For Want of a Yam

Who knew you could build such a great TL on Yams?

Dashed interesting idea, this, old boy. I fear I can't contribute anything of substance, but I'll be watching with interest!

Another TL? About yams?

This isn't meant to be a full timeline. It's meant to be a discussion thread where everyone can throw in ideas. I don't have the time to write another full timeline. I don't even know if I have the energy to finish DoD.
(Okay, I'm kidding about that last sentence.)

Advance *Islamic Australia Fair!

Heh. I'm not actually sure if Islam will reach *Australia in time to matter; the domesticated yams won't be penetrating the Northern Territory until at least 1500 or 1600. But still, it would be an entertaining possibility.

So we have the yams reaching the tropics around 1500AD?

More or less. They will slowly spread north; I expect it would take another hundred years or more for them to penetrate as far north as, say, Cairns.

Any kind of society will produce trade goods, and I think that it's quite likely that trade will occur between New Guinea and *Australia once the *Australian societies have spread far enough north.

Assuming that there is enough sea contact between them, sure, there'll be trade of some kind.

This will probably cause *Australia to be integrated into the SE Asian economy that existed at the time. We could probably see some Dutch trading posts / colonial activity.

I'm figuring that the Dutch will be the first to try something. They'll be in contact, and unlike in the case of OTL Australia, there'll be settled peoples for them to trade with. Although I'm not sure how profitable the trade will be, unless someone's discovered the alluvial goldfields...

Finally... a reason of the Dutch to have a huge part of Australia... :D

Heh. A Dutch Australia is certainly one of the possibilities for this PoD.

Higher human population means more competition for animal meat. Maybe they'll have more sophisticated weaponry by the time of contact?

Depends on whether they find the resources to enter the bronze age. This is actually a relatively limited timeframe to accomplish it; it took a while after the development of agriculture in OTL. I don't actually know offhand where there are convenient sources of copper and tin in Australia; I'll have to dig around to work that one out.

A TL with gunned Aborigines would be interesting, to say the least.

I suspect that European contact will bring with it an equivalent to the Musket Wars in New Zealand.

Looks cool. :) :cool:

Are yams, particularly domesticated varieties, susceptible to disease? I am thinking of something like the potato blight that affected the crop in Ireland. If they are then one outbreak could spell disaster.

Any mono-crop economy is in one sense susceptible to disease, especially domesticated crops. However, what made the potato blight in Ireland so deadly was that only a couple of varieties of potatoes had made it to Europe, and the potatoes there were thus extremely genetically uniform. This meant that they were all vulnerable. (Potatoes in the Andes have much more genetic variety). ITTL, there would be a wide range of cultivars of Red Yams, so it's unlikely that one disease would wipe them all out.

Even if they are not it still seems a rather limited base for the development of a settled urban culture. Still, as pointed out the Maori managed to do it.

It's going to place severe limits on what happens. Protein deficiency is the most obvious restriction; without hunting, yams aren't going to supply much of that. But at a rough estimate, it will at least triple the carrying capacity of a given area of land. That's enough for a much larger population than Australia had historically.

If the eel farmers in southern Australia had their diet complemented with yams it would make a huge difference to the chances of urbanization in their clan group.

The eel farmers urbanised to a certain degree anyway; they built stone houses and lived in villages/towns of up to a few hundred individuals. Their urbanisation here would be correspondingly larger; towns of a few thousand people, I'd suspect. There are all the obvious limitations, but this is going to make a big difference.

What other bush tucker species grow in that area that has the potential to be domesticated? A varied crop of even a few domesticated species would be advantageous to trade as well as the local development of an urban culture.

I'm not sure about in the immediate area of the Murray Valley, but there's a variety of crops in Australia which could be potentially domesticated. The big thing which was missing was a founder crop; something which would let farming start. Once it had started, it would be easier to explore the possibilities of other crops.

There's a lot of fruits in Australia which could be domesticated (and which is starting to happen today). These would add flavour and variety to the diet, but in terms of caloric intake would remain minor. There's various other plants which might make decent vegetables, too. I'll draw up a list of some of the possibilities and post it to this thread later.

