Lands of Red and Gold #11: On The Eve Of The Storm
Lands of Red and Gold #11: On The Eve Of The Storm
This instalment of Lands of Red and Gold gives an overview of Australasia as it developed over the millennia since the invention of agriculture, and then a broad overview of how things are in 1618, on the eve of first contact with Europeans. Some of the cultures mentioned in this overview will be explored in more detail in subsequent posts.
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Sometime in the distant unrecorded allohistorical past, a wild yam growing along the River Murray in south-eastern Australia mutated into a new form. The result was a domesticable plant called the red yam, which grew wild along most of the central Murray. Red yams were just one plant among many until humans arrived in Australia. When they reached the Murray, red yams became a staple part of their diet, but there was no particular need to domesticate them (yet).
When the glaciers retreated and the climate entered the current interglacial period, humans around the world started down the road to domesticating plants. The red yam is a more difficult crop to domesticate than some other founder crops, but by around 4000 BC, the plant was fully domesticated. Other plant domestications followed this, most notably another root vegetable called murnong, and several species of wattles, fast-growing trees which bear edible seeds and which have multitudinous other uses. These formed the core of an indigenous Australian agricultural package. These crops are largely perennial, drought-tolerant plants which are well-suited to regions of low or irregular rainfall. As perennials, they also need less labour to produce a useful harvest; the yield per worker for Australian crops is very high. This allows Australian societies to sustain a much higher percentage of their population in non-agricultural roles than other comparable early agricultural peoples.
The Gunnagal, Australia’s first civilization, emerged along the Murray between 2500 and 1000 BC. Their ancestors were already using domesticated crops, but inspired by contact with eel-farming peoples further south, the Gunnagal developed a complex system of artificial lakes and wetlands. These wetlands gave them an excellent source of food from fishing, hunting water birds, and gathering water plants. The planning and organisation needed to build and maintain these wetlands resulted in the development of hierarchical societies and an organised form of government.
The early Gunnagal flourished for about sixteen centuries. They developed many of the fundamentals of civilization: pottery and other ceramics; weaving; metallurgy in copper, lead and arsenical bronze; complex oral law codes and an established government; an organised trade system; and some domesticated animals (ducks and dingos). They did not invent full writing, although they had a developing proto-writing system which used symbols to represent ownership, especially for trade goods, and to indicate container contents. Gunnagal culture spread along the length of the Murray. Religious preferences and reliance on artificial wetlands meant that their settlements were largely confined to the vicinity of the river.
The Gunnagal culture of this period (usually called the Formative era) collapsed after 900 BC, under the pressure of depleted soils and prolonged drought. Many of the displaced peoples expanded across Australia in a series of population movements which would be called the Great Migrations. Gunnagalic-speaking peoples spread their languages, culture, and agriculture across much of south-eastern Australia. The new farming communities spread almost as far north as the Tropic of Capricorn, and to the eastern and southern coastlines of Australia; their western border was the deserts of central Australia. Agriculture spread even further than the limit of the Gunnagal migrations; red yams and a few other crops spread across the deserts to the fertile south-western corner of Australia, which in time would develop its own civilization only loosely connected to peoples further east.
The farming communities formed in the Great Migrations began as isolated settlements, small villages and the like; they would take time to develop into larger political units. Along the Murray itself, the Gunnagal survivors developed better agricultural techniques and through trade contact received a new domesticated animal, the emu. In time, their urban civilization recovered into what would be termed the Classical era. In this time, the Gunnagal developed from small city-states into four kingdoms. They developed a full writing system, mostly used for inscriptions and clay tablets, and this became the basis of a developing government bureaucracy [1]. They perfected the use of tin-alloyed bronze, replacing the older arsenical bronzes, and this new metal became an integral part of their increasing technological expertise. They were particularly successful when working in stone; some of the buildings built in the early days of the Classical era would still be standing and in use two millennia later when first visited by Dutch explorers. The Classical Gunnagal kingdoms were at the heart of extensive trade networks which stretched across the eastern half of the continent, and which carried their culture and ideas far beyond their political borders.
Classical Gunnagal culture survived for centuries. It endured the rise of Australia’s first major epidemic disease, blue-sleep fever, a variant of avian influenza which infected humans. The demise of the Classical Gunnagal eventually came from within. The kingdom of Garrkimang, centred on the eponymous city, was one of the four nations of the Classical Gunnagal. Unlike the others, it was located on a major tributary, the Murrumbidgee, not the Murray proper. The city had been founded during the Great Migrations, and its social structure was less faction-ridden than the older and more traditionalist cities along the main river. Under the determined and largely capable rule of a dynasty of prophet-kings, the kingdom of Garrkimang grew into the largest and wealthiest nation on the continent.
Garrkimang rose as a cultural and military power and eventually eclipsed the other Classical kingdoms. Trading wealth started its growth, but the kingdom’s ultimate success was founded on a number of military innovations. They had greater access to bronze than any other Classical peoples, and created a system of well-armed heavy infantry which used long pikes and shields. Combined with better tactics and training, these soldiers transformed Garrkimang into an empire. Its armies first conquered the other Classical kingdoms, then expanded much further. After conquering the last surviving Classical rival in 556 AD, the nation took the name Watjubaga, the Five Rivers (the Murray, Murrumbidgee, Darling, Lachlan and Macquarie).
Watjubaga was Australia’s first and largest indigenous empire. At its height, it claimed suzerainty over territory which stretched from the Darling Downs in the north to Bass Strait in the south, and to the deserts and the Spencer Gulf in the west. Its eastern border was mostly formed by the Great Dividing Range, apart from tributary city-states in the Hunter Valley. It reached its greatest territorial extent in 822 AD, but its primacy did not last long. Economic disruptions formed by the colonisation of Tasmania and increase in the bronze supply unravelled much of the economy, subject peoples learned how to counter imperial military tactics, and logistical difficulties meant that outlying regions grew independent of imperial control. Revolts and military disasters saw most of the outlying regions gain independence by the mid-tenth century. The imperial heartland around the Murray and Murrumbidgee gained independence more gradually, and the last vestiges of the Empire were overthrown in 1124 AD.
