You've not gone into much detail concerning Gunnagalic and Junditamara religious practices, but I assume human sacrifice isn't part of either.
No comment, except that more details will be forthcoming with the posts on the Yadji (the ethnic-Junditmara empire around in 1618) and on post-Imperial Tjibarr.
Will this make the Dutch (already probably less fanatically religious than the Spaniards, even in the late 17th century) less inclined to try and impose Christianity on the natives by force? Or can we expect to see a sort of Dutch Protestant Australian inquisition?
The Dutch were, on the whole, much less inclined to Christianisation of their colonial subjects than, say, the Spanish. I can't recall offhand what their policy was like in every colony, but they certainly didn't see missionary activity as a primary focus of their colonial activities. (Profit was their objective.) So while there will undoubtedly be Christian missionary activities, official support is probably going to be half-hearted at best.
Also. With the natives having developed their own varieties of intoxicating liquors I'm guessing the introduction of western alcoholic beverages won't be quite as devastating as in OTL.
Indeed they won't. The *Australians won't have discovered distilled beverages, but they will have alcoholic beverages of equivalent strength to wine or cider. This will have considerable effects.
And finally. What about the introduction of Eurasian crop packages to Australia?
Some will take off, some won't. From the locals point of view, a lot of Eurasian crops will require much more effort to farm for limited rewards, and/or will only be suitable in more limited, high-rainfall areas. Some legumes, spices and fruits would probably be quite popular, but I doubt that wheat or other small grains will be popular. They just won't grow as well - the effects of low-phosphorus soils in Australia, and this will be earlier than most artificial fertilisers.
Eurasian domesticated animals, though, will be very popular. Especially those suitable for transportation.
As a native
Oamaruvian I am obliged to inform you we spell it as
Oamaru 
.
Sorry, my bad - the effects of writing a post at the end of a long weekend with little sleep. I have been to Oamaru, although it's been a while...
I'm by no means a farmer of anykind (despite growing up on one), nor do I know the details of your agricultural crop package, but perhaps you under-rate Oamaru's potential.
Oamaru's OTL immediate hinterland (within 10km) has a rather large market garden sector - things like potato, kumara, tomatoes, cabbage etc are regularly grown and I believe supplied across the South Island (Oamaru potatoes for example have gained a reputation for quality and now can be found, marketed as far away as Auckland). Slightly further afield (within 50 or some KM) in the less immediate hinterland stone fruits fruits like grapes, cherries, apricots and apples are grown in large quantities. Vineyards are also becoming common. There are also substantial grain farming concerns across the area as well - barley, wheat etc, that in past times supported a substantial milling infrastructure, although that is largely gone now I believe.
The reason I think that farming in Oamaru and points further south has little to do with that region's agricultural potential, and very much to do with the nature of the *Australian agricultural package. It is optimised for subtropical conditions, particularly drier conditions. It grows best between the latitudes of about 25 to 45 degrees south. Oamaru is right on the edge of that growing zone. Many Australian crops will grow there, but they won't grow that well - the growing season will be too short for a lot of them.
Despite the reputation for droughts, the area is actually pretty well supplied for water, through the Waitaki river system. If irrigation can be developed in an earlier period that part of the region could develop rather differently (irrigation in large part only really started being constructed well into the post War period), prior to that it was primarily pastoral.
Closer to Oamaru (10-25km) the Kakanui river system supports a wide array of dairy farms and market gardens. The soil there is apparently rather fertile and the rainfall patterns in the coastal reach could be good enough to support a small agricultural community, without the benefit of irrigation.
Periods of drought won't be that bad for *Australian crops. That's what they are pretty much optimised to tolerate. Irrigation isn't something which *Australian cultures go for anyway, although the Maori may of course develop the idea on their own. I can't remember offhand if they did much irrigation of kumara in OTL.
Thanks for the replies, Jared. Two further thoughts:
First, in re the whole wheel issue, maybe just flip a coin? I mean, it may be unlikely, but much like the real world your TL is entitled to one or two unlikely things that aren't flat-out ASB.
I've already given the *Australians a few lucky breaks. (Writing, metallurgy, etc.) I'm not sure if the wheel will be one lucky break too many. I'll think about it.
Second, as far as the European technological superiority, how hard will it be for the *Aborigines to reverse-engineer gunpowder? Assuming that the entire continent isn't overrun in one fell swoop, I would think that at least one or two polities might be able to pull a Japan in regards to gunpowder weapons before the Europeans get to them. Assuming that Australia has the necessary quantities of sulfur and saltpeter, anyway.
Hmm. The cultural and technological gap between the *Aborigines and Eurasians is very, very large. I'm not at all sure that they would be able to reverse engineer gunpowder in any meaingful period of time. They would pick up on metallurgy and steel-making very quickly, but I doubt that their chemistry knowledge would be sufficiently advanced. Mind you, in a couple of respects their knowledge is equal to or better than that of Europeans. An *Aboriginal doctor of 1619 would be less likely to kill you than a European doctor. Admittedly, this is only because they haven't picked up the European preoccupation with bleeding, and because they were fortunate enough to inherit knowledge of a couple of very useful native plant antiseptics.
