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Lands of Red and Gold #2: What Grows From The Earth

Stylistic note: Lands of Red and Gold is written in a variety of styles, which are mixed between posts and within posts at authorial discretion. Most of the posts will be descriptions of the world of LoRaG itself. However, there will also be considerable sections of the posts which provide relevant background information [1] to make sense of what’s happening in the timeline. And sometimes to justify what’s happening, too, particularly in areas where there are some popular misconceptions.

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Think not of the present time, but of an older era. Step back in time, if you wish, to the time six thousand years before the birth of a man whom the world’s largest religion will credit with being divine. Far from the place of this birth, in the continent which will much later be named Australia, live a great many peoples. Long before the peoples along the Murray Valley discover how to make the earth bear regular bounties of red yams according to their needs, one other people have developed their own method of farming. One that does not involve growing plants, but rather farming eels.

The Junditmara people [2] live in a region which in another time and place will be called south-western Victoria. Their home country includes areas which were natural wetlands, but the Junditmara have transformed the landscape to suit their needs. They construct stone dams and weirs across rivers and streams, creating man-made ponds and expanding existing swamps. They dig channels through rock and earth to join the ponds and lakes into a complex system of waterways. These waterways are naturally abundant in fish, but the Junditmara do not stop there. From the nearby ocean, they catch young eels which they release into the waterways. These eels grow for up to twenty years, and are then harvested in woven baskets which form eel traps.

The Junditmara have, in fact, developed a system of aquaculture. The eel harvests are abundant and predictable enough to let them develop a sedentary lifestyle. They have no need to move around in search of food. With the harvests of eels, hunting of eggs and waterbirds, and collection of edible plant roots and tubers which grow along the fringes of the waters, they have more than enough food to sustain their population. Indeed, the Junditmara have such a surplus of eels that they smoke eel meat for later use, or as a valued trade good to be sent along trade routes that stretch for hundreds of kilometres.

For in Junditmara country, Australia has its first people who build in stone. Junditmara society is a complex of hierarchical chiefdoms, with chiefs controlling the lives of their peoples, assigning them to roles and arranging all their marriages. The chiefdoms sit on a confluence of trade routes; the Junditmara export smoked eel meat and possum-skin coats, and import quartz, flints and some high-quality timber which cannot be found in their own country. Collectively, the Junditmara chiefdoms oversee the lives of some ten thousand people [3].

Still, forget, for a moment, the people living alongside the waterways of south-western Victoria, and look further north, to the peoples who live along the Mighty Murray. When last we saw them, the Aboriginal peoples along the Murray had been harvesting red yams from the wild and turning them into Australia’s first domesticated crop. With the red yam, they have developed the idea of farming. This is not enough to create an agricultural society, not by itself, but it is a beginning.

The gradual domestication of the red yam has turned these peoples from hunter-gatherers into hunter-gardeners. They hunt and fish for food, they gather other wild plants, and they have established gardens of red yams which they plant and tend. Red yams alone are not sufficient to let them establish permanent settlements. Wild yam tubers can be stored for up to nine months, not enough to form a year-round store of food. Instead, the peoples of the Murray establish early settlements where they reside for up to nine months out of each year, and which they leave for the remainder of the year to hunt and gather wild foods.

Of course, these societies are not static. The population of the Murray peoples grows, and they start to develop new tools, new social structures, and new beliefs. With their growing population comes more contact with their neighbours outside the Murray Valley. Ancient trade routes connect the Murray Valley with regions both to the north and south. In a land without beasts of burden or good roads, most trade goods are passed between many hands rather than having one person move along the length of a trade route, but where goods move, sometimes ideas do, too.

One of the major trade routes is to Junditmara country, far to the south. This brings in eel meat and other goods, but it also means that ideas move, too. With the increasing population of the Murray peoples, some of them visit their neighbours, and in time travellers bring back tales of the elaborate dams, weirs and channels of the Junditmara chiefdoms. And with these tales comes inspiration.

For one of the Murray peoples call themselves the Gunnagal [4]. Their country is around where the River Loddon flows into the Murray, in a locality which in another time and place will see the founding of a town called Swan Hill. The town would have been named for a lagoon at the joining of the two rivers, which teemed with so many waterfowl that the first European explorers who visited there could not sleep properly at night, even though they were camped half a mile away.

The Gunnagal know nothing of these explorers from a time-that-was-not, but they do know of the lagoon that is one of their rich sources of food. Inspired by travellers’ tales, and with a population boosted by farming red yams, the Gunnagal begin constructing works of their own. They do not have the same bountiful rain which feeds the waterways of the Junditmara, but they do have a river which floods prodigiously if irregularly. With stone, wood and determination, they create their own systems of ponds and lagoons, connected with channels to the Murray and the Loddon. In most times those channels are dry, but when the rivers rise they bring enough water to the new ponds and lagoons to sustain them as standing water.