The Imperial period coincided with the colonisation of Tasmania. Seafaring techniques amongst Gunnagalic peoples were not an early specialty, but their technology slowly improved. In time, this led to the colonisation of the Bass Strait islands, then, in the ninth century AD, the settlement of Tasmania itself. Tasmania was colonised by two distinct groups of peoples, the Tjunini who entered via King Island in the northwest, and the Kurnawal first colonised Flinders Island in the northeast, then Tasmania itself. The Tjunini settled most of the northern coast. The Kurnawal were initially established along the north-eastern coast, but after the War of the Princess (which would become immortalised in song), were driven to the eastern coast. The central highlands and rugged western coast of Tasmania were initially left to the native hunter-gatherer inhabitants, the Palawa [2]. Tasmania has rich reserves of tin, which were quickly exploited. The Tjunini and Kurnawal made more extensive use of bronze than anywhere else in Australia, and they also exported considerable quantities of tin back to the mainland.
The collapse of the Empire did not mean the decline of agriculture or of the human population over its former lands. Indeed, the growing size of the subject populations was one of several factors which had weakened imperial control. This increasing population inevitably had its effects on Australia’s natural environment. Increased farming meant some cases of local deforestation and habitat destruction. Fortunately for the Australian peoples, their perennial agriculture did not produce the same soil erosion which European farming practices would produce in another history. Still, the changing habitats meant that much of the local flora and fauna were being displaced. Large kangaroos and wild emus were usually hunted out near any settlements. Some trees and other plants became locally extinct, or even completely extinct if they had a limited geographical range. Other Australian wildlife was likewise displaced: possums, wombats, wallabies, bandicoots, and so forth became increasingly rare over the agricultural areas of the continent.
While politically fragmented, the cultures of the Murray basin and their southern neighbours flourished in the post-Imperial period. Australia’s deadliest epidemic disease, the Waiting Death (Marnitja), emerged in the thirteenth century and caused widespread death, but the population recovered over time. These cultures were focused mostly on themselves, defining the Murray kingdoms and their Junditmara neighbours as the only people possessing true civilization. Save as sources of trade goods, they had little regard for the lands outside. They were vaguely aware of the Yuduwungu and related peoples in south-western Australia, but only occasional travellers visited those distant regions. The arid interior was a source of some metals, gems and salt, with a few mining colonies and trading contact with some local hunter-gatherers who adopted semi-sedentary lifestyles trading gems and salt for food. Otherwise, this region too was largely ignored.
The major urban areas of Australia also regarded the eastern seaboard of Australia as an uncivilized backwater. Separated from the older cultures of the west by the Great Dividing Range, the eastern seaboard was for a long time only thinly-populated. A few valuable spices grew there and were traded west of the mountains, but for the most part the rugged geography and lack of effective sea travel meant that the eastern coast consisted of scattered agricultural communities, with few large states. Two developing kingdoms were forming in the Hunter Valley and around Coffs Harbour, but most of the rest remained a backwater. Still, it was in these eastern lands that Australia’s isolation came to an end.
In 1310, voyaging Maori from New Zealand landed in the Illawarra region on the coast of modern New South Wales. The initial contact was wary, but peaceful. An exchange of crops, animals and ideas followed over the next few decades. The Maori obtained Australian crops such as red yams, wattles and murnong, and animals such as the emu and the wood duck. The Maori also learned about new technologies such as metallurgy and ceramics. The Australian peoples gained new crops such as kumara (sweet potato), taro and New Zealand flax. They also received new inspiration in sailing and navigation techniques, first from individual Maori who settled on the eastern coast, and then from diffusion of ideas. Sailing technology slowly spread up and down the east coast and eventually along the southern coast, leading to new trade routes and increased contact between Australian peoples. Contact between Australia and New Zealand continued until the time of European arrival, although the volume of trade was limited; only a few high-value, low-bulk items were worth trading at such distances, such as greenstone (jade), kauri amber, some high-quality textiles, raw tin and some worked metal tools and weapons.
With the advent of new sailing technology, much more effective long-range contact became possible between Australian cultures. Some societies were more open to these new technologies than others. In particular, the inhabitants of Kangaroo Island took the new sailing techniques and became the leading maritime trading power in Australia. Their voyagers plied the stormy waters of Australia’s southern coast, bypassing the desert barriers between east and west. In time, they or their successors may well have made contact of their own with Australia’s northern neighbours. However, their progress was cut short on 6 August 1619, when Dutch sailors under the command of Frederik de Houtman landed on the banks of the Swan River...
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Australasia in 1618 is a complex group of societies, ranging from literate Iron Age urbanites to desert-dwelling hunters whose ways of life have barely changed in the last ten thousand years. It is a region with much common heritage, and some vast cultural differences. It is a region where the inhabitants have learned to master the challenges of nature, of flood, fire and drought, but where a much greater storm will soon break on their shores.
The south-western corner of Australia is a small region of fertile land surrounded by hostile deserts. Some domesticated crops spread here in the sixth century BC, and a trickle of new ideas and technology has continued ever since, but the region developed largely in isolation. Lacking a reliable source of tin, the region had only very limited supplies of bronze, but in the last few centuries, they discovered the arts of working in iron. Iron tools and weapons here are the most advanced in Australia. The Atjuntja were the most successful people to adopt these new technologies, and created a dominion which stretches from Esperance in the east to the Indian Ocean, and with its most northerly outpost a salt-harvesting works and penal colony at Shark Bay. The Atjuntja rule over an empire of multiple ethnicities , who speak dialects which are sometimes different enough to be considered distinct languages. Under the watchful eye of their armies, a steady stream of tribute flows to their capital at the White City [Albany]. The Atjuntja pour this wealth into two of their main passions; they are masters of working in stone and arranging the natural world to suit their vision. The carefully shaped glories of the Garden of Ten Thousand Steps and the grandeur of the Walk of Kings would be considered amongst the wonders of the world, if the world knew of them.
