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1300 BC: Lapita settlers establish a colony on Great Palm Island. They come into conflict with the Aboriginal inhabitants of the island, but the Lapita bow and arrow sees the Aborigines driven from the island. They eventually establish more peaceful contact with the Aborigines on the mainland.
As the colony grows and the Lapitans start to fight among themselves, they recruit mainland warriors through marriage. As a matrilocal society, husbands move in with wives and so the Lapita are able to bring in young Aborigine men to their home. These men do keep some contact with their mainland kin, which allows for cultural exchange between the Lapita settlers and the mainland Aborigines.
1000 BC: Farming becomes established on the mainland in response to the introduction of pigs from Great Palm Island. The ecological disruption of this invasive species which eats bush tucker and scares game forces the Aborigines to adapt, either using the Lapitan bow and arrow to hunt or adopting the Lapita farming lifestyle to get secure access to food.
A Lapitan colony is established on Magnetic Island by Great Palm Islanders fleeing conflict by voyaging which would continue to spread knowledge of agriculture to the Aborigines.
750 BC: With growing populations, farming societies on the mainland begin to incorporate hunter-gatherer societies, both peacefully and through force. This sees the wild bush tucker of Queensland becoming domesticated, and an indigenous knowledge base develops to supplement Lapitan-style farming. In addition to native fruits, acacia seeds become the Queensland dietary equivalent to soybeans or chickpeas, and native spices are used to add a local accent to the taro and yam staples introduced by the Lapita.
500 BC: The farming societies that now dominate coastal Queensland begin building projects, creating fortified towns, monuments, and irrigation canals, calling upon the labor power of booming populations. The ease of gaining food means that social stratification is limited even as these societies become more complex. Positions equivalent to ‘king’ or ‘chief’ in the Old World do develop, but they are limited in power through Aboriginal familial taboos, and there is little class stratification. The chiefs do find ways to set themselves apart from commoners, often decorating themselves with paint and jewelry to mark their status. The Magnetic and Great Palm Islanders help in this, plying the Coral Sea in their great catamarans to gather shells and pearls to trade to mainland chiefs.
0 AD: The Outrigger Culture develops along the Gulf of Carpentaria. This culture consisted of Aborigines who adopt Lapita-style fishhooks, harpoons, and of course outrigger canoes to fish and hunt sea mammals from the farming peoples on the east coast of Cape York. The Lapita’s navigational technology is lost in the exchange and the Outrigger Culture does not adopt the sails or catamarans of the Great Palm and Magnetic islanders. As such they tend to keep sight of land when they set out to sea, and aside from some island hopping to New Guinea where they trade stone tools and jewelry for heart of palm and bird of paradise feathers, they do not leave Australia.
Although it remains a hunter-gatherer culture, the Outrigger culture does trade for food with York Peninsula farmers and plants cuttings of bananas and yams across its range and as far away as Kimberly. The poor soils of the Top End kill off most of these plants, but in Arnhem Land the transplanted bananas and yams survive and grow.
200 AD: The Breimba Culture develops in southwestern Queensland, in the headwaters of the Darling River. Named for the great temple complex along OTL’s Clarence River, the Breimba were far more stratified as a society than the chieftainships along the Pacific coast of Queensland. This was the result of living in the semi-arid interior, where control over granaries was a vital bulwark against drought and famine-and so control over the granaries led to the rise of an elite consisting of priests, who maintained grand temples and managed tribute, warriors who fought and conquered those who would not submit to giving tribute to the temple, and singers who flattered the other two classes.
500 AD: The Breimba sphere extends to the coast, as the farming communities of OTL’s Brisbane and Gold Coast at the southernmost fringe of the Australian farming sphere are conquered by the Breimba elite looking to expand the range of their tribute empire. Attempts by the Breimba to conquer northward fail past Fraser Island. A millenia of higher human populations on the coast had resulted in more varieties of malaria evolving, and long term campaigning on the Pacific coast resulted in many of the Breimba military elite dying as they tried to march north since these people from the dry inland had not been previously exposed to malaria. They settled for extracting tribute from the chieftains to their north rather than ruling them directly.