With the new waterworks, the Gunnagal have a greatly expanded source of food. In the lagoons they hunt for swans, ducks and other waterbirds. In the waters, they lay traps to catch Murray cod, golden perch, Australian smelt, and a variety of other fish. Around the watery fringes, they harvest plants with edible tubers and leaves. On the nearby fields, they farm red yams, and in the more distant reaches, they hunt kangaroos and gather wild plants.

Like the Junditmara before them, the Gunnagal have established a lifestyle which allows them to establish permanent settlements. Unlike the Junditmara, the Gunnagal live on a river system where these practices can spread over a wide distance. For with the establishment of yams and fishing, of agriculture and aquaculture, the Gunnagal will develop the first permanent settlement large enough to be called a city. As a people, they understand the rudiments of farming, and with their continued gathering of a wide range of wild plants, they can turn their attention to domesticating other Australian plants.

That is, if there are any other Australian plants which can be domesticated.

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It has been claimed that the Australian continent lacks any domesticable plants apart from the macadamia nut [5,6]. This claim has the advantage of being simple, easy to repeat, and offers a plausible explanation for why Australia did not develop any full-scale indigenous agriculture. This claim has only one major disadvantage: it is completely wrong.

For several Australian native plants have, in fact, been domesticated. While the most widely-known native Australian domesticate is the macadamia, this was not the first Australian native plant to earn this status. That distinction belongs to the plant which today is marketed in Australia as Warrigal greens (Tetragonia tetragonoides), and which has been variously called Botany Bay greens, Australian spinach, New Zealand spinach, and Cook’s cabbage. This plant was brought from Australian and established in England in the later eighteenth century as a domesticated vegetable. Its leaves are harvested as a vegetable which is used in a similar manner to spinach. Another Australian plant was also taken to Britain to be domesticated. The mountain pepperbush (Tasmannia lanceolata), a plant with peppery-flavoured leaves, was established in Cornwall, domesticated as the ‘Cornish pepperleaf,’ and became a flavoursome part of Cornish cuisine. Recent selective breeding efforts have produced domesticated strains of several Australian fruits, such as quandong (Santalum acuminatum), muntries (Kunzea pomifera), and various native Australian Citrus species (relatives of oranges and limes).

More intriguingly, there are several domesticable plant species which are native both to Australia and nearby parts of Southeast Asia. The water chestnut (Eleocharis dulcis) is an aquatic vegetable which is native to China, Southeast Asia and northern Australia, and which was domesticated in China. Two species of yams (Dioscorea alata and D. bulbifera) were likewise native both to Southeast Asia and northern Australia, and were domesticated in the former, but not the latter. Common purslane (Portulaca oleracea) is a succulent plant widespread in Australia and much of the Old World, was domesticated on multiple occasions in several parts of the world as a leaf vegetable, yet was not domesticated in Australia. All of these plants are clearly domesticable, were known and used by Aboriginal peoples within Australia as wild-harvested sources of food, and yet were not domesticated on Australia’s shores [7].

Most intriguing of all, Australia possesses native plants which are easily cultivated into staple crops. Trees of the genus Acacia are widespread throughout the tropics and subtropics of the globe, but they are most abundant in Australia. The Australian acacias, usually called wattles, are well-adapted to the harsh conditions and are widespread throughout the continent. They produce large quantities of edible seeds which are collected by Aboriginal peoples as a rich source of food. Recently, several species of wattles were introduced into various parts of tropical Africa (Acacia colei, A. torulosa, A. tumida, A. elachantha and A. saligna). The seeds from these wattles are being increasingly adopted as staple parts of the diet, and domesticated strains of wattles are being developed.

In short, Australia actually has a variety of domesticable plants, including some which have recently been domesticated or which were domesticated millennia ago elsewhere in the world. Given this, the question which naturally arises is why these plants were not domesticated within Australia itself over the last few thousand years.

The answer lies in the fact that there is a distinction between domesticable plants and founder crops. Domesticable plants are any plants which can be bred to human uses, but most of them first require a human population to be at least semi-sedentary and acquainted with the concept of farming. Founder crops are much rarer plants, since they possess appropriate qualities (either alone, or in a package with other crops) to enable people to move from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a farming lifestyle.