Northward of the Atjuntja dominions to the north are lands which they consider barren and useless. For northern Australia, particularly the northwest, has been the least-changed part of the continent. Until very recently, the inhabitants did not posses any crops suitable for tropical agriculture. Separated by desert barriers, the hunter-gatherer peoples are the most isolated on the continent. They do have some sporadic trade contact, which has seen the spread of some copper tools and a very few of iron, occasional beads, pendants or other jewellery, and even rarer textiles and ceramics, but their life here is the least changed from what would be recognised in our own history.
Eastward of the Atjuntja lies a treeless, barren plain which until recently formed their only line of communication with other civilizations. Now that role has been filled by a people who call themselves the Nangu, but who are known to outsiders as Islanders. They are inhabitants of Kangaroo Island who have taken the Polynesian navigational package and adapted it to the conditions of the Southern Ocean. The Islanders regularly voyage from the Atjuntja dominions in the west to Tasmania in the east, and occasionally beyond; their trading ships sometimes reach the coastal cities of southern New South Wales. North of the Island lies the Eyre Peninsula, a small fertile patch of land bounded by sea and northern deserts. This land is occupied by several city-states who have a loose alliance to defend each other against the expansionistic powers further east.
The Yorke Peninsula and the eastern side of the Gulf St Vincent, including modern Adelaide, contain richly fertile land and an abundance of copper and other metals. This is a much-contested region between two of the great powers of Australia. One of these is the resurgent Post-Imperial kingdom of Tjibarr, which has its heartland along the central Murray but which seeks to control the wealth of the lower Murray and the lands beyond. Tjibarr is the most powerful kingdom to reemerge after the collapse of the old Watjubaga Empire, but it is only one of several. The Post-Imperial Murray basin is a seething sea of cultural discontent overlying a wealth born of trade routes which have grown stronger since the collapse of the Empire. Famously argumentative and faction-ridden, the heirs of the Gunnagal show no inclination to reunite into any new empire. Nor have they managed to re-establish any control over the rebellious peoples of the Monaro plateau. That high country is still occupied by the Nguril and Kaoma, non-Gunnagalic peoples who have learnt to fight in the mountains, and who sometimes raid into the low-lying regions of the Murray basin.
When fighting for control of the Murray Mouth and its environs, the Tjibarr kingdom is opposed by the most populous empire in Australia, that of the Yadji. Named for their ruling dynasty, the Yadji are the descendants of the old Junditmara. With relatively rain-drenched lands and fertile soils, the Yadji dominions stretch from south-eastern South Australia and almost all of modern Victoria south of the Great Dividing Range, as far as East Gippsland. The Yadji are a rigidly hierarchical society bound by conventions of religion and tradition, and their government is among the most organised in Australasia. Trade contact via the Islanders has recently acquainted them with the arts of working in iron. They are particularly adept at building roads to allow swift transport between the key regions of their empire. Only in the north and north-west do they face serious opposition from the kingdom of Tjibarr, which relies on riverine control of the Murray to fend off the military advances of the Yadji.
To the north and east of the Yadji and the Murray basin dwell backward peoples, at least according to the standards of the city dwellers of those ancient lands. North of the Murray kingdoms lies the dry plains of modern New South Wales. A land of mostly flat ground and fading rains as one moves further west, this is not a region to support a large population in any one place. Food is not the limitation; even here, dryland Australian agriculture can supply a sufficient harvest to support a decent population. The limitation is water. Away from the permanent rivers, only limited amounts of water can be collected from wells, small dams, and rainwater cisterns. The open plains of central New South Wales are occupied by scattered agricultural communities and city-states, each of which defend larger areas of rangelands which they use for hunting and extraction of timber and other resources.
Bounded by the peaks of the Great Dividing Ranges and the Tasman Sea, the eastern coast of Australia is a narrow stretch of often rugged but well-watered land. By Australian standards, the rainfall here is high; sufficient to support a great variety of plants which do not grow west of the mountains. Several of these are spices which are traded further west; as far as the Murray kingdoms and the Yadji are concerned, this is the only feature of interest of the eastern seaboard. A few additional crops have been domesticated here, including additional species of wattles, and a few fruits, but these are mostly unknown further west. This region, stretching from East Gippsland in modern Victoria to southern Queensland, is inhabited by a variety of agricultural peoples. The rugged nature of the terrain and the limitations of transport technology has prevented the development of large political entities in most of this region. Most of the peoples here live in small farming communities which are usually separated into distinct valleys or coastal regions.
The introduction of better sailing technology from the Maori has seen the gradual development of seaborne trade routes linking these peoples, and while most of the peoples remain divided into small communities, a few reasonable sized kingdoms have emerged in some of the more open areas. The most significant of these is that of the Patjimunra in the Hunter Valley, where the former city-states were formed into an established kingdom after the collapse of the Empire. The Hunter Valley controls one of the best ways to cross the Great Dividing Range, and the Patjimunra have become wealthy through trade in spices. The Patjimunra are a Gunnagalic-speaking people, but their culture and religion has evolved along a distinct path from those further west. The kitjigal have developed into a rigid social hierarchy that defines all occupations and social contact. The other major nation along the eastern coast is the Daluming kingdom, formed by the Bungudjimay around modern Coffs Harbour. A non-Gunnagalic people who preserved their own way of life despite the Great Migrations, the Bungudjimay have religious beliefs and a social structure which is wholly alien to their neighbours, who consider them to be warlike, head-hunting savages.
Inland of the kingdom of Daluming lies the New England tablelands, an elevated region of high country with reasonably fertile soils and some of the best mineral wealth in Australia. This region is one of the two main sources of tin in Australia, and although it has elevated terrain, its climate is still mild enough that red yams and other crops can grow here. Politically, the New England tablelands are a confederation of several distinct peoples, who while they are sometimes wary of each other, are more concerned by the threat from Daluming to the east.