600 AD: The Magnetic and Great Palm Islanders (remember them?) start to use their voyaging catamarans to trade with the Breimba. They bring harvests of sugarcane, slaves bought from mainland slave raids, and mother of pearl to the Breimba civilization, and seeking to go further to find trade goods begin to launch voyages of discovery, following up on northern trade routes and navigating through the Great Barrier Reef to reach New Guinea, where they swap large emu feathers for the smaller but more distinct bird of paradise feathers.
For the mainland tribes, dealing with the hegemony saw the rise of confederacies to defend against and enact raids for the slaves and sugarcane that the Breimba elite held in high demand.
750 AD: The Breimba hegemony is destroyed as the priest class is overthrown in their homeland. The great temple of Breimba is burnt as the farming class rises up against the upper class’s increasingly harsh demands for labor. In the chaos, hunter-gatherer peoples join the attack, looting the homes of the wealthy.
800 AD: The coastal colonies of Breimba are united by the legendary king Jangyalwen One-Eye. Although a member of the coastal Badjalang people subjugated by the Breimba, he rose to power in the political chaos after the fall of the temple. He presented himself as saving the religious structure of the Breimba while overthrowing the corrupt warrior caste, but in gaining power he subjugated the priestly caste to his clan, turning them into bureaucrats to oversee what was now a personal kingdom, leaving him and his family free to focus on his favorite hobby: military conquest. His empire would be named for his coastal clan, the Widje. They would occupy the Breimba homeland and wage wars of conquest against the confederacies to their north.
850 AD: The Noongar of southwestern Australia adapt bows and arrows. With the deserts forming a barrier against the invasive pigs, they were not under environmental pressure to take this technology, and despite having contact with the east they did not see much need to work with this newfangled weaponry.Nonetheless, after generations of interaction, the technology is finally taken up due to its usefulness for hunting and repulsing occasional raids from desert tribes to the north.
1000 AD: The Widje Empire reaches its northernmost extent after its large armies are crushed in the rainforests of northeast Queensland by the Yidinji. The dense rainforest broke up the Widje armies, making their tactics impossible to execute. Attempts to send reinforcements to the northern campaign weakened the empire in the south, allowing the Breimba homeland to successfully revolt and secede from the empire, forming an independent Breimba kingdom-though in this kingdom, the king was most definitely subordinate to the reconstituted priest caste.
The Widje Empire would develop a new focus on consolidating its power within its remaining borders, seeking peace with the Breimba and the Yidinje. Without new conquests to generate wealth, they turned to purchasing slaves from the northern tribes, triggering a wave of slave raiding in northeastern Queensland.
1100 AD: Seeking respite from slave raiders, some visionaries from the York Peninsula would go westward to look for refuge, joining the outrigger culture and exploring the Gulf of Carpentaria. Finding wild yams and bananas in Arnhem land, they would return preaching of a new promised land. A great migration would occur over the next few centuries as York farmers moved to Arnhem Land and its outlying islands, introducing farming to the region. As the land they left from lay fallow, settlers from New Guinea and the Torres Straits would come to claim it.
1200 AD: Breimba artisans discover metallurgy, adapting their pottery kilns to smelt gold and copper ores to create jewelry.
1250 AD: Traders from the Magnetic and Great Palm Islands begin to sail from New Guinea to the Solomons, drawn in by a growing trade network which used shell money and was centered on large temple complexes. In the Solomons, they would encounter other Austronesians, including members of the Polynesian outlier cultures settling the far atoll islands of the Solomons. Contact with these Polynesians would give the islanders a new good to bring to Australia: the sweet potato.
1300 AD: The Tusk Kingdom is founded in the York Peninsula as New Guinea settlers and indigenous peninsulars unite to fight off the slave raiders, taking heads as trophies in massive reprisal raids directed by hereditary chiefs who would elect from their number a monarch titled The Great Boar, a title which spoke to wealth, power, and ferocity for them.
Facing an organized and powerful threat to their north, the tribes between the Tusk Kingdom and the Widje Empire would form the Babinda confederacy for mutual self-defense. While loosely organized, the confederacy managed to largely bring peace to Northeast Queensland by presenting a united front too powerful for the Tusk Kingdom or Widje Empire to challenge and managing conflict among its members through men and women empowered by kinship taboos to have authority over the chiefs and big men-a northern answer to the Breimba priests of old.