When people say "pull a Japan" in this sort of context, it makes me wonder if they really know what it was that Japan pulled.
Well, "pull" could mean the nation-state equivalent of "picking up"... maybe Japan will "pick up" Korea, although it'd probably just turn into a one-year stand.
I was wondering if things might not work out a bit better for Native Americans in this TL. While they would be just as vulnerable to the new diseases as any other ethnicity, it seem like it would throw just a bit of a monkey wrench in the European colonial efforts. I would think the big colonial cities and shipping ports would be the worst hit, and if things go to shit in Europe might the Natives of North and South America be left alone for a while?
Good question about the effects of European colonisation, and something I will have to think about. On the whole, there are likely to be fewer would-be colonists, but then the native population of the Americas is going to take an even bigger hit. Thinking out loud, I'd expect that the overall population of the Americas is going to be lower for a good long while, but I'm not sure what the demographic balance is going to be like.
Unless Europeans start out their settlement far closer to contact than OTL, I don't see them having much of a chance to get a foothold. After all, in OTL, there was 181 years between discovery and settlement of Australia.
True, but that was because Australia had nothing to attract European colonists. ATL, well, it does...
While the existence of empires to exploit could further western interest, the plagues Australia sends to Eurasia will lessen population pressures quite a good bit.
Depends on the nature of colonisation, and the motives of the colonisers. Prospectors, would-be conquistadors, merchants, adventurers and so forth would be just as likely to come. Settlement colonies are another matter, but then the Dutch didn't really go in for those kinds of colonies much anyway.
It's plausible, provided enough of the population survives to maintain social order (say 20% or higher), that the growth following the introduction of the plagues will be rapid enough that, by the time European settlement starts in full swing, the population will be as large or larger than it was pre-contact.
The problem is that building up immunity to Eurasian diseases
requires prolonged contact, and repeated episodes of diseases. One plague of smallpox, if it happens in isolation, would just devastate the population but produce no long-term immunity. So if the Eurasians are staying away, then there'll be the occasional epidemic to devastate the population, but nothing to build up long-term resistance. It will just mean that whenever the Europeans do come in numbers, then the massive population die-offs will happen then.
I'm sure you're feverishly looking up numbers on this yourself though. It's a shame good population figures for Europe after the Black Death are so hard to come by, as it (at least, in the areas it was felt more severely, like Southern Europe), is probably the closest model demographically to what will happen to Australia.
Getting a decent estimate of global population in the seventeenth century is hard, to say that least. Still, what estimates I can find put the world population at around 500 million in 1650. The seventeenth century was already a time of substantial disease rampages anyway, especially from bubonic plague. ATL, the world is also going to take a substantial population hit when Marnitja and blue-sleep spread. This is going to involve something like 60-100 million deaths around the world. Dear God. It will take at least half a century for the global population to recover, if not longer.
I can tell you for a fact that the area around Koroit is good farmland because I lived in Warrnambool and Koroit for most of my life and worked on said farmland from about 1986 to 2000. Basically its the ashfall area from the Tower Hill volcano, and is probably why I think Hamilton is shit in comparison.
I've no doubt that the Koroit area is good farmland. It will support a substantial population in ATL Australia, without a doubt, and will be the heartland of a major Junditmara population centre. The thing is, though, that *Australian crops are very good at growing even on pretty poor soils - wattles are self-fertilising, in fact. The volcanic soils around Koroit will certainly add to the agricultural yields there, but Hamilton will also be capable of supporting an agricultural population. As will much of southern Victoria, for that matter - there's going to be a large number of agricultural settlements stretching from the Murray Mouth (in SA, yes, I know) to the Gippsland Lakes. I'm not sure exactly which ones will be the largest - Koroit will no doubt be a very productive settlement, but not the only one. The largest population centre in ATL southern Victoria is actually going to be somewhere else entirely, but that's for political reasons rather than agricultural ones. Essentially, the administrative centre of the Yadji will be their home city before they start conquering, and it will grow because it is the capital.
They'll probably work out worse. Native Americans were not only not immune to Eurasian diseases specifically, they seemed to have less robust immune systems in general. So throw yet TWO MORE serious epidemic diseases into the mix and I expect you'll find that the Native Americans are really going to be biting it in this timeline.
Depends on the region of the Americas. The less robust systems of the Amerindians were due to not having exposure to any epidemic diseases when they were young. (According to James V. Neel, anyway). It seems that the adaptive immune system develops a lot of its functions due to exposure to some form of diseases when young, and without such exposure then the adaptive component of the immune system loses a lot of its effectiveness. (The innate immune system seems to be largely unaffected.)