North of the New England tablelands, entering what is modern south-eastern Queensland, the agricultural population gradually diminishes. These regions are nearing the effective growing limit of the red yam, which was for so long the main staple crop of all farming peoples on the continent. Inland, the Darling Downs, a region of sweeping plains and open pastures, is covered by numerous small agricultural communities, but few large towns.
Around the coast, where drinking water is easier to obtain and seafood supplements the farming diet, the population density is higher. The modern regions of the Gold Coast, Moreton Bay and the Sunshine Coast are the home of the Kiyungu, another society born in the Great Migrations, and who have adapted to life in the northern sun. They are not very militaristic; the Empire never reached this far north, and they have no enemies worthy of the name. The Kiyungu are happy enough to squabble amongst themselves, while mostly living for trade. Their name for their own land translates as the Coral Coast. This is something of a misnomer, since most of the coral reefs are further north, but the Kiyungu had long learned to voyage north in small boats and dive to collect corals. This is a very valuable trade good which they exchange further south for tin and copper to supply them with bronze tools. The Coral Coast is home to several decent-sized cities, and the Kiyungu have picked up on Maori sailing techniques to extend their own trade network about halfway up the Queensland coast.
Beyond the Kiyungu lands and the Darling Downs, northern Australia was until recently almost the exclusive domain of hunter-gatherers. The Kiyungu maintained a few small fishing outposts and trading points along the coast, but otherwise farming and towns were non-existent. In the last century and a half, though, new tropical crops emerged. Kumara (sweet potato) and taro, brought across the seas by the strange Maori, first reached the Kiyungu around 1450 AD, and their cultivation has since spread inland.
Another new crop appeared in farmers fields about half a century before that; a new kind of yam. It does not look quite like a regular red yam, it is smaller, and its roots are twisted. No-one is quite sure where it came from, and it does not always grow well on its own, but farmers learnt to cultivate it through cuttings, and then later through seed. This lesser yam does not yield as well as the common red yam, but it has one valuable quality; it can grow even in the northern fields where common yams wither [3]. The benefits are obvious, and farming has slowly spread further north. Central Queensland is in the midst of a process of transformation. Small agricultural communities have been established, but nomadic hunter-gatherer peoples have still not been completely displaced. The only decent-sized towns are on the coast, where offshoots of the Kiyungu are slowly spreading out. Farming peoples are on the advance once more, and absent outside influence, the northern migration will stop only at Cape York. As of 1618, though, the northernmost coastal outpost is at Mackay, and farming inland has not even spread that far.
Much further to the south, Tasmania in 1618 remains divided between the descendants of the Tjunini and the Kurnawal. Their long rivalry has divided much of the island between them, except for the spurned areas of the central highlands and south-western coast where the Palawa have developed a hunter-gardener lifestyle. The territorial and cultural conflicts between the Tjunini and the Kurnawal has produced two states with clearly-defined borders and patrolled frontiers. It has also meant that both peoples possess a strong sense of nationalism. In their language, their culture, their fashion, and their diet, the inhabitants of Tasmania define themselves as citizens of either the Tjunini confederation or the Kurnawal kingdom. It is often a mortal insult to suggest to a Tjunini that they act like or a Kurnawal, or vice versa. Their rivalry is not just cultural, but over land and trade. The best tin mines lie in the region of the disputed frontier, and the two nations have fought a seemingly endless series of wars over control of that region, and over other valuable agricultural land. Tasmanian tin and gum cider are held in high regard on the mainland, although neither of the two kingdoms conducts much in the way direct trade. The export of goods to and from the mainland is usually controlled by the Islanders.
In New Zealand, the Maori have benefitted immensely from the introduction of Australian domesticated crops and animals, although they also suffered from the arrival of blue-sleep and Marnitja, both of which have become endemic diseases. The Maori have been transformed from a hunter-gardener people into a culture of warrior-farmers. They have acquired knowledge of ceramics, writing, and metallurgy from Australia, and adapted them to suit their own culture. The Maori are unfortunately limited in their metallurgy, because New Zealand has virtually no native sources of tin; all of their bronze must be imported from Australia, and this is almost prohibitively expensive. Still, the fertile and well-watered lands of New Zealand support a much higher population density than virtually any part of Australia. The Maori population is more highly-concentrated in the North Island, but farming has spread throughout both of the main islands. The introduction of metal weapons and farming meant an increasing population and a long series of wars, which ended with consolidation into several major kingdoms in both of the main islands. The Maori are linked to Australia by small-scale but regular trade contact, and by much less frequent contact with their old homelands in Polynesia. Fortunately for the inhabitants of Polynesia, the travel time required, and the infrequency of those contacts, means that so far they have not been afflicted with Australian diseases.
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[1] Some things seem to be unavoidable, alas.
[2] The Palawa are essentially the historical Tasmanian Aborigines. The butterfly trap has meant that their languages and cultures are effectively unchanged until first contact with the colonisers from the mainland.
[3] The lesser yam is the product of a hybridisation between the red yam (Dioscorea chelidonius) and one of its close relatives, the long yam (Dioscorea transversa). This hybridisation occurs occasionally whenever cultivated red yams are bred near wild long yams, which occurs in north-eastern New South Wales and southern Queensland. Like both of their parents, the hybrid yams have a perennial root system and their stems and leaves die back every year. The hybrid yams have tubers which are midway in size between the larger red yams and the smaller long yams, hence their name of “lesser yam.” The first lesser yams are not interfertile with either of their parents, and since yams require both a male and female plant, were effectively sterile. Australian farmers have learned to propagate yams through using cuttings, though, and this allows them to propagate the lesser yams. Since hybrids show up on a fairly regular basis, this eventually means that they find strains of lesser yams which can fertilise each other and then be grown from seed. As a crop, the lesser yam offers a lower yield than red yams, and is somewhat less drought-tolerant, but one of the characteristics it has inherited from its long yam parent is the capacity to grow in the tropics.