1450 AD: Widje farmers develop a new form of agriculture based on the sweet potato supplemented with indigenous plants such as acacias, pigweed, and millet. Propagating sweet potatoes by cuttings rather than seeds and growing them in mounds, the farmers are able to produce enough calories to support themselves even in cool climates. The potential frontier for farming in eastern Australia was now pushed hundreds of miles to the south.
For the Widje Empire, this would be salvation. Peace to their north meant that the slave trade had dried up, and conflict among the elite for control of labor corvees and land was getting intense, as well as conflict between the elite and the common people they increasingly sought to wring wealth out of. This new form of agriculture meant that there was plenty of land to share among the elite, and granting some of that land to commoners could defuse class tensions.
This result was quite bad for the peoples of the southeastern Pacific coast. Due to the Widje thirst for slaves, relations with the southern peoples had never been good. While the indigenous peoples did not see the need to take up farming in their wet and productive land, it was coveted by Widje farmers. The Widje would start a southward conquest, sending soldiers to pacify hunter-gatherer peoples and granting farmland to them for their service. This conquest would see many of the hunter-gatherer people enslaved, killed or driven into the the peaks of the Great Dividing Range, and the southeast “Badjalang-ized” as the Widje Empire dominated the region.
1550 AD: The Breimba Kingdom goes through a second collapse as massive outmigration occurs from the kingdom. The collapse was caused by bands of formerly hunter-gatherer peoples such as members of the Baagandji and Gamilaraay speakers who had fallen within the Breimba sphere taking up sweet potato agriculture from their contact with the settled cultures. Conflict with relatives who kept the hunter-gatherer lifestyle drove them to invite Breimba farmers as allies to settle near or in their communities to bolster their numbers. Free land with the prospect of not paying any harvest or labor corvee drove many low-class Breimba to take the offer despite the inevitable conflicts they would face. These immigrant farmers would assimilate to the language and culture of their hosts, and leave the upper classes of the Breimba land to farm their own damn food.
Many Breimba artisans would emigrate to the Widje Empire in response to this change, spreading their knowledge of metalworking.
1608 AD: First European contact with Australia occurs, as William Janzsoon lands on the western edge of the Cape York peninsula. Just outside of agricultural lands, the hail of arrows that greets his landing parties drives him back to sea. Over the next several decades the Dutch would explore the barren western side of Cape York and the non-agricultural west coast, finding little to interest them in this land.
1627 AD: Francois Thjissen notes that his ship is approached by dugout canoes with outriggers when he sails by the Eyre peninsula. He has a peaceful interaction with these curious sailors, giving them Dutch cloth for seal skin, but notes that these “brutes know nothing about spices or gold”. He turns back, only a few hundred kilometers from the agricultural frontier of Australia.
1642 AD: Abel Tasman explores Australia for the Dutch East India Company. He finds in Tasmania a land untouched by the transformations of Lapita contact, and further out encounters the Maori of New Zealand in a fatal meeting for several of his men.
1644 AD: In a second foray to Australia on the northern coast, Abel Tasman makes contact with farming communities of Arnhem Land who live by growing the Queensland agricultural package-including spices hitherto unknown to the Old World, particularly the leaf of the lemon ironbark. The Dutch begin to trade with the Arnhem landers, gathering some quantities of spices for what was, for them, a dirt cheap trade of iron tools, cloth and common livestock such as goats, water buffalo, cows, and Java ponies.
1650 AD: The frontier of sweet potato agriculture reaches its western limit at the mouth of the Murray-Darling, and southeastern limit on the Pacific coast at around the latitude of OTL’s Mt. Kosciuszko. Further south, the climate was simply too cold for sweet potato agriculture to work, giving the hunter-gatherer cultures a respite from the advance of the farmers.
The Widje would build a series of forts stretching from the coast to the mountains to guard against the hunting peoples, who would launch raids from the south and from the mountains against them.
