the few Aborigines in the vicinity on that day or night can be easily supposed. A flow of lava could block creeks and waterholes, ruin patches where edible roots and vegetables grew, drive game from an area. A cloud of ash settling on land could make it barren, though in the long term the ash could blend with the rich soil and nourish the fresh grass and attract game. On plains which were more vulnerable to bushfires than almost any other terrain in the world, some of the volcanic eruptions in summer could have started massive bushfires that spread far. Three metres beneath the ash of Tower Hill a grooved axe of stone was found in modern times – strong evidence that Aborigines inhabited the area before the eruption.

We have long believed that during the time of the Aborigines’ domination their landscape did not change. At times it changed dramatically. The basalt plains of that part of Victoria, which was later named Australia Felix, were violently affected by volcanoes. For most of the people living close to the ocean – and for some who had never seen it – a more shattering change was the rising of the sea and the drowning of their hunting grounds. Nothing in the short history of British Australia can match those physical changes. The building of cities, the making of railways and roads and dams – none of these changes which dominate modern history can be compared to the ancient rising of the seas, the shaping of thousands of new harbours, the swamping of scores of tribal territories and the wiping out of the evidence of the human life once lived on those drowned lands.

CHAPTER TWO

The discoverers

The first human beings lived in Africa. Known as homo erectus, meaning that they stood upright, they came out of Africa almost two million years ago. In the space of the next 400 000 years they settled over much of Asia and even reached Java, which was then joined by land to the rest of Asia. Their toolkit was simple, and fire was their most valuable asset.

To reach even nearby islands was a difficult task, but some 840 000 years ago they made two short sea voyages which enabled them to reach the mountainous island of Flores, further east in the Indonesian archipelago. An unusual descendant was excavated there as recently as the year 2004. The person, full grown, was only 1 metre high, and the hands were extremely long. Two Australians, Michael Morwood and Peter Brown, were foremost among the researchers who found and assessed this strange human. The date when this species died out will long be the topic of learned arguments.

The modern humans known as homo sapiens were very much the latecomers. Emerging from Africa less than 100 000 years ago, they made their way to other continents. They accomplished some of their long-distance migrations to new lands in slow stages, spread over hundreds of generations. It is even proposed by some scholars that they reached Australia before they arrived in central Europe. The investigating of these latter-day migrations is in its infancy, for it was only in 1987 that an impressive family tree of the human race was created, with the help of DNA. In the forthcoming half-century much more will be known. It is one of the most challenging periods for historians of the human race.

2

The first Australians probably came across the stepping stones from South-East Asia during an epoch when the level of the ocean was lower. The sea-straits and the gaps and gulfs between islands were not as wide as they are today, but the voyages were still courageous. The slow migration of these peoples to distant Australia was one of the major events in the history of the world.

The south-eastern shores of Asia were then closer to Australia. At the time of the migrations Java and Sumatra probably were still part of the landmass of Asia, and their inhabitants could have walked to China on dry land. Even Bali was not yet an island. From Bali, however, the seabed fell away steeply to the east, and the waters of the Lombok Strait were extremely deep.

That deep strait between Asian Bali and the island of Lombok marked an old zoological boundary which was first described by Alfred Wallace, the English naturalist. Wallace’s Line loosely divided the flora and fauna of Asia and Australasia. Thus on the mountains of Bali, to the west, are the nests of woodpeckers and fruit thrushes, and on Lombok are the nests of cockatoos and honeysuckers; and many birds of the one island are rarely seen on the other. To the east, for millions of years, the sea has protected marsupials from the tigers and other strong predators which flourished in Asia. While Wallace pencilled that north–south boundary more sharply than the evidence merited, he correctly pointed to a long-lasting barrier against the migration of large animals in the direction of Australia. That barrier, with Bali and Borneo on the Asiatic side and Sulawesi and the Philippines on the outer side, was the first strip of sea which had to be crossed by those people whose descendants ultimately pioneered Australia.

The Shallow Seas: Australia and New Guinea were joined before the rising seas separated them in Aboriginal times.

One possible route to Australia was to cross the deep water to Lombok, follow the chain of islands to the east, and then perhaps cross from the mountainous island of Flores to Timor. The sea crossings on that line of advance to Timor were well within the capacity of fragile rafts or canoes. On each voyage the land on both sides would have clearly been in sight unless heavy rain, mist or darkness fell. But the very first voyage from Timor to Australia would have been hazardous, for the deep sea would still have formed a gap 80 kilometres in width. As the Australian coastline opposite Timor held no high mountains, it offered no signpost, no landmark, for the first voyagers to cross the intervening sea.

Another possible line of island-hopping lay on the other side of the equator. John Mulvaney, in his pioneering book of the late 1960s, The Prehistory of Australia, thought the ocean between Timor and Australia was too wide an obstacle. Instead he suggested the possibility of the first migrants reaching the continent somewhere near the western shore of New Guinea or near the mountains which are now the Aru Islands. He charted a possible route – predominantly overland – from South China and Taiwan through the Philippines and Borneo and the island of Sulawesi,