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Thoughts?
This instalment of Lands of Red and Gold gives an overview of Australasia as it developed over the millennia since the invention of agriculture, and then a broad overview of how things are in 1618, on the eve of first contact with Europeans. Some of the cultures mentioned in this overview will be explored in more detail in subsequent posts.
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Sometime in the distant unrecorded allohistorical past, a wild yam growing along the River Murray in south-eastern Australia mutated into a new form. The result was a domesticable plant called the red yam, which grew wild along most of the central Murray. Red yams were just one plant among many until humans arrived in Australia. When they reached the Murray, red yams became a staple part of their diet, but there was no particular need to domesticate them (yet).
When the glaciers retreated and the climate entered the current interglacial period, humans around the world started down the road to domesticating plants. The red yam is a more difficult crop to domesticate than some other founder crops, but by around 4000 BC, the plant was fully domesticated. Other plant domestications followed this, most notably another root vegetable called murnong, and several species of wattles, fast-growing trees which bear edible seeds and which have multitudinous other uses. These formed the core of an indigenous Australian agricultural package. These crops are largely perennial, drought-tolerant plants which are well-suited to regions of low or irregular rainfall. As perennials, they also need less labour to produce a useful harvest; the yield per worker for Australian crops is very high. This allows Australian societies to sustain a much higher percentage of their population in non-agricultural roles than other comparable early agricultural peoples.
The Gunnagal, Australia’s first civilization, emerged along the Murray between 2500 and 1000 BC. Their ancestors were already using domesticated crops, but inspired by contact with eel-farming peoples further south, the Gunnagal developed a complex system of artificial lakes and wetlands. These wetlands gave them an excellent source of food from fishing, hunting water birds, and gathering water plants. The planning and organisation needed to build and maintain these wetlands resulted in the development of hierarchical societies and an organised form of government.
The early Gunnagal flourished for about sixteen centuries. They developed many of the fundamentals of civilization: pottery and other ceramics; weaving; metallurgy in copper, lead and arsenical bronze; complex oral law codes and an established government; an organised trade system; and some domesticated animals (ducks and dingos). They did not invent full writing, although they had a developing proto-writing system which used symbols to represent ownership, especially for trade goods, and to indicate container contents. Gunnagal culture spread along the length of the Murray. Religious preferences and reliance on artificial wetlands meant that their settlements were largely confined to the vicinity of the river.
The Gunnagal culture of this period (usually called the Formative era) collapsed after 900 BC, under the pressure of depleted soils and prolonged drought. Many of the displaced peoples expanded across Australia in a series of population movements which would be called the Great Migrations. Gunnagalic-speaking peoples spread their languages, culture, and agriculture across much of south-eastern Australia. The new farming communities spread almost as far north as the Tropic of Capricorn, and to the eastern and southern coastlines of Australia; their western border was the deserts of central Australia. Agriculture spread even further than the limit of the Gunnagal migrations; red yams and a few other crops spread across the deserts to the fertile south-western corner of Australia, which in time would develop its own civilization only loosely connected to peoples further east.
The farming communities formed in the Great Migrations began as isolated settlements, small villages and the like; they would take time to develop into larger political units. Along the Murray itself, the Gunnagal survivors developed better agricultural techniques and through trade contact received a new domesticated animal, the emu. In time, their urban civilization recovered into what would be termed the Classical era. In this time, the Gunnagal developed from small city-states into four kingdoms. They developed a full writing system, mostly used for inscriptions and clay tablets, and this became the basis of a developing government bureaucracy [1]. They perfected the use of tin-alloyed bronze, replacing the older arsenical bronzes, and this new metal became an integral part of their increasing technological expertise. They were particularly successful when working in stone; some of the buildings built in the early days of the Classical era would still be standing and in use two millennia later when first visited by Dutch explorers. The Classical Gunnagal kingdoms were at the heart of extensive trade networks which stretched across the eastern half of the continent, and which carried their culture and ideas far beyond their political borders.
Classical Gunnagal culture survived for centuries. It endured the rise of Australia’s first major epidemic disease, blue-sleep fever, a variant of avian influenza which infected humans. The demise of the Classical Gunnagal eventually came from within. The kingdom of Garrkimang, centred on the eponymous city, was one of the four nations of the Classical Gunnagal. Unlike the others, it was located on a major tributary, the Murrumbidgee, not the Murray proper. The city had been founded during the Great Migrations, and its social structure was less faction-ridden than the older and more traditionalist cities along the main river. Under the determined and largely capable rule of a dynasty of prophet-kings, the kingdom of Garrkimang grew into the largest and wealthiest nation on the continent.
Garrkimang rose as a cultural and military power and eventually eclipsed the other Classical kingdoms. Trading wealth started its growth, but the kingdom’s ultimate success was founded on a number of military innovations. They had greater access to bronze than any other Classical peoples, and created a system of well-armed heavy infantry which used long pikes and shields. Combined with better tactics and training, these soldiers transformed Garrkimang into an empire. Its armies first conquered the other Classical kingdoms, then expanded much further. After conquering the last surviving Classical rival in 556 AD, the nation took the name Watjubaga, the Five Rivers (the Murray, Murrumbidgee, Darling, Lachlan and Macquarie).
Watjubaga was Australia’s first and largest indigenous empire. At its height, it claimed suzerainty over territory which stretched from the Darling Downs in the north to Bass Strait in the south, and to the deserts and the Spencer Gulf in the west. Its eastern border was mostly formed by the Great Dividing Range, apart from tributary city-states in the Hunter Valley. It reached its greatest territorial extent in 822 AD, but its primacy did not last long. Economic disruptions formed by the colonisation of Tasmania and increase in the bronze supply unravelled much of the economy, subject peoples learned how to counter imperial military tactics, and logistical difficulties meant that outlying regions grew independent of imperial control. Revolts and military disasters saw most of the outlying regions gain independence by the mid-tenth century. The imperial heartland around the Murray and Murrumbidgee gained independence more gradually, and the last vestiges of the Empire were overthrown in 1124 AD.