A lack of domestic animals, except for the dingo of course, is a great disadvantage.

It doesn't help, of course, but the crucial factor is going to be whether the population is a farmer society or hunter-gatherer society. In most of the world, areas which had hunter-gatherer societies at the time of European contact saw Europeans become the large majority of the population. Conversely, areas which had farmer societies saw the indigenous inhabitants survive as a substantial percentage of the population.

Could significant technical and social advances take place without beasts of burden?

Depends how you define significant. The Maori and the Aztecs had none and very few domestic animals, respectively. Although I doubt that *Australia will be able to support population centres the size that the Aztecs managed.

Would the lack of such animals mean that any aboriginal proto urban culture be limited to the level of the near eastern first farmers? The first farmers of course had domesticated animals as well as cereal crops.

Not in all areas. The highlands of New Guinea didn't have domesticated areas, although they had multiple crops. The Aztecs and their predecessors had only a few domestic animals at most. But yes, in general terms there's going to be some limits on how far things develop. Especially with the clock ticking until Europeans arrive...

In relation to the yam spreading north, it would appear to be unlikely that it could form the basis for an urban culture. After all, northern Europe remained ‘barbarian’ for centuries because its soils and climate was unsuitable for the types of crops considered the basis for civilization.

It won't happen quickly, certainly, but the transfer is likely to happen over time. The north-south axis will mean that it takes longer to develop varieties which can grow in the tropics. (Much as the reverse happened in spreading maize north from Mesoamerica to the rest of North America). But new varieties could be bred, albeit slowly. And they likely would be bred by the same processes of artificial selection as happened in OTL.

More advanced aboriginal civilizations that developed in the south could conceivably found colonies or trading posts all the way up the coast. But the Murray Valley is a LONG way from northern Australia.

It's a long way, but no more so than the distance from Tenochtitlan to Boston, and varieties of maize were bred which could make the jump. Still, I'd agree that the most populous and advanced urban cultures would develop in the southeast, and maybe in the southwest around Perth if the trade routes bring yams there early enough. (One of the advantage of yams for transfer that way is that they keep so well.)

Aboriginal Australians reached the Murray Valley area relatively soon after their ancestors arrived. If such a yam existed, it would be eaten by what was at the time the most advanced culture on the planet. I would expect this to lead to the establishment of an urban-based culture very early indeed, particularly if fish farming and the domestication of other suitable plants proceeded apace. It would not be beyond the realms of possibility that a city civilization would exist long before Sumer.

The odd thing about domestication of crops is that while humans had lived in contact with domesticable varieties of crops for tens of thousands of years, including previous warm interglacial periods, but domestication didn't start until the beginning of the current interglacial. Then it developed independently in at least four areas, over a timeframe which depended on how readily crops could be developed. (The Middle East and China happened early, New Guinea and Mesoamerica happened later. It's still open for debate whether the Andean and West African agricultural zones developed independently or not.) The reasons for this are not easy to figure out; maybe something about the stresses of that era of climate change triggered the shift to farming. But the pattern is pretty clear, and hence I'd expect that domestication of the red yam isn't going to really start until after the end of the last interglacial. Even then, while it's at least domesticable, I've assumed it takes longer than it took to domesticate maize. Hence I've settled on a timeframe of roughly 1500 years ago for there to be fully domesticated varieties. But the population is going to spread pretty quickly from there.

This all presumes that the yam can indeed provide the basis for settled, densely populated civilization.

It is an assumption, but I think it's a reasonable one. The example of the Maori shows that single-crop cultures can be formed, and there are several examples of domesticable yam species around. None in Australia, admittedly, but that doesn't mean that there couldn't be one.

I doubt that the presence of a domesticable species of yam in Australia would have had much effect, unless you couple that with other environmental or cultural factors. Rarely do hunter-gatherers adopt horticulture (especially intensive horticulture) unless they find themselves in environmentally constrained situations facing overpopulation. Never in human history have people voluntarily adandoned a hunting gathering economy unless they have to. Agriculture takes more effort, requires more energy, and requires more complex social and economic rules. Nobody like that, least of all hunter-gatherers.

