A bit of minor thread necromancy here, but hey, I've been away.
Guns, Germs and Steel. Go consult the bible of societal population growth factors please.
Yes, that book is essential reading, even if the guy did steal my name. But a word of caution is in order. Diamond is very good on the broader picture of how geography and ecology affects technological development. However, he is often wrong in some of the details. For instance, he is quite simply incorrect about Australia having no domesticable crops apart from the macadamia nut. There's actually a reasonable selection, and we would probably know about even more crops if so much of the accumulated Aboriginal knowledge hadn't been lost with European colonisation.
Isn't Australia low on water? Someone said the continent can only support 9 million people now at present levels of water consumption.
I'm skeptical about that figure. Even with the drought, Australia
as a continent has enough water to sustain its population. There's just two problems with our current . Most of the rain is up in the north, where most of the people aren't. And European-style farming practices are ruining Australian soils to the point where it's going to be impossible to farm anything much at all due to things like salinity and topsoil erosion. It's possible - although by no means certain - that better farming practices would be sustainable. (Things like more use of perennials, for instance, and better dryland agricultural techniques rather than trying to run cattle.)
Would the British even bother to colonize it if the place had large numbers of indigenous people? Of all the places the British Empire colonized, Australia was pretty low on the priority list.
I suspect that the British would colonise the continent, but it would be a different style of colonisation. At first it would be flag-planting and protectorates rather than treating the whole place as terra nullius. Of course, once diseases anti-decimate [1] the population, then some land-hungry colonists will probably start pushing in anyway.
There was a thread a while ago called something like 'Red Yam', where a single farmable crop was introduced into Australia millenia ago and was used by the Aboriginies.
Guilty as charged, y'honour. Although to nitpick, the PoD of
that thread was that a domesticable crop evolved in Australia, rather than being introduced.
When combined with improved wetlands like in Condah, Victoria (which even without a farmable crop had high population densities around imoroved swamps) many areas would have sizable popluations living much like people in the Americas prior to Columbus. Of course they would have similar problems with disease that the Americans had.
Yup. The diseases always going to be the big problem. And it's not something which can be avoided with an easy PoD.
I doubt the doctrine of terra nullius would be promulgated when the locals lived in villages, farming yams and eels/fish and fighting to maintain their lands. Perhaps a treaty of Waitangi would ensue.
Or more probably a series of treaties with different groupings; Australia is rather bigger than NZ, after all. I'd also note that in the short term, the Maori didn't benefit all that much from the Treaty of Waitangi; they were still largely overrun through weight of numbers with the provisions of the treaty usually being disregarded on the ground. (Although they certainly put up a good fight along the way.)
I don't think we can water more than 25 million or so, and even then we'll need to make some serious changes to our water use. I'm strongly against modifying rivers for farming, every time they've tried it the results have been bad, but they keep suggesting it.
To be honest, I think that we can water more than 25 million. Australia has up until now treated water as essentially free, with no real attempts to conserve water. There are a number of simple steps which can reduce water loss both from irrigation and urban areas to a significant degree. (Rainwater tanks and water recycling for cities; and less leaky water transport systems for irrigation, for instance.)
Have to agree with you mostly. However, if there were more Aboriginals and if somehow they were at least semi-agricultural wouldn't there still be an incentive for white settlement, ie cheap agricultural labour (OTL Sth Africa Zimbabwe, etc).
In the early stages, it would probably be more about pushing the *Aboriginals away from the prime areas, I suspect. Not least because the large majority of them would die anyway, so trying to use them for cheap agricultural labour would be difficult.
There is no way Australia's Aboriginal population could reach 20 million. Britain's didn't get past 6.5 million until the 1700s and they had the benefit of large array of domesticated animals and plants as well as the most effective technology in the world at the time.
20 million may be a stretch, particularly without domesticated animals and a greater variety of plants, but I wouldn't hold Britain up as having the most effective agriculture to support a large population. Britain didn't even like to use the most high-yielding crops available at the time potatoes, maize, rice all yielded higher than wheat, which was the preferred British crop for large-scale agriculture. (At least amongst the landowners.)
If the Aboriginals, with a farmed crop, got to the Mayan level they'd be kicking arse. That would perhaps get 3-4 million people in Australia, most of them SE of the WW2 Brisbane line.
However if they did get to the level of the Maya or Aztecs I think there would be more contact with the outside world since Ausrtalia's SE isn't as isolated as Mexico and Peru. This could perhaps lead to greater tolerance of disease, so the American model of depopulation wouldn't occur.
I doubt that a Mayan or Aztec level of technology is going to make contact with other agricultural societies on their own. The navigation tech is a bit lacking.
How big a factor was disease in the fall of the aboriginal population?
The biggest single factor. A large percentage of the population wiped out directly, and the survivors were disrupted and often demoralised. The birth rate tended to drop to almost zero for a while, for instance.
And on a more general note, I've figured out a way to expand on my "red yam" idea and create an *Australia which has a population of 5-8 million at the time of first contact with Europeans (Dutch) in the early seventeenth century. Watch this space...
[1] Note for pedants: "decimate" literally means "kill one in ten." Given that estimates of the die-off of indigenous peoples range up to 90%, "anti-decimate" seems like a reasonable way of saying "leaves one in ten alive."