The Imperial period coincided with the colonisation of Tasmania. Seafaring techniques amongst Gunnagalic peoples were not an early specialty, but their technology slowly improved. In time, this led to the colonisation of the Bass Strait islands, then, in the ninth century AD, the settlement of Tasmania itself. Tasmania was colonised by two distinct groups of peoples, the Tjunini who entered via King Island in the northwest, and the Kurnawal first colonised Flinders Island in the northeast, then Tasmania itself. The Tjunini settled most of the northern coast. The Kurnawal were initially established along the north-eastern coast, but after the War of the Princess (which would become immortalised in song), were driven to the eastern coast. The central highlands and rugged western coast of Tasmania were initially left to the native hunter-gatherer inhabitants, the Palawa [2]. Tasmania has rich reserves of tin, which were quickly exploited. The Tjunini and Kurnawal made more extensive use of bronze than anywhere else in Australia, and they also exported considerable quantities of tin back to the mainland.
The collapse of the Empire did not mean the decline of agriculture or of the human population over its former lands. Indeed, the growing size of the subject populations was one of several factors which had weakened imperial control. This increasing population inevitably had its effects on Australia’s natural environment. Increased farming meant some cases of local deforestation and habitat destruction. Fortunately for the Australian peoples, their perennial agriculture did not produce the same soil erosion which European farming practices would produce in another history. Still, the changing habitats meant that much of the local flora and fauna were being displaced. Large kangaroos and wild emus were usually hunted out near any settlements. Some trees and other plants became locally extinct, or even completely extinct if they had a limited geographical range. Other Australian wildlife was likewise displaced: possums, wombats, wallabies, bandicoots, and so forth became increasingly rare over the agricultural areas of the continent.
While politically fragmented, the cultures of the Murray basin and their southern neighbours flourished in the post-Imperial period. Australia’s deadliest epidemic disease, the Waiting Death (Marnitja), emerged in the thirteenth century and caused widespread death, but the population recovered over time. These cultures were focused mostly on themselves, defining the Murray kingdoms and their Junditmara neighbours as the only people possessing true civilization. Save as sources of trade goods, they had little regard for the lands outside. They were vaguely aware of the Yuduwungu and related peoples in south-western Australia, but only occasional travellers visited those distant regions. The arid interior was a source of some metals, gems and salt, with a few mining colonies and trading contact with some local hunter-gatherers who adopted semi-sedentary lifestyles trading gems and salt for food. Otherwise, this region too was largely ignored.
The major urban areas of Australia also regarded the eastern seaboard of Australia as an uncivilized backwater. Separated from the older cultures of the west by the Great Dividing Range, the eastern seaboard was for a long time only thinly-populated. A few valuable spices grew there and were traded west of the mountains, but for the most part the rugged geography and lack of effective sea travel meant that the eastern coast consisted of scattered agricultural communities, with few large states. Two developing kingdoms were forming in the Hunter Valley and around Coffs Harbour, but most of the rest remained a backwater. Still, it was in these eastern lands that Australia’s isolation came to an end.
In 1310, voyaging Maori from New Zealand landed in the Illawarra region on the coast of modern New South Wales. The initial contact was wary, but peaceful. An exchange of crops, animals and ideas followed over the next few decades. The Maori obtained Australian crops such as red yams, wattles and murnong, and animals such as the emu and the wood duck. The Maori also learned about new technologies such as metallurgy and ceramics. The Australian peoples gained new crops such as kumara (sweet potato), taro and New Zealand flax. They also received new inspiration in sailing and navigation techniques, first from individual Maori who settled on the eastern coast, and then from diffusion of ideas. Sailing technology slowly spread up and down the east coast and eventually along the southern coast, leading to new trade routes and increased contact between Australian peoples. Contact between Australia and New Zealand continued until the time of European arrival, although the volume of trade was limited; only a few high-value, low-bulk items were worth trading at such distances, such as greenstone (jade), kauri amber, some high-quality textiles, raw tin and some worked metal tools and weapons.
With the advent of new sailing technology, much more effective long-range contact became possible between Australian cultures. Some societies were more open to these new technologies than others. In particular, the inhabitants of Kangaroo Island took the new sailing techniques and became the leading maritime trading power in Australia. Their voyagers plied the stormy waters of Australia’s southern coast, bypassing the desert barriers between east and west. In time, they or their successors may well have made contact of their own with Australia’s northern neighbours. However, their progress was cut short on 6 August 1619, when Dutch sailors under the command of Frederik de Houtman landed on the banks of the Swan River...
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Australasia in 1618 is a complex group of societies, ranging from literate Iron Age urbanites to desert-dwelling hunters whose ways of life have barely changed in the last ten thousand years. It is a region with much common heritage, and some vast cultural differences. It is a region where the inhabitants have learned to master the challenges of nature, of flood, fire and drought, but where a much greater storm will soon break on their shores.
The south-western corner of Australia is a small region of fertile land surrounded by hostile deserts. Some domesticated crops spread here in the sixth century BC, and a trickle of new ideas and technology has continued ever since, but the region developed largely in isolation. Lacking a reliable source of tin, the region had only very limited supplies of bronze, but in the last few centuries, they discovered the arts of working in iron. Iron tools and weapons here are the most advanced in Australia. The Atjuntja were the most successful people to adopt these new technologies, and created a dominion which stretches from Esperance in the east to the Indian Ocean, and with its most northerly outpost a salt-harvesting works and penal colony at Shark Bay. The Atjuntja rule over an empire of multiple ethnicities , who speak dialects which are sometimes different enough to be considered distinct languages. Under the watchful eye of their armies, a steady stream of tribute flows to their capital at the White City [Albany]. The Atjuntja pour this wealth into two of their main passions; they are masters of working in stone and arranging the natural world to suit their vision. The carefully shaped glories of the Garden of Ten Thousand Steps and the grandeur of the Walk of Kings would be considered amongst the wonders of the world, if the world knew of them.