The stresses of the end of the ice age would have been enough to start people down the road of domestication; it happened all over the world, why not Australia? And given the historical examples, it's not a case of people waking up and deciding to become farmers. It's a gradual process; they harvest the red yam as part of their diet, applying principles of artificial selection without necessarily meaning to, and they gradually shift to a domesticated crop. From that, they develop higher population densities, which leads to urbanisation. There were the starts of urbanisation in Australia even without domesticable crops (see the eel-farming communities I mentioned), and with a domesticable crop, it's likely to be the same shift which happens elsewhere. And once some cultural group has adopted farming, they tend to spread by force of numbers. Farmer societies can simply put more bodies in the line when compared to hunter-gatherer bands.

To make this idea work, you need to create reasons aboriginal population would increase to the point where it places strains on the ability of the natural habitat to sustain it...or change history and have the first aborigines migrate to the continent with a pre-existing knowldge of practical agriculture.

Agriculture was independently invented in at least four areas, and I'm not aware of there being great periods of strain in all of those areas. (In New Guinea, in particular).

After all, the Maoris did not develop agriculture in New Zealand, they came from places where agriculture was already a major element of the subsistence pattern.

The exmaple of the Maori was only to show that one-crop farmer societies could exist, not as a pattern for how agriculture developed in the first place.

If you did get this to happen, I would tend to imagine the agricultural tribes would probably occupy the wet tropical north, where societies not unlike those in New Guinea would evolve. One might then imagine a situation where these groups would then reach population densities forcing the development of more stuctured and heirarchical socities, especially if they attempted to expand into the more arid areas where irrigation and other collaborative intensive agricultural practices are necessary.

It depends on where the domesticable species happen to be. The yams which happen to grow in the tropical north are not easily domesticable. Not as founder crops, anyway. (Nor are those in the south.) I picked the Murray Valley for the location of an alternate species of yam which was domesticable.

There is evidence that the artifacts originally described as fish traps in the Murray Valley area were in fact primitive attempts to farm fish, particularly eels. That they worked is shown by the centuries of use. This may well indicate that the pressures you mentioned had occured and this was the response. It could also mean that the theory is wrong and that when humans discover a particularly delicious food source they attempt to farm it.

There were eel-farming communities in a couple of areas in Victoria. (The Murray Valley was one.) These were people who built stone houses, in the first stage of urbanisation. An eyewitness account also reports acres of wild yam fields growing there. That was my inspiration for placing the red yam in that area - how much more would those societies have grown if there were domesticable yams in the Murray Valley

It is now generally accepted that climate change was the trigger for the development of agriculture in the Middle East. Such changes have occured in Australia as well. With the existence of a viable species of domesticable and edible plant, the possibility of urban development is likely. It happened all over the world after all except in Australia and most probably because of the absence of the equivilent of a cereal crop.

Not all of the developments of agriculture used cereal crops. New Guinea's agriculture used root crops - yams and taro - and fruits. Also sugarcane, but that wasn't their main source of calories.

You are correct. Climate change can often result in increased pressures on an existing population to prompt greater dependence on intensive agriculture.

There's been no shortage of climate change in Australia. If memory serves, there was a big one starting around 4000 years ago which had other cultural effects in OTL. I'll try to dig up some more of the details.

Very interesting Jared. I look forward to what you have in store for this TL. But how densely populated could Australia get with just better food? And the tech gap will still be quite large with simply the length of Eurasia and all that Guns Germs and Steel stuff. You've read the book I hope and I'll just trust you'll make it plausible.

As per upthread, this isn't meant to be a TL in itself, just a collaborative discussion thread. But what I'm thinking of isn't a case of Australia developing a technology enough to fend off European invasion. The differences are going to be profound, but mostly having to do with higher population density. And yes, a farming society can have a population density several times higher than a hunter-gatherer society. Compare the populations, for example, of the North and South Island of New Zealand. The kumar didn't grow very well in most of the South Island, leaving the people there as near-hunter-gatherers. (Not exactly, but near enough.) The North Island isn't bigger, but it had a much larger population.