Inland, the peoples at the mouth of Murray would trade with the Kaurna across the Flinders range. Uninterrupted, this trade would have probably introduced agriculture to the Thura-Yura peoples, but outside influence would stop that course of history.
As the colony grows and the Lapitans start to fight among themselves, they recruit mainland warriors through marriage. As a matrilocal society, husbands move in with wives and so the Lapita are able to bring in young Aborigine men to their home. These men do keep some contact with their mainland kin, which allows for cultural exchange between the Lapita settlers and the mainland Aborigines.
1000 BC: Farming becomes established on the mainland in response to the introduction of pigs from Great Palm Island. The ecological disruption of this invasive species which eats bush tucker and scares game forces the Aborigines to adapt, either using the Lapitan bow and arrow to hunt or adopting the Lapita farming lifestyle to get secure access to food.
A Lapitan colony is established on Magnetic Island by Great Palm Islanders fleeing conflict by voyaging which would continue to spread knowledge of agriculture to the Aborigines.
750 BC: With growing populations, farming societies on the mainland begin to incorporate hunter-gatherer societies, both peacefully and through force. This sees the wild bush tucker of Queensland becoming domesticated, and an indigenous knowledge base develops to supplement Lapitan-style farming. In addition to native fruits, acacia seeds become the Queensland dietary equivalent to soybeans or chickpeas, and native spices are used to add a local accent to the taro and yam staples introduced by the Lapita.
500 BC: The farming societies that now dominate coastal Queensland begin building projects, creating fortified towns, monuments, and irrigation canals, calling upon the labor power of booming populations. The ease of gaining food means that social stratification is limited even as these societies become more complex. Positions equivalent to ‘king’ or ‘chief’ in the Old World do develop, but they are limited in power through Aboriginal familial taboos, and there is little class stratification. The chiefs do find ways to set themselves apart from commoners, often decorating themselves with paint and jewelry to mark their status. The Magnetic and Great Palm Islanders help in this, plying the Coral Sea in their great catamarans to gather shells and pearls to trade to mainland chiefs.
0 AD: The Outrigger Culture develops along the Gulf of Carpentaria. This culture consisted of Aborigines who adopt Lapita-style fishhooks, harpoons, and of course outrigger canoes to fish and hunt sea mammals from the farming peoples on the east coast of Cape York. The Lapita’s navigational technology is lost in the exchange and the Outrigger Culture does not adopt the sails or catamarans of the Great Palm and Magnetic islanders. As such they tend to keep sight of land when they set out to sea, and aside from some island hopping to New Guinea where they trade stone tools and jewelry for heart of palm and bird of paradise feathers, they do not leave Australia.
Although it remains a hunter-gatherer culture, the Outrigger culture does trade for food with York Peninsula farmers and plants cuttings of bananas and yams across its range and as far away as Kimberly. The poor soils of the Top End kill off most of these plants, but in Arnhem Land the transplanted bananas and yams survive and grow.
200 AD: The Breimba Culture develops in southwestern Queensland, in the headwaters of the Darling River. Named for the great temple complex along OTL’s Clarence River, the Breimba were far more stratified as a society than the chieftainships along the Pacific coast of Queensland. This was the result of living in the semi-arid interior, where control over granaries was a vital bulwark against drought and famine-and so control over the granaries led to the rise of an elite consisting of priests, who maintained grand temples and managed tribute, warriors who fought and conquered those who would not submit to giving tribute to the temple, and singers who flattered the other two classes.
500 AD: The Breimba sphere extends to the coast, as the farming communities of OTL’s Brisbane and Gold Coast at the southernmost fringe of the Australian farming sphere are conquered by the Breimba elite looking to expand the range of their tribute empire. Attempts by the Breimba to conquer northward fail past Fraser Island. A millenia of higher human populations on the coast had resulted in more varieties of malaria evolving, and long term campaigning on the Pacific coast resulted in many of the Breimba military elite dying as they tried to march north since these people from the dry inland had not been previously exposed to malaria. They settled for extracting tribute from the chieftains to their north rather than ruling them directly.
