So more populous population centres that are more tightly packed together? Given that lacking waterways, a city would have to be essentially adjacent to farmland for easy food transport, I imagine this would affect the overall layout of civilization with less small villages and town laid about, it'd be advantageous to instead have all the labour required for not only the production of food but also the transport in one city.
The value and use of land is linked to how close it is to riverine transportation. The land closest to the river is used for aquaculture, where possible, or the sort of premium cash crops which require irrigation. Land slightly further from the river is used for root crops (highe bulk than wattles), and land further than that used for seed and fibre crops (wattles, flax, purslane etc).
Land further away than that is still managed intensively, in line with the Aururian land management practices, but not farmed in the traditional sense. Timber for coppicing, berries for gathering, managed for possum fur trapping (basically by placing nest boxes), production of aromatics, rangelands for hunting kangaroos, etc. But while people visit these rangelands regularly, their main homes are nearer the river. There's still satellite towns and villages, but these are rarely more than a day's travel from the nearesst waterway, except where there are special resouces (eg mines).
And if I'm not wrong, Aururian crops could produce more per unit of land than European crops, which would allow the lands just outside the city to be productive enough to feed it without too much expansion of farmland needed.
Generally yes, though whether Aururian crops are more productive per land varies considerably depending on which crop and period it's being compared to. Tuber crops during this era tend to yield higher than cereal crops anyway (though they don't store as well). Cereal crops also required that a portion of the harvest be kept as seed grain for next year (up to half of the total yield, for early farming), so wattles are more productive simply because the seed grain doesn't need to be kept.
Even where Aururian crops are not more productive per unit of land, they are much more poductive per worker. This tends to lead to individual farms being larger and cultivating a greater variety of crops, timed to harvest and maintain at times when the staple crops are not beng harvested or maintained. Depending on the location and era, this may be fibre crops, cash crops such as kunduri or aromatics, dyes, animal husbandry (emus, ducks, dogs) etc.
So this tends to lead to a given area of land requiring fewer workers, and thus a greater proportion of the poulation live in the towns and cities and follow non-agricultural occupations.
I guess then the introduction of Old World draught animals would represent an exponential change in the expansion of civilization, where lands farther away from can be made agriculturally productive, and also allow for more smaller settlements to pop up in between as well. As well as reducing the labour involved in porter work, so those workers could now specialize in some other job.
The introduction of European daft animals certainly makes for more efficient transportation, although it's one element in an already-booming agriclutral revolution. The kicker was actually the spread of ironworking, a few centuries earlier, which meant that they had access to many more metal tools. This made farming much more efficient, with better digging tools, better land clearing, more irrigation of prime crops, more haresting of timber, and also more land on which to produce food for dogs. Dog-travois made for better transprtation and better access to lands further from the river.
This procexs was of course accelerated with the arrival of European draft animals, and also European metallurgy. Aururian agricultural productivity has increased significantly sine European contact, even setting aside the effect of the plagues. (The plagues raised agricultural productivity because more marginal agricultural lands were abandoned).
I suppose then that the Kiyungu and Panjimundra can basically represent the early form of Aururian civilization, if the earliest civilizations in Aururia are cities that make agricultural use of all surrounding lands to a point but have no other settlements under their political control, thus the highest form of political organization they developed is the city-state, whereas in the Old World you would find more scattered small settlements in early civilizations than cities, and more territory could be politically united. Not so much because of military power projection, but of simple travel difficulties; people can only carry stuff so far by themselves.
And trade and travel would be slow and difficult enough between these city-states that any sort of political-cultural union between them would be untenable, and technology and ideas go slower to these places.
Broadly yes, although it's worth emphasising that people
can] transport goods long distances. So can dogs. It's just that it's more expensive than with draft animals, and so this affects both trade and military power. Long-distance trade still exists in high-value goods - spices, dyes, aromatics, coral, tin ore, etc - but often through a chain of intermediaries rather than directly.
Water supplies also had a restrictive effect on the Panjimundra (not really the Kiyungu) as reliable water wasn't as easily available, so they tended to have larger farmlands which produced less per acre (though still high per worker) and larger rangelands used particularly for hunting kangaroos, more than using domesticated animals.
What were the specific reasons for the Atjuntja and Yadji coalescing, by the way?
For the Yadji, a combination of a series of extremely gifted rulers who were capable of winning battles, and the adoption of a military system which emphasised larger numbers of warriors rather than a small elite corps. (Death warriors, but not just them - the Yadji engaged more regular soliders too). That let them build up the necessary coreland.