PS so this will replace DoD?

Nah; I'm abandoning DoD for reasons which have nothing to do with this thread. (Kidding, people.)[/

Maybe this was already happening there is evidence to suggest that Australias desertification was caused by thousands of years of fire stick hunting. (Setting fire to the bush and killing the things that ran way from the flames)

Firestick farming seems to have been used for tens of thousands of years. It was deliberate land management; keeping open areas for kangaroos to grow, for instance, and rotating those areas so that there was always a supply of kangaroos to hunt. But these practices needed large areas to work, which leads to the low population density I've mentioned upthread.

In the North West espesially aroung Kalbarri the Abboriginals were actually growing crops. This is largly thought to have been the influence of Dutch sailors shipwrecked on the West coast in the 1600's. As the Abborigals are the only ones in the entire contenant who cultivated a crop.

Aboriginal peoples around Australia harvested wild crops, resowed the seeds in some cases, and left parts of yams in the ground so that they could be reharvested next year. But without a fully domesticable crop, the population density remained low. If the agriculture of the New Guinea highlands could have somehow been transferred to parts of Australia, it would have worked very well, too. But transfer was difficult because highland agriculture didn't work in the lowlands of New Guinea, and thus didn't spread further...

Love PODs from a seemingly minor change!:)

I do, unfortunately, have to disagree with you regarding the percentage of native die off from imported European diseases. Western Hemisphere experiences indicate a die off more on the order of 90%+, especially in areas with some population density.

The worst-hit areas lost up to 90%, but it doesn't seem to have been that bad across whole continents. The problem is that even the best-intentioned estimates are rubbery... I think that 80% is a reasonable estimate, but even if it's close to 90%, that still means a large enough surviving population to have interesting effects downtime.

One of the biggest killers would be measles, which proved to be just as lethal to virgin populations as Small Pox (although small pox gets all the ink!)

There was a whole cocktail of diseases, plus other factors, certainly.

Yams are hardly a minor change!

Especially some of the varieties which can grow up to 25kg tubers...

I've been thinking about pre-European Australia and contact in the last few days, and the society in the Condah swamp. Here are links which give a bit of info about the area, basically the Gundijimara built up stone wiers etc to make the swamp into an eel farming area, and lived a resonably sedentary, structured lifestyle.
www.eniar.org/news/stones.html
www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s806276.htm
If you throw 'red yams' into the mix and all of a sudden you have the ability to carry large populations in selected areas. Perhaps this combination of improved wetlands and 'red yams' would result in something similar to one of the American societies, pre Columbus.

These were the areas I was thinking of. Yam farming would be a natural extension of what happened there, if there was a domesticable species. Although I suspect that the yams would spread further than the eel-farming itself, which was more restricted in terms of wet areas to spread to.
 
I think the improved wetlands would provide a needed second prop to hold up fixed societies, with hunting as the third. Without the wetlands with their eels the people would have to spend so much time and energy looking for the extras they needed that it would take away from their yam farming. Unless they could supplement the yams with some other concentrated food source.
 

Rockingham

Banned
Just a thought, though its rather impossible without beasts of burden....

(OK, firstly, with 100 000 years or more POD, I think their are gonna be some butterflies, so we may not be able to talk of the "Dutch" for example)

Australia is rather large, so the "Dutch" won't be interested in full conquest. Mightn't we instead see various European peoples setting up client states, ala the Indian Raj?

Pity about DoD, but it was to good to last:D.... simple exhaustion of it on your behalf I suppose? Or something else?
 
according to GGS, some people from SE Asia did visit Australia... they didn't stay because of the harsh terrain, and the Native Australians didn't adopt any of the domestic animals (other than dogs) because they didn't have the agriculture to make use of them. With this POD, might not pigs be useful to them? They could eat the leftover parts of the yams and provide some needed protein...
 
I can't think of much right now, but I tend to agree the area around Perth, and the Murray valley region would probably be good places for states to form. The east is kind of hilly, so it might prevent the development of one unified state. Would they develop tech powerful enough to fight off the Europeans. It depends on how bad the population pressures are. And from the potential Jared mentions here, it sounds like there could be some problems.
 