600 AD: The Magnetic and Great Palm Islanders (remember them?) start to use their voyaging catamarans to trade with the Breimba. They bring harvests of sugarcane, slaves bought from mainland slave raids, and mother of pearl to the Breimba civilization, and seeking to go further to find trade goods begin to launch voyages of discovery, following up on northern trade routes and navigating through the Great Barrier Reef to reach New Guinea, where they swap large emu feathers for the smaller but more distinct bird of paradise feathers.
For the mainland tribes, dealing with the hegemony saw the rise of confederacies to defend against and enact raids for the slaves and sugarcane that the Breimba elite held in high demand.
750 AD: The Breimba hegemony is destroyed as the priest class is overthrown in their homeland. The great temple of Breimba is burnt as the farming class rises up against the upper class’s increasingly harsh demands for labor. In the chaos, hunter-gatherer peoples join the attack, looting the homes of the wealthy.
800 AD: The coastal colonies of Breimba are united by the legendary king Jangyalwen One-Eye. Although a member of the coastal Badjalang people subjugated by the Breimba, he rose to power in the political chaos after the fall of the temple. He presented himself as saving the religious structure of the Breimba while overthrowing the corrupt warrior caste, but in gaining power he subjugated the priestly caste to his clan, turning them into bureaucrats to oversee what was now a personal kingdom, leaving him and his family free to focus on his favorite hobby: military conquest. His empire would be named for his coastal clan, the Widje. They would occupy the Breimba homeland and wage wars of conquest against the confederacies to their north.
850 AD: The Noongar of southwestern Australia adapt bows and arrows. With the deserts forming a barrier against the invasive pigs, they were not under environmental pressure to take this technology, and despite having contact with the east they did not see much need to work with this newfangled weaponry.Nonetheless, after generations of interaction, the technology is finally taken up due to its usefulness for hunting and repulsing occasional raids from desert tribes to the north.
1000 AD: The Widje Empire reaches its northernmost extent after its large armies are crushed in the rainforests of northeast Queensland by the Yidinji. The dense rainforest broke up the Widje armies, making their tactics impossible to execute. Attempts to send reinforcements to the northern campaign weakened the empire in the south, allowing the Breimba homeland to successfully revolt and secede from the empire, forming an independent Breimba kingdom-though in this kingdom, the king was most definitely subordinate to the reconstituted priest caste.
The Widje Empire would develop a new focus on consolidating its power within its remaining borders, seeking peace with the Breimba and the Yidinje. Without new conquests to generate wealth, they turned to purchasing slaves from the northern tribes, triggering a wave of slave raiding in northeastern Queensland.
1100 AD: Seeking respite from slave raiders, some visionaries from the York Peninsula would go westward to look for refuge, joining the outrigger culture and exploring the Gulf of Carpentaria. Finding wild yams and bananas in Arnhem land, they would return preaching of a new promised land. A great migration would occur over the next few centuries as York farmers moved to Arnhem Land and its outlying islands, introducing farming to the region. As the land they left from lay fallow, settlers from New Guinea and the Torres Straits would come to claim it.
1200 AD: Breimba artisans discover metallurgy, adapting their pottery kilns to smelt gold and copper ores to create jewelry.
1250 AD: Traders from the Magnetic and Great Palm Islands begin to sail from New Guinea to the Solomons, drawn in by a growing trade network which used shell money and was centered on large temple complexes. In the Solomons, they would encounter other Austronesians, including members of the Polynesian outlier cultures settling the far atoll islands of the Solomons. Contact with these Polynesians would give the islanders a new good to bring to Australia: the sweet potato.
1300 AD: The Tusk Kingdom is founded in the York Peninsula as New Guinea settlers and indigenous peninsulars unite to fight off the slave raiders, taking heads as trophies in massive reprisal raids directed by hereditary chiefs who would elect from their number a monarch titled The Great Boar, a title which spoke to wealth, power, and ferocity for them.
Facing an organized and powerful threat to their north, the tribes between the Tusk Kingdom and the Widje Empire would form the Babinda confederacy for mutual self-defense. While loosely organized, the confederacy managed to largely bring peace to Northeast Queensland by presenting a united front too powerful for the Tusk Kingdom or Widje Empire to challenge and managing conflict among its members through men and women empowered by kinship taboos to have authority over the chiefs and big men-a northern answer to the Breimba priests of old.