For the Atjuntja, they were the first adopters of ironworking. This allowed them to both have more iron-armed soldiers, and also improve their agricultural productivity more than their neighbours, and produce a significantly larger population. This, again, allowed them to conquer a large enough coreland that they could form an empire.
The thing about wattles that might be relevant to this is, while they may allow for the annual harvest times that arguably contributed to the development of states which could coordinate the activity (not sure whether wattles can only be harvested only once a year) of planting and harvest year after year, wattles would require just a single planting, and being perennial, would give year after year. Red yams would have to be harvested and replanted, so I imagine they would require more labour year around than collecting wattleseed would.
Doesn't discount a wattle-based civilization, but it would be getting rid of the planting-harvest-replanting structure of early agrarian civilizations.
Yams are only really harvested/replanted once a year, the same as wattles. In late autumn/early winter, the red yams (and murnong) are dug up, harvested and replanted at the same time. (For red yams, cut off the top of the tuber and replant that while keeping the rest. For murnong, replant one of the four (or eight) tubers and harvest the rest.) There is a secondary time required in spring to check whether the tubers have sprouted again and replant a new seed or tuber if necessary, but this requires only a small part of the labour as generally speaking a tuber will last for ten or more seasons before the plant fails to resprout.
For wattles, they do indeed only produce seeds once a year. There is also a smaller post-harvest period of work required, pruning the wattles, replanting a portion of them (again the wattles last for about 10-15 years before they die).
However, the important point is that Aururian farmers do not harvest just one crop. The same farmers will be planting/harvesting red yams/munong at one time of year, and wattles at a different time of year (Generally one species of wattle pre-Interregnum, two species of wattles affter that, chosen so that they produce seeds at different seasons). So there is an overall package of labour required at set times throughout most of the year. There is about three months off when labour can be drafted for other purposes, which in early Aururian farming was mostly drafting labour for maintaining aquaculture. Later this was also in public works and in mobilising farmers as militia during the campaign season.
Also, I was thinking about what cash crops the Nuttana can grow aside from sugar, and possibly cotton, coffee, opium poppy, and kratom, and cannabis seems an obvious choice. Not only rivals alcohol as the most used recreational drugs, but is widespread in production and usage all across Asia and Africa by this point.
Cotton tends to work better further south than the Nuttana lands - they have too much rain at the wrong time of year to grow cotton reliably. Or maybe this depends on the species - the big cotton-growing lands in Australia are inland and further south. But this is short-staple cotton, I believe - long-staple cotton might be different. Even if the Nuttana could grow cotton, though, India is producing a huge amount of cotton during this period, and has cheap labour for spinning and weaving.
Coffee is grown a bit in OTL in the equivalent of Nuttana lands, but is finicky and requires a lot of fertiliser. I suspect that the Nuttana would experiment but mostly give up on the idea, since any land which could possibly grow coffee could definitely grow sugar, and sugar is proven profitable.
Kratom, as discussed previously, is probably a winner for the Nuttana.
The opium poppy might grow in Nuttana lands - not sure offhand - but there will be big production in the Five Rivers as well during this period, since they've figured out a cheap method of producing almost-morphine (it actually doesn't get rid of most of the codeine)
Cannabis I'm doubtful will be useful, because it is a plant which can be easily grown almost anywhere. Hemp is very easily cultivatable, and indeed was widespread in cultivation in OTL all over the place as both fibre and drug. If there's an Aururian market for it, the European trading companies would be both able and willing to supply it. Especially since they're always looking for goods to market to the Five Rivers and Durigal to maintain the trade balance (for silver and dyes particularly in the Five Rivers, and gold and jeeree in Durigal).
I also have an interesting theory on why cannabis was popular as a recreational drug in the hotter regions of the earth (aside from the fact that it grew more readily in, say, India rather than Ireland), and it's based on the fact that cannabis actually has a physiological cooling effect, dropping body temperature a few degrees. So I posit it could be used as a way to feel comfortable even in equatorial temperatures. If one thing Aururia does not lack for, it's heat, so if my theory holds any water Aururians would likely prefer cannabis to alcohol for that reason, plus the lack of drunkenness and hangovers making day-use possible without making one uselessly drunk. So like kratom it could be encouraged instead of alcohol to be used by labourers to have them be able to work even if not sober.
Interesting theory. There may well be a market for cannabis in Aururia, but I doub that the Nuttana could maintain an exclusive one for very long. Even if they maintain a premium product, that is only going to be a small part of the market, with most grown locally.