Rockingham

Banned
I can't think of much right now, but I tend to agree the area around Perth, and the Murray valley region would probably be good places for states to form. The east is kind of hilly, so it might prevent the development of one unified state. Would they develop tech powerful enough to fight off the Europeans. It depends on how bad the population pressures are. And from the potential Jared mentions here, it sounds like there could be some problems.
Ok, I'm picturing Greek style city states at the moment:p

This deserves a TL
 
I think the improved wetlands would provide a needed second prop to hold up fixed societies, with hunting as the third. Without the wetlands with their eels the people would have to spend so much time and energy looking for the extras they needed that it would take away from their yam farming. Unless they could supplement the yams with some other concentrated food source.

Depends on size of the settlements, and the particular areas under discussion. Most peoples near the sea are going to be able to get supplementary protein and other nutrients mostly from seafood. Those near the Murray would indeed use wetlands; those were able to sustain populations of up to several hundred individuals in one location even without a domesticated crop.

There's also the possibility that other Australian flora will be domesticated after yams. As I discussed upthread, that wasn't going to many of the others domesticated without a founder crop in the first place. It's not that Australian plants are useless, it's just that it's hard to get a sedentary society started with them. The macadamia has been domesticated recently, for instance, and I suspect it would be domesticated ATL too. I'll post a list of other possible candidates for domestication further down in this post.

Just a thought, though its rather impossible without beasts of burden....

(OK, firstly, with 100 000 years or more POD, I think their are gonna be some butterflies, so we may not be able to talk of the "Dutch" for example)

Depends how you strictly you adhere to the butterfly laws; it isn't as if the domesticated crops are going to have much effects outside of Australia until relatively recently. I prefer to treat the time of the actual domestication as the "effective" PoD.

Australia is rather large, so the "Dutch" won't be interested in full conquest. Mightn't we instead see various European peoples setting up client states, ala the Indian Raj?

I suspect that with the rather late start, plus the inevitable wave of deaths whenever the *Australians come into contact with someone from Eurasia, will limit that. If the Dutch (or *Dutch) aren't interested in conquest, what might happen is more along the lines of the Musket Wars in New Zealand or the Hawaiian unification: peoples with trade access to firearms conquer those who don't.

Pity about DoD, but it was to good to last:D.... simple exhaustion of it on your behalf I suppose? Or something else?

The bit written in white upthread might be a bit of a giveaway.

according to GGS, some people from SE Asia did visit Australia... they didn't stay because of the harsh terrain, and the Native Australians didn't adopt any of the domestic animals (other than dogs) because they didn't have the agriculture to make use of them. With this POD, might not pigs be useful to them? They could eat the leftover parts of the yams and provide some needed protein...

Pigs would be extremely useful if they could get them. Unfortunately, with the timeframe Ive suggested, then the northern reaches of Australia would not get domesticated crops until very late. So there may not be time for pigs to spread south before Europeans arrive. Not more than a couple of hundred years at most, and that's assuming that Southeast Asian traders come immediately.

I can't think of much right now, but I tend to agree the area around Perth, and the Murray valley region would probably be good places for states to form. The east is kind of hilly, so it might prevent the development of one unified state. Would they develop tech powerful enough to fight off the Europeans. It depends on how bad the population pressures are. And from the potential Jared mentions here, it sounds like there could be some problems.

In terms of developing tech to fight off the Europeans, I rather doubt it. At best, they'd be in the bronze age as far as tech goes. But the larger the initial population, the likelier it is to survive as a substantial component of the modern population.

For unified areas, I'd agree that the Murray Valley and southwestern areas are likely to form unified cultural zones. I'm not so sure about unified states. Maybe, although much depends on the details of how the societies develop first. City-states may be more likely.

Ok, I'm picturing Greek style city states at the moment:p

This deserves a TL

If there's any volunteers to write a TL based on this, let me know...

Some more ideas, in no particular order.

