was for long the source of nearly all of its institutions and ideas; and the
extreme variability of Australia’s long-term climate—a powerful fact which is
perhaps glimpsed more than realized by many historians.
Some of these exceptional changes and episodes have evoked praise, others
have been deplored, but together they shaped not only a vanished Australia
but also the one we know today.
2.1 Worlds Apart: Nomads and the Industrial Revolution
Australia has experienced a human history that is much longer than any other
New World nation or society. Nearly all of Australia’s long history has centred
on the hunters and gatherers, who arrived from South-East Asia as thefirst
settlers when Australia and New Guinea formed one continent. For some
50,000 years they continued to practise a semi-nomadic way of life. In the
face of several setbacks of a magnitude not experienced in the modern history
of this land, Aborigines survived, succeeded, and sometimes triumphed.
The rising of the seas—commencing fewer than 20,000 years ago—largely
isolated the Aborigines. The present continent of Australia, in full view of
generations of its inhabitants, was slowly cut off from New Guinea, and
severed from Tasmania. The rising seas created or shaped many of the land-
marks of the east coast of the continent, including the Torres Strait and its
islands, the Great Barrier Reef, Sydney Harbour, and Port Phillip Bay. The
higher sea levels also created Kangaroo Island, the Swan River estuary, the
Kimberley archipelago, the Gulf of Carpentaria, and the Derwent estuary
(Blainey 2015, ch. 6). These tumultuous changes were part of an astonishing
period of global warming that spread the eucalyptus over a huge area of
Australia (Pyne 1991, ch. 1), shaped the fern gullies of Gippsland and the
wide expanse of Mallee scrub, landscaped the Kakadu swamps, and altered the
main deserts of the interior for better or worse.
By isolating Australia from the outside world, the rising seas largely deprived
the Aborigines of the benefits—and the drawbacks—of thefirst major eco-
nomic revolution in human history: the slow birth of agriculture and pastor-
alism in the Middle East and other parts of the northern hemisphere. In most
of the world—but not in Australia—the farmers and the keepers offlocks and
herds eventually supplanted the hunters and gatherers (Burroughs 2005,
pp. 188–92). The food supply of the world was augmented, and its population
multiplied. In Australia, in contrast, economic change, though present, was
slower and less decisive.
The domestication of plants and animals was even more a political than an
economic revolution. There can be no farms, no agriculture, without a discip-
lined workforce, and a strong army that protects the whole territory from
Geoffrey Blainey