Northward of the Atjuntja dominions to the north are lands which they consider barren and useless. For northern Australia, particularly the northwest, has been the least-changed part of the continent. Until very recently, the inhabitants did not posses any crops suitable for tropical agriculture. Separated by desert barriers, the hunter-gatherer peoples are the most isolated on the continent. They do have some sporadic trade contact, which has seen the spread of some copper tools and a very few of iron, occasional beads, pendants or other jewellery, and even rarer textiles and ceramics, but their life here is the least changed from what would be recognised in our own history.
Eastward of the Atjuntja lies a treeless, barren plain which until recently formed their only line of communication with other civilizations. Now that role has been filled by a people who call themselves the Nangu, but who are known to outsiders as Islanders. They are inhabitants of Kangaroo Island who have taken the Polynesian navigational package and adapted it to the conditions of the Southern Ocean. The Islanders regularly voyage from the Atjuntja dominions in the west to Tasmania in the east, and occasionally beyond; their trading ships sometimes reach the coastal cities of southern New South Wales. North of the Island lies the Eyre Peninsula, a small fertile patch of land bounded by sea and northern deserts. This land is occupied by several city-states who have a loose alliance to defend each other against the expansionistic powers further east.
The Yorke Peninsula and the eastern side of the Gulf St Vincent, including modern Adelaide, contain richly fertile land and an abundance of copper and other metals. This is a much-contested region between two of the great powers of Australia. One of these is the resurgent Post-Imperial kingdom of Tjibarr, which has its heartland along the central Murray but which seeks to control the wealth of the lower Murray and the lands beyond. Tjibarr is the most powerful kingdom to reemerge after the collapse of the old Watjubaga Empire, but it is only one of several. The Post-Imperial Murray basin is a seething sea of cultural discontent overlying a wealth born of trade routes which have grown stronger since the collapse of the Empire. Famously argumentative and faction-ridden, the heirs of the Gunnagal show no inclination to reunite into any new empire. Nor have they managed to re-establish any control over the rebellious peoples of the Monaro plateau. That high country is still occupied by the Nguril and Kaoma, non-Gunnagalic peoples who have learnt to fight in the mountains, and who sometimes raid into the low-lying regions of the Murray basin.
When fighting for control of the Murray Mouth and its environs, the Tjibarr kingdom is opposed by the most populous empire in Australia, that of the Yadji. Named for their ruling dynasty, the Yadji are the descendants of the old Junditmara. With relatively rain-drenched lands and fertile soils, the Yadji dominions stretch from south-eastern South Australia and almost all of modern Victoria south of the Great Dividing Range, as far as East Gippsland. The Yadji are a rigidly hierarchical society bound by conventions of religion and tradition, and their government is among the most organised in Australasia. Trade contact via the Islanders has recently acquainted them with the arts of working in iron. They are particularly adept at building roads to allow swift transport between the key regions of their empire. Only in the north and north-west do they face serious opposition from the kingdom of Tjibarr, which relies on riverine control of the Murray to fend off the military advances of the Yadji.
To the north and east of the Yadji and the Murray basin dwell backward peoples, at least according to the standards of the city dwellers of those ancient lands. North of the Murray kingdoms lies the dry plains of modern New South Wales. A land of mostly flat ground and fading rains as one moves further west, this is not a region to support a large population in any one place. Food is not the limitation; even here, dryland Australian agriculture can supply a sufficient harvest to support a decent population. The limitation is water. Away from the permanent rivers, only limited amounts of water can be collected from wells, small dams, and rainwater cisterns. The open plains of central New South Wales are occupied by scattered agricultural communities and city-states, each of which defend larger areas of rangelands which they use for hunting and extraction of timber and other resources.
Bounded by the peaks of the Great Dividing Ranges and the Tasman Sea, the eastern coast of Australia is a narrow stretch of often rugged but well-watered land. By Australian standards, the rainfall here is high; sufficient to support a great variety of plants which do not grow west of the mountains. Several of these are spices which are traded further west; as far as the Murray kingdoms and the Yadji are concerned, this is the only feature of interest of the eastern seaboard. A few additional crops have been domesticated here, including additional species of wattles, and a few fruits, but these are mostly unknown further west. This region, stretching from East Gippsland in modern Victoria to southern Queensland, is inhabited by a variety of agricultural peoples. The rugged nature of the terrain and the limitations of transport technology has prevented the development of large political entities in most of this region. Most of the peoples here live in small farming communities which are usually separated into distinct valleys or coastal regions.
The introduction of better sailing technology from the Maori has seen the gradual development of seaborne trade routes linking these peoples, and while most of the peoples remain divided into small communities, a few reasonable sized kingdoms have emerged in some of the more open areas. The most significant of these is that of the Patjimunra in the Hunter Valley, where the former city-states were formed into an established kingdom after the collapse of the Empire. The Hunter Valley controls one of the best ways to cross the Great Dividing Range, and the Patjimunra have become wealthy through trade in spices. The Patjimunra are a Gunnagalic-speaking people, but their culture and religion has evolved along a distinct path from those further west. The kitjigal have developed into a rigid social hierarchy that defines all occupations and social contact. The other major nation along the eastern coast is the Daluming kingdom, formed by the Bungudjimay around modern Coffs Harbour. A non-Gunnagalic people who preserved their own way of life despite the Great Migrations, the Bungudjimay have religious beliefs and a social structure which is wholly alien to their neighbours, who consider them to be warlike, head-hunting savages.
Inland of the kingdom of Daluming lies the New England tablelands, an elevated region of high country with reasonably fertile soils and some of the best mineral wealth in Australia. This region is one of the two main sources of tin in Australia, and although it has elevated terrain, its climate is still mild enough that red yams and other crops can grow here. Politically, the New England tablelands are a confederation of several distinct peoples, who while they are sometimes wary of each other, are more concerned by the threat from Daluming to the east.
