MacCaulay
Banned
I was working last night and this thought came into my head fully formed but without background:
It was a piece of TV footage from the mid-1980s, taken along the northeastern Australian coast. It showed two or three wheeled vehicles carrying troops driving past the camera towards a city in the distance that was smoking, and they were waving as they went by.
The logic seemed to be that there was an Australian country, but also some sort of Aborigine country as well that was poor in that sort of Palestinian-post1989 way we know so well.
These troops were moving into the Aborigine country after some sort of terrorist attack or something.
I tried to figure out what the background was, and near as I could figure, the aborigine population was higher than in OTL, about double or triple. At some point during their early history, Australia then was cut off from the outside world for some reason, for a decade or two. When people started coming back, they'd found that the Australians had been carrying on farely well without help (due in some part to Aborigine slave labour) and that they didn't really want the world to come back in and tell them what to do.
When gold was struck, the Australians (there's less of them in this TL, since the settlement was stopped for a period and then mostly curtailed after that) brought in some foreigners to help mine it, and used the money to buy modern machinery for their country and weapons to finally push in from the coast against the natives in the interior that were holding them against the water.
Then there's this blank spot I don't quite have anything for, but somehow the Aborigines and Australians are still fighting this Outback War during WWII even though the Australians fight the Japanese. Then somehow the Communists prop up an Aborigine state in Australia or something. It gets hazy and indistinct.
I'm posting this on pre-1900 since the POD would probably be before, but I figured I'd just throw this out there for folks to pick at. I don't figure it's possible, but I'm throwing it up anyway.
It was a piece of TV footage from the mid-1980s, taken along the northeastern Australian coast. It showed two or three wheeled vehicles carrying troops driving past the camera towards a city in the distance that was smoking, and they were waving as they went by.
The logic seemed to be that there was an Australian country, but also some sort of Aborigine country as well that was poor in that sort of Palestinian-post1989 way we know so well.
These troops were moving into the Aborigine country after some sort of terrorist attack or something.
I tried to figure out what the background was, and near as I could figure, the aborigine population was higher than in OTL, about double or triple. At some point during their early history, Australia then was cut off from the outside world for some reason, for a decade or two. When people started coming back, they'd found that the Australians had been carrying on farely well without help (due in some part to Aborigine slave labour) and that they didn't really want the world to come back in and tell them what to do.
When gold was struck, the Australians (there's less of them in this TL, since the settlement was stopped for a period and then mostly curtailed after that) brought in some foreigners to help mine it, and used the money to buy modern machinery for their country and weapons to finally push in from the coast against the natives in the interior that were holding them against the water.
Then there's this blank spot I don't quite have anything for, but somehow the Aborigines and Australians are still fighting this Outback War during WWII even though the Australians fight the Japanese. Then somehow the Communists prop up an Aborigine state in Australia or something. It gets hazy and indistinct.
I'm posting this on pre-1900 since the POD would probably be before, but I figured I'd just throw this out there for folks to pick at. I don't figure it's possible, but I'm throwing it up anyway.