The population density is going to be increased over OTL, but it's still going to be pretty thinly-spread in most cases. But then that's true of OTL Australia anyway; even the fertile areas are thinly populated. (Limited water, dontchaknow.)

I'm expecting that the *Aboriginals will adapt to domesticated crops in different ways. In areas where wetlands can be "upgraded", then the population is going to be relatively high. Eel farming has been mentioned, the harvesting of waterbirds and so on, some gathering of other wetland plants, and so forth. Settlements of several hundred individuals are possible, probably even a couple of thousand in some cases. I doubt that we're talking any big cities here, but there'd be strings of towns along the Murray, and in other areas with wetlands.

Areas along the coast will get a lot of seafood, and the general hunting will be good. Expect no shortage of coastal towns and villages along much of Australia, although not in areas where the seas are barren.

For areas away from large water sources, I'd expect an adaptation of what happened in OTL. Individual Aboriginal peoples had (and have) what they called their "country", i.e. the territory belonging to a particular people. The inner regions of OTL Sydney were Eora country, for instance. These lands would be managed in a variety of ways, especially burning on a rotation system to keep some grasslands open for kangaroos.

ATL, I'd expect this practice to be adapted to a larger population. Sedentary peoples would be even more vigorous in defending their territory. I'd expect that each village or town would have a central farming area close to where they live, and a wider hunting range for kangaroos (and other game). Their country would be quite vigorously defended, since meat would be a preferred food. This would likely lead to a variation of turf wars over hunting areas.

As I mentioned upthread, I'd expect some other *Australian plants to be domesticated to some degree. (This may just consist of collecting their seeds and resowing them.) There's a variety of plants which could potentially be domesticated. I'm looking mostly at ones in the southeastern areas of Australia, since this is where farming would start, and hence there would be longer to domesticate suitable crops.

Macadamia nuts (Macadamia integrifolia and Macadamia tetraphylla) are a no-brainer as far as domestication goes. Very tasty, quite healthy, and a likely dietary addition when farmers reach their home range in northern NSW and southern Queensland. Because they only grow in subtropical areas, though, they aren't going to spread south to the more heavily settled areas.

The native peach/quandong (Santalum acuminatum) is an odd plant. It's what's called a root parasite; its roots leach some of their nutritional requirements from the rootstock of other trees/shrubs in the area. It produces a tasty fruit and nut which has also seen some attempts for domestication today. It has a widespread range, including around the Murray Valley and surrounding areas. There have been registered cultivars of the plant as a fruit crop today, and I expect that it would be developed as a fruit crop by a farming society. There are a variety of other Australian fruits which could be domesticated as well, but I suspect that the quandong would be the most widely-used.

Warrigal greens (various species of Tetragonia) are a green leafy vegetable which would be a healthy part of the diet, and would also likely be domesticated.

Another type of plant which would be quite likely to be domesticated is various species of Acacia, such as the wattles. Many of these plants produce edible seeds which are quite high in protein. They're fast growing and can cope with a variety of soils. Importantly, as legumes they're also nitrogen-fixers. Growing them alongside yams or in rotation would be a very valuable way of restoring the fertility of the soil. The most likely species to be domesticated would be Gundabluey (Acacia victoriae) - which is used in OTL a bit - and related species such as the Sydney golden wattle (Acacia longifolia).

In a related thought, most *Australian cooking would be rather spicy. There are a wide variety of Australian plants with strongly flavoured leaves and/or fruits which were used to flavour food even in OTL. They aren't going to be of that much nutritional benefit, but they'll add a lot of varieties of flavour to what would otherwise be almost endless yams...
 
(Okay, I'm kidding about that last sentence.)

Phew. I was worried for a second. To not finish the most detailed TL on this board would totally suck.

Anyway, I like the ideas and I remember the contact between New Guineans and Aboriginals mentioned in Guns, Germs, and Steel. I wonder if that could a way for Australia to receive more domesticate animals and better farming techniques.
 
I was down in SW Vic/SE SA on the weekend, my parents live just up the road from the Condah Swamp 'improved wetland' where the villiages were. It's pretty good country, decent sized rivers, good rainfall etc. with yams and improved wetlands it could support a (relatively) thick but evenly spread population, considering that eels alone supported thick populations.
 