North of the New England tablelands, entering what is modern south-eastern Queensland, the agricultural population gradually diminishes. These regions are nearing the effective growing limit of the red yam, which was for so long the main staple crop of all farming peoples on the continent. Inland, the Darling Downs, a region of sweeping plains and open pastures, is covered by numerous small agricultural communities, but few large towns.
Around the coast, where drinking water is easier to obtain and seafood supplements the farming diet, the population density is higher. The modern regions of the Gold Coast, Moreton Bay and the Sunshine Coast are the home of the Kiyungu, another society born in the Great Migrations, and who have adapted to life in the northern sun. They are not very militaristic; the Empire never reached this far north, and they have no enemies worthy of the name. The Kiyungu are happy enough to squabble amongst themselves, while mostly living for trade. Their name for their own land translates as the Coral Coast. This is something of a misnomer, since most of the coral reefs are further north, but the Kiyungu had long learned to voyage north in small boats and dive to collect corals. This is a very valuable trade good which they exchange further south for tin and copper to supply them with bronze tools. The Coral Coast is home to several decent-sized cities, and the Kiyungu have picked up on Maori sailing techniques to extend their own trade network about halfway up the Queensland coast.
Beyond the Kiyungu lands and the Darling Downs, northern Australia was until recently almost the exclusive domain of hunter-gatherers. The Kiyungu maintained a few small fishing outposts and trading points along the coast, but otherwise farming and towns were non-existent. In the last century and a half, though, new tropical crops emerged. Kumara (sweet potato) and taro, brought across the seas by the strange Maori, first reached the Kiyungu around 1450 AD, and their cultivation has since spread inland.
Another new crop appeared in farmers fields about half a century before that; a new kind of yam. It does not look quite like a regular red yam, it is smaller, and its roots are twisted. No-one is quite sure where it came from, and it does not always grow well on its own, but farmers learnt to cultivate it through cuttings, and then later through seed. This lesser yam does not yield as well as the common red yam, but it has one valuable quality; it can grow even in the northern fields where common yams wither [3]. The benefits are obvious, and farming has slowly spread further north. Central Queensland is in the midst of a process of transformation. Small agricultural communities have been established, but nomadic hunter-gatherer peoples have still not been completely displaced. The only decent-sized towns are on the coast, where offshoots of the Kiyungu are slowly spreading out. Farming peoples are on the advance once more, and absent outside influence, the northern migration will stop only at Cape York. As of 1618, though, the northernmost coastal outpost is at Mackay, and farming inland has not even spread that far.
Much further to the south, Tasmania in 1618 remains divided between the descendants of the Tjunini and the Kurnawal. Their long rivalry has divided much of the island between them, except for the spurned areas of the central highlands and south-western coast where the Palawa have developed a hunter-gardener lifestyle. The territorial and cultural conflicts between the Tjunini and the Kurnawal has produced two states with clearly-defined borders and patrolled frontiers. It has also meant that both peoples possess a strong sense of nationalism. In their language, their culture, their fashion, and their diet, the inhabitants of Tasmania define themselves as citizens of either the Tjunini confederation or the Kurnawal kingdom. It is often a mortal insult to suggest to a Tjunini that they act like or a Kurnawal, or vice versa. Their rivalry is not just cultural, but over land and trade. The best tin mines lie in the region of the disputed frontier, and the two nations have fought a seemingly endless series of wars over control of that region, and over other valuable agricultural land. Tasmanian tin and gum cider are held in high regard on the mainland, although neither of the two kingdoms conducts much in the way direct trade. The export of goods to and from the mainland is usually controlled by the Islanders.
In New Zealand, the Maori have benefitted immensely from the introduction of Australian domesticated crops and animals, although they also suffered from the arrival of blue-sleep and Marnitja, both of which have become endemic diseases. The Maori have been transformed from a hunter-gardener people into a culture of warrior-farmers. They have acquired knowledge of ceramics, writing, and metallurgy from Australia, and adapted them to suit their own culture. The Maori are unfortunately limited in their metallurgy, because New Zealand has virtually no native sources of tin; all of their bronze must be imported from Australia, and this is almost prohibitively expensive. Still, the fertile and well-watered lands of New Zealand support a much higher population density than virtually any part of Australia. The Maori population is more highly-concentrated in the North Island, but farming has spread throughout both of the main islands. The introduction of metal weapons and farming meant an increasing population and a long series of wars, which ended with consolidation into several major kingdoms in both of the main islands. The Maori are linked to Australia by small-scale but regular trade contact, and by much less frequent contact with their old homelands in Polynesia. Fortunately for the inhabitants of Polynesia, the travel time required, and the infrequency of those contacts, means that so far they have not been afflicted with Australian diseases.
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[1] Some things seem to be unavoidable, alas.
[2] The Palawa are essentially the historical Tasmanian Aborigines. The butterfly trap has meant that their languages and cultures are effectively unchanged until first contact with the colonisers from the mainland.
[3] The lesser yam is the product of a hybridisation between the red yam (Dioscorea chelidonius) and one of its close relatives, the long yam (Dioscorea transversa). This hybridisation occurs occasionally whenever cultivated red yams are bred near wild long yams, which occurs in north-eastern New South Wales and southern Queensland. Like both of their parents, the hybrid yams have a perennial root system and their stems and leaves die back every year. The hybrid yams have tubers which are midway in size between the larger red yams and the smaller long yams, hence their name of “lesser yam.” The first lesser yams are not interfertile with either of their parents, and since yams require both a male and female plant, were effectively sterile. Australian farmers have learned to propagate yams through using cuttings, though, and this allows them to propagate the lesser yams. Since hybrids show up on a fairly regular basis, this eventually means that they find strains of lesser yams which can fertilise each other and then be grown from seed. As a crop, the lesser yam offers a lower yield than red yams, and is somewhat less drought-tolerant, but one of the characteristics it has inherited from its long yam parent is the capacity to grow in the tropics.
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Thoughts?