1450 AD: Widje farmers develop a new form of agriculture based on the sweet potato supplemented with indigenous plants such as acacias, pigweed, and millet. Propagating sweet potatoes by cuttings rather than seeds and growing them in mounds, the farmers are able to produce enough calories to support themselves even in cool climates. The potential frontier for farming in eastern Australia was now pushed hundreds of miles to the south.
For the Widje Empire, this would be salvation. Peace to their north meant that the slave trade had dried up, and conflict among the elite for control of labor corvees and land was getting intense, as well as conflict between the elite and the common people they increasingly sought to wring wealth out of. This new form of agriculture meant that there was plenty of land to share among the elite, and granting some of that land to commoners could defuse class tensions.
This result was quite bad for the peoples of the southeastern Pacific coast. Due to the Widje thirst for slaves, relations with the southern peoples had never been good. While the indigenous peoples did not see the need to take up farming in their wet and productive land, it was coveted by Widje farmers. The Widje would start a southward conquest, sending soldiers to pacify hunter-gatherer peoples and granting farmland to them for their service. This conquest would see many of the hunter-gatherer people enslaved, killed or driven into the the peaks of the Great Dividing Range, and the southeast “Badjalang-ized” as the Widje Empire dominated the region.
1550 AD: The Breimba Kingdom goes through a second collapse as massive outmigration occurs from the kingdom. The collapse was caused by bands of formerly hunter-gatherer peoples such as members of the Baagandji and Gamilaraay speakers who had fallen within the Breimba sphere taking up sweet potato agriculture from their contact with the settled cultures. Conflict with relatives who kept the hunter-gatherer lifestyle drove them to invite Breimba farmers as allies to settle near or in their communities to bolster their numbers. Free land with the prospect of not paying any harvest or labor corvee drove many low-class Breimba to take the offer despite the inevitable conflicts they would face. These immigrant farmers would assimilate to the language and culture of their hosts, and leave the upper classes of the Breimba land to farm their own damn food.
Many Breimba artisans would emigrate to the Widje Empire in response to this change, spreading their knowledge of metalworking.
1608 AD: First European contact with Australia occurs, as William Janzsoon lands on the western edge of the Cape York peninsula. Just outside of agricultural lands, the hail of arrows that greets his landing parties drives him back to sea. Over the next several decades the Dutch would explore the barren western side of Cape York and the non-agricultural west coast, finding little to interest them in this land.
1627 AD: Francois Thjissen notes that his ship is approached by dugout canoes with outriggers when he sails by the Eyre peninsula. He has a peaceful interaction with these curious sailors, giving them Dutch cloth for seal skin, but notes that these “brutes know nothing about spices or gold”. He turns back, only a few hundred kilometers from the agricultural frontier of Australia.
1642 AD: Abel Tasman explores Australia for the Dutch East India Company. He finds in Tasmania a land untouched by the transformations of Lapita contact, and further out encounters the Maori of New Zealand in a fatal meeting for several of his men.
1644 AD: In a second foray to Australia on the northern coast, Abel Tasman makes contact with farming communities of Arnhem Land who live by growing the Queensland agricultural package-including spices hitherto unknown to the Old World, particularly the leaf of the lemon ironbark. The Dutch begin to trade with the Arnhem landers, gathering some quantities of spices for what was, for them, a dirt cheap trade of iron tools, cloth and common livestock such as goats, water buffalo, cows, and Java ponies.
1650 AD: The frontier of sweet potato agriculture reaches its western limit at the mouth of the Murray-Darling, and southeastern limit on the Pacific coast at around the latitude of OTL’s Mt. Kosciuszko. Further south, the climate was simply too cold for sweet potato agriculture to work, giving the hunter-gatherer cultures a respite from the advance of the farmers.
The Widje would build a series of forts stretching from the coast to the mountains to guard against the hunting peoples, who would launch raids from the south and from the mountains against them.
Inland, the peoples at the mouth of Murray would trade with the Kaurna across the Flinders range. Uninterrupted, this trade would have probably introduced agriculture to the Thura-Yura peoples, but outside influence would stop that course of history.