Hey, I lived in Australia for around 6 months. While I was there I read a rather old article about Kangaroo ranching. The article claimed that herding these Kangaroos for their meat and their pelts would be much more environmentally friendly as the native animals put much less strain on the environment than say cattle or sheep.

Perhaps these Aborigines, with the establishment of a somewhat agrarian society take up ranching 'roos as a way to suppliment their diet?
 
The problem with roos is that they are too fast and jump too well, it's probably like trying to farm antelope or springbok, you couldn't catch them or fence them in. Another problem with roos is that they live for 30 years and breed only every 3 years, unlike a cow who lives for 10 years and breeds every year. However with firestick farming the Aboriginies created a lot of habitat with was favorable to roos, and made their hunting easier. I'd think the permanent water in the improved wetalands would draw in roos during summer, which would be handy. Perhaps they could be smoked too, like the eels.
 
Phew. I was worried for a second. To not finish the most detailed TL on this board would totally suck.

DoD has gone through a bit of a lull for a couple of weeks due to various RL commitments, but it will be back. There's four posts in the works, including two by guest authors, and there should be a few more instalments soon. I was hoping to finish the TL before I head to Europe, but now that doesn't look very likely. Oh well...

Anyway, I like the ideas and I remember the contact between New Guineans and Aboriginals mentioned in Guns, Germs, and Steel. I wonder if that could a way for Australia to receive more domesticate animals and better farming techniques.

It's not impossible, by any means, but I suspect that the timeframe is going to be a bit limited. New Guinea isn't exactly overloaded with domesticated animals either...

One thing which is quite possible is that there would be contact with New Zealand, rather than New Guinea. It's likely that the Maori reached Australia in OTL - the distance is no worse than the trip from Polynesia to New Zealand in the first place. They had no attractions to make them stay, though, and nothing to trade with. It's possible that with towns now established across the coast of eastern Australia, there is more substantial contact. Kumara may make it across to Australia. So might New Zealand flax (Phormium tenax and Phormium cookianum), which is unrelated to common flax but is an extremely useful plant for fibre (clothes, ropes, mats, linen etc). That would have interesting effects on *Aboriginal culture.

I was down in SW Vic/SE SA on the weekend, my parents live just up the road from the Condah Swamp 'improved wetland' where the villiages were. It's pretty good country, decent sized rivers, good rainfall etc. with yams and improved wetlands it could support a (relatively) thick but evenly spread population, considering that eels alone supported thick populations.

Yup. This is going to be an important concentration of people. And there is scope to expand "improved wetland" over a wide area. One odd thing about Australia in this era is that there aren't really any tropical diseases to be bred through mosquitoes. So living near wetlands isn't really a health hazard in the same way it was in much of the world at the time. (Malaria, anyone?)

Hey, I lived in Australia for around 6 months. While I was there I read a rather old article about Kangaroo ranching. The article claimed that herding these Kangaroos for their meat and their pelts would be much more environmentally friendly as the native animals put much less strain on the environment than say cattle or sheep.

They would be more environmentally friendly from a meat point of view.

Perhaps these Aborigines, with the establishment of a somewhat agrarian society take up ranching 'roos as a way to suppliment their diet?

The problem with roos is that they are too fast and jump too well, it's probably like trying to farm antelope or springbok, you couldn't catch them or fence them in.

Yup. It's hard to domesticate an animal which can jump over fences.

Another problem with roos is that they live for 30 years and breed only every 3 years, unlike a cow who lives for 10 years and breeds every year.

Not exactly. The average lifespan of wild kangaroos is usually estimated at less than 15 years. And their breeding is more frequent than once every 3 years; a female kangaroo can be supporting 3 young at once (an embryo, a small joey inside the pouch, and one which spends most of its time outside). How quickly joeys emerge from the pouch depends on the general feeding conditions.

However with firestick farming the Aboriginies created a lot of habitat with was favorable to roos, and made their hunting easier. I'd think the permanent water in the improved wetalands would draw in roos during summer, which would be handy. Perhaps they could be smoked too, like the eels.