Domesticable plants are relatively common throughout the world; founder crops are much rarer, and they need to become established first before many other plants can be domesticated. The quintessential founder crops were found in the Middle East, which possessed eight Neolithic founder crops which allowed agriculture to be established there [8]. Founder crops were also found elsewhere in the world, although in most cases they needed longer to domesticate than in the Middle East [9]. Notably, however, the Middle East possessed several domesticable plants which were not domesticated until well after the Neolithic founder crops. Plants such as olives and date palms were domesticable, but the process took several thousand years after agriculture had already started.

In Australia, historically, there were no founder crops. Australia possessed several domesticable crops, including some yams which were domesticated elsewhere in the world once agriculture had started, but never in Australia. Some yams are suitable as founder crops, such as the white and yellow yams of West Africa (Dioscorea rotunda and D. cayenensis, respectively), but others are not.

In allohistorical Australia, the red yam (Dioscorea chelidonius) is a suitable founder crop. It is not enough to form a complete diet in itself, but it is enough to encourage a semi-sedentary lifestyle and an understanding of the basics of farming. This leads to a stationary population who are still gathering wild plants as a significant component of their diet, which in turn means that more plants will be domesticated [10]. In time, this will lead to the development of a full Australian agricultural package of crops, and the farming cultures which go along with that.

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[1] Also known, less charitably, as infodumps.

[2] While butterflies in this timeline have been confined to Australia until there is human contact with overseas peoples, it is inevitable that there will be changes within Australia itself. Languages and peoples have changed slightly. The ATL people known as the Junditmara were historically called the Gunditjmara.

[3] This is one of those examples of things where I have to say “I am not making this up.” This is exactly what the Gunditjmara did, historically.

[4] In keeping with the changed peoples within ATL Australia, the Gunnagal are not the same people who lived there in OTL. The historical inhabitants of Swan Hill and the surrounding country were the Wemba-Wemba people.

[5] Yes, you all know of at least one author who made that claim, although he was not the only one.

[6] To be pedantic, macadamia nuts are actually derived from two closely-related species, Macadamia integrifolia and M. tetraphylla.

[7] There are several domesticable plant species which are common both to northern Australia and parts of Southeast Asia, and which were probably carried between the two regions by birds. The plants listed above are those which are known to have been present in Australia before European contact and which were used by Aboriginal peoples. There may well have been others (e.g. the domesticable herb and leaf vegetable common self-heal (Prunella vulgaris)), but it’s not always clear whether these arrived before or after European contact.

[8] Even with potential founder crops, their domestication can sometimes be erratic. There is some evidence that rye was domesticated in northern Syria before the eight main founder crops (emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, barley, lentils, peas, chickpeas, bitter vetch and flax) were adopted. If so, the domestication does not seem to have been continued; rye was largely abandoned as a crop for several millennia before eventually being domesticated again in Europe. Likewise, early attempts to cultivate barley and oats in Jericho seem to have been unsuccessful. It appears that founder crops will eventually be domesticated if people live in the area for long enough, but they may not be adopted quickly.

[9] Independent agriculture has arisen in a number of areas: definitely in Mesoamerica, China (at least once), New Guinea, the Andes, West Africa (at least once) and in eastern North America. It is also quite likely to have arisen independently in Ethiopia, in two locations in China and West Africa, and possibly in India. There have been a variety of founder crops in these areas; potatoes, squash, sunflowers, millets, sorghum and rice, among others.

[10] The domesticability of Australian native plants is reasonable (excellent, in fact, for Acacias), but the lack of suitable founder crops meant that Aboriginal peoples did not become sedentary and domesticate them. Significant domestication efforts for Australian native plants had to wait until European arrival, since they had an established package of crops which allowed them to maintain a sedentary lifestyle. This means that there has been only a couple of centuries to explore the potential of Australian native plants. It also means that any Australian native plants need not only to be domesticable, but able to compete with long-established domesticated plants from elsewhere around the world.

This is often a difficult challenge. The establishment of new fruit crops is hard, for instance, because wild fruits are usually small and have irregular yields. Domesticated fruit plants have had thousands of years of selective breeding for larger size and improved flavour. Establishing new cereal (or pseudocereal) crops is likewise challenging, since any new plants need to compete with long-established crops such as wheat, barley or maize which have thousands of years of cultivation for increased yields and ease of harvesting. Moreover, in twentieth century terms, most new Australian crops need to compete with plants which are mechanically harvested. The most promising Australian native staple crops, the Acacias, are quite difficult to harvest mechanically. Notwithstanding these problems, some Australian plant species have been domesticated, and work is continuing in this area. Naturally, an indigenous agricultural civilization would make more exploitation of Australian plant species since there would not be the same competition from overseas plants.

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Thoughts?