In the seventeenth century Americas, there were a lot of Eurasian epidemic diseases running around much of the continents. This meant that the surviving Amerindians in, say, Mesoamerica had over a century of being exposed to epidemic diseases. This did not mean that they had long enough to acquire natural resistance to specific diseases (that takes about six generations, usually), but that their overall immune systems would be stronger. So Australian diseases are unlikely to hit Mesoamerica any harder than they would hit Europe or China. However, in 1619 there are considerable portions of the Americas which had not yet been exposed to enough epidemic diseases to allow them the same strengthening of their immune systems. This would apply in a lot of North America, for instance, and also much of Argentina, if I remember right. So those areas would indeed be hit harder.
This probably won't make too much difference in North America--though maybe it makes the frontier less of a threat in the American colonial period with knock-on effects for colonial unity and development--but the real effects are probably in Latin America, which is going to have smaller and more European/Argentine populations in this TL--though maybe with an even greater African mix.
It's going to be a good question as to how much the population of Latin America is affected. There are the demographic effects of Australian diseases, lower numbers of Europeans immigrating, and so forth. The African slave trade may
also take a hit for a while - Australian diseases will hit there, too. On the whole, I suspect that this will make for a longer colonial period, since it will take longer for the colonial population to grow to a level where they can seek independence from Europe. Of course, some areas are going to be more heavily-populated than they were in OTL, and the boundary line between Latin America and the rest of the continent may be drawn further north. Australian crops are pretty much ideally-suited to Southern California and large parts of Texas - that may encourage more Latin settlement of those regions.
I wonder if you'll get a significant slave trade in *Australians. The fact that *Australia is a crazy quilt of competing polities and cultures, with a high population, that's going to be very unsettled by European contacts, makes slaving more likely (as some *Australians turn to it as a source of profits). So does the fact that Europeans may not be able to effect a complete conquest of the area. So does the decline in world population in comparison to OTL, making labor more valuable, especially labor with some disease resistance.
While more resistant to Australian diseases, *Aborigines are still going to be very prone to dying from Eurasian diseases. The Spanish tried slavery was tried with Amerindians, and largely had to give up due to the death rates. I suspect that much the same will hold for any large-scale trade in *Aboriginal slaves, since the majority of them will die.
On the other hand, *Australia doesn't seen to have an indigenous slave tradition that we know of, and the distances across the Pacific are greater than the distances across the Atlantic. On the gripping hand, if any kind of plantation economy develops with *Australian crops, especially in the New World or Africa, using *Australian slave labor will be attractive.
The shipping distances are really going to be killers. Plenty of Africans died going across the Atlantic, and this would be even worse. However, one potential market I can see is for semi-indentured labourers being encouraged to move to Africa and the Americas and teach people how to farm Australian crops properly. The techniques of perennial agriculture are quite different from anything which European or African farmers will be used to.
You mean, will an *Australian nation meet with the Europeans, trade with them and make friends with the Courts, convince one white guy to go native, get screwed over by the Europeans because that white guy happened to be rivals with the guys who run the Trade Companies, go through a civil war that sees three generals become etched in legend, grow more isolationist and conservative, expelling all but the weakest European power, and even limiting those guys to a podunck island, leading to an explosion of native literature and artistry, followed by a decline of the noble class, leading to some deals with a nation which is white but not European, so is safe to deal with, leading to a civil war between the guys who want to modernise right now and the guys who want to take it slow and easy, with the slow and easy guys losing, leading to an attempt at democracy and a defeat of a European nation in a major war, leading to the military getting an inflated opinion of itself, sparking a campaign of conquest that leads into an ill-advised alliance with a Central European nutjob because the *Australians' foreign minister was convinced said nutjob had the powers of God, leading to an occupation by the white power they made friends with earlier, leading to Australia becoming a leading producer in the electronics and entertainement industries?
You do realise you're
so tempting me to make that happen, don't you? Although probably with a few less samurai and a few more boomerangs.
In OTL, coal wasn't used in the production of iron until the eigthteenth century. Basically coal contains impurities that makes the iron brittle. Coal has to be converted to coke before it can be used for smelting iron and I don't think that this is a technique that the *Australians are going to stumble on.
The Chinese used coal to make cast iron at least as far back as the eleventh century, and maybe for or five hundred years before that. However, the *Australians are not going to figure out cast iron. Their ironworking techniques will be different to those the Chinese used - I've based them on a different historical analogue. Coal will not be of any particular use to them; charcoal will be sufficient for their needs.
They're far more likely to use charcoal for smelting iron. Since their agricultural methods involve the controlled burn-off (to produce rangelands), they are likely to discover methods of charcoal production quite early.
Definitely. They also have the advantage that they've got a lot of experience with coppicing (for timber and spice production). Once they've figured out the usefulness of charcoal, they can also produce a large amount of it to suit their needs.