Smoked meat is a definite possibility.

On a related note, I'm not sure what fibres would be used for clothing. Possibly some bark fibres, but I haven't really looked into that.

And in something of a separate note, here's an excerpt describing the farming practices of an *Aboriginal town:

* * *

To the eyes of a man raised in the ways of farming in Europe, the whole country looked wild. Oh, the stone houses were familiar enough, although these peoples were too backward to have heard of things like glass. The small town or large village or whatever it was looked like it held a couple of thousand people. Nothing much compared to Rotterdam or any other Dutch city, but still something far larger than he had expected to find here.

The crowded streets were familiar enough, too, but with some strange exceptions. No animals to share the streets except a few dogs. No horses, no chickens, nothing. The common meats he had seen on offer was eel and swan [1], and some smoked offerings of red-gray meat he presumed was from the large hopping-rats of this strange land.

But alien though the town was, it was commonplace compared to what the inhabitants called their "farms"; as best as he could render their native words into Dutch. The first time he asked about their farms, his guide had pointed to the swamps not too far outside the town's fringes. He had asked if they planned to drain the waters there and then farm what would be rich soil. Like any good Dutchman, he knew about how to reclaim land from underwater.

His guide had just reared back, like a man responding to a suggestion that he become a eunuch and join the court of the Emperor of India. "We make the swamps for our food. Why would we want to destroy them?" After a lengthy round of explanations, he came to understand that the natives here extended and maintained those swamps to let them harvest eels, fish and waterbirds. To them, water was a sign of wealth and plenty in an otherwise dry land. It was like seeing the Netherlands turned upside down.

He had persisted in trying to ask about farms. These strange people did not live by eels alone. He had seen the large red tubers which seemed to be their biggest source of food. Sweet and juicy; not a bad meal, although he suspected he would grow sick of it before long. They must grow those somewhere.

But when shown the "fields" where those crops were grown, he scarcely recognised them as fields. Vines spread along the ground and sometimes propped up with sticks. It was flowering time, and the flowers were mostly white with purple edging to their petals. Large vines, and abundantly grown, but what a strange crop! It seemed entirely useless to his mind. Where were the plowed fields, or the irrigation? These people seemed to use none. To a man accustomed to wheatfields, and who had seen maize and rice growing, these strange tubers were something he could not fathom.

Until, that is, he saw a couple of the natives digging up one of the tubers. It was at least four feet long, and looked like it weighed at least twenty pounds! His guide explained that they pulled a tuber of this size from the vines every year, and harvested them in rotation over the spring and summer so that there would always be some available.

These strange fields yielded more than just tubers. There were some smaller plants scattered between the vines; green plants with triangular leaves. The leaves were edible, apparently, and the plants grew throughout the spring and summer, according to his guide. They were used to flavour some of the extracts of yams. He was not a man who appreciated green leaves in his food - he was not a rabbit - but the natives seemed to like them well enough.

Their other two main crops, he did not even realise until they were pointed out. There were trees growing amongst the fields here, scattered almost at random. Most of them had dark-green leaves and magnificent golden flowers. Who would bother to leave trees amongst the fields? They would just get in the way. But no, his guide explained, these trees were much-loved. The seeds of those green and gold trees were very tasty and a treasured source of energy. Better yet, growing these trees alongside the yams replenished the soil. That sounded like what farmers back home sometimes did with clover, but these trees were rather too big to be clovers. The trees also attracted birds, the guide said. To a farmer back home, that would have been bad news, since the birds would eat the grain. But the birds here did not dig for tubers, and they ate a lot of insects who otherwise would damage the plants.

The other kind of tree was much rarer, and looked plainer than the golden trees. It only grew individually between several of the golden trees; never two of these trees together. It had small white flowers, too, but nothing which looked like it might be edible. His guide said that this tree produced a fruit which was favoured in its season. Here at last was a crop which I could understand, even if I could not yet see the fruit...

[1] Yes, Flocculencio, if you come to *Australia you can indeed eat a swan.
 
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