Polynesian Wank?

Though coastal Queensland does have good land, and Polynesian settlers on Australia would give them a boost in stuff, how are they going to discover Australia? Evwn though this area of land is greater than all of Polynesia combined, New Zealand, which the Polynesians will have probably discovered for best Australian discovery, is greater than the rest of Polynesia combined. Why would they want to leave?

Also, the Polynesians probably would not be able to discover Australia by going south, because by the time their culture becomes Polynesian, they already established an easterly exploration route. Any earlier, and the Polynesians as we know it would not exist.

Their migration route passed by Papua New Guinea by 5000 BC, which is far closer to Australia than New Zealand, a land not reached by the Polynesians as late as 1200-1300 AD by according to some researchers. No doubt like anyone else they would be culturally different in 5000 BC than their 18th century descendants, though perhaps not unrecognizably so given similiarities even between people as distant as Easter Island and Taiwan.
 
My understanding of the Polynesian diaspora was that it was driven in part by a cultural desire to explore, cultural/religious conflict, physical conflict, resource depletion and overpopulation. so the key along with communication with the mainland (ie iron use, hence long distance trade) would be something that both spanned multiple islands and caused people to be desperate enough to head out into the unknown or head to known islands causing follow migrations. I would vote for a unifying religion with a theocratic hierarchy that splinters or just has a harsh way with apostates, splitters etc. So the same migration patterns would take place but quicker over all. The contact with south America would most definitely become more widespread as they would have even in the tiny quantities you could carry over the pacific 'Iron' and Hierarchical religions like their status symbols and could concentrate on the acquisition of them driving a trade network for ideas, diseases plants and animals as well as people.
 
I'm suspicious of the proposition that colonizing Australia circa 4000-2000BCE wouldn't work. The northern and more so the eastern coasts of the continent are hospitable (there are rain forests in New South Wales fer chrissakes) it isn't hard to adapt fishing to new areas, and the natives are divided into a thousand small cultures rather than being unified in any way. And conflict with alien cultures is just what you need to promote larger unified states among the Polynesians. Getting back and forth from Australia to Taiwan is also navigationally easier than hitting tiny islands in the middle of the Pacific, so maintaining ties to Taiwan is easier, allowing your iron age boost.
 
It lives on in my heart and one of these days I will continue in some form somewhere
If anyone's qualified it'd be you, dude.
Coastal Queensland has the same cilmate and fishing the Polynesians were used to, and far more land than all of Polynesia combined. With agriculture and domesticated animals they would quickly outnumber local natives and intermarry, expand overland in time. As a maritime culture, this new Australia would not become isolated and instead participate in the Southeast Asian trade network.
I'm suspicious of the proposition that colonizing Australia circa 4000-2000BCE wouldn't work. The northern and more so the eastern coasts of the continent are hospitable (there are rain forests in New South Wales fer chrissakes) it isn't hard to adapt fishing to new areas, and the natives are divided into a thousand small cultures rather than being unified in any way. And conflict with alien cultures is just what you need to promote larger unified states among the Polynesians. Getting back and forth from Australia to Taiwan is also navigationally easier than hitting tiny islands in the middle of the Pacific, so maintaining ties to Taiwan is easier, allowing your iron age boost.
Climate is just one piece of the puzzle; the actual physical environment is another. Australia's lushness is only deceptively so -- those rainforests are old-growth that probably took a very long time to get that way. Australia is probably the least fertile continent on Earth; much of its soil's nutrients have been washed away, and any geologic or glacial processes that could replenish nutrients haven't happened in millions of years. Australia's British settlers learned this the hard way. Even today agriculture there is challenging with farmers in the Murray watershed and elsewhere having to deal with increasingly saline soils. Australia's wheat belt was originally sandy, nutrition-poor soil that is now artificially fertilized.

Consider this: Immediately to the north of Australia is New Guinea, which is vastly more fertile than Australia and requires less effort to farm. It is accessible via a chain of increasingly larger fertile islands from Tonga to Fiji westward. Even Fiji, right next to the heartland of Polynesia, rivals the total habitable territory of the Polynesian Pacific (if you take Hawaii and NZ out). Both of these islands are inhabited by Melanesians, a similar Austronesian group with their own maritime traditions (the Fijian drua was one of the largest catamarans in existence then). If people are of little consequence, why was Fiji not significantly re-colonized by Polynesians? Or Vanuatu, or the Solomon Islands at least if not New Guinea outright?

Moreover despite the large trade connections and seafaring capability of Melanesia, they did not even obtain any significant amounts of materials, technologies, domesticates or ideas from the nearby Indonesian kingdoms, far closer than Taiwan (and the kingdoms and sultanates were at least aware of the Papuans), and if any trade of this variety existed it did not drastically change Papua society. Granted one could say that the Polynesians' increased drive for exploration, slightly increased political complexity and a few more plants (like sweet potato) could make a bigger difference here but it all begs the question as to if they ever saw a need? How alluring do the trade goods have to be to encourage them? Would it even have the desired effect?

Polynesian colonization seems to have mainly focused on finding new, empty lands to cultivate and settle. Finding people already using that land might defeat the point in their eyes.
 
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If anyone's qualified it'd be you, dude.

Moreover despite the large trade connections and seafaring capability of Melanesia, they did not even obtain any significant amounts of materials, technologies, domesticates or ideas from the nearby Indonesian kingdoms, far closer than Taiwan (and the kingdoms and sultanates were at least aware of the Papuans), and if any trade of this variety existed it did not drastically change Papua society. Granted one could say that the Polynesians' increased drive for exploration, slightly increased political complexity and a few more plants (like sweet potato) could make a bigger difference here but it all begs the question as to if they ever saw a need? How alluring do the trade goods have to be to encourage them? Would it even have the desired effect?

Polynesian colonization seems to have mainly focused on finding new, empty lands to cultivate and settle. Finding people already using that land might defeat the point in their eyes.

The issue is that the area you are talking about would have had only oral records of contact for trade or conflict between the Melanesians and the Polynesians before the advent of contact with Europeans. after this tidal wave of disease and disruption the fragments were recorded and then distorted by various levels of ignorance and cultural chauvinism. There could have been extensive conflict or trading between the groupings in fact for the Wank to work you need a more outward looking Polynesian ethnic group from the time that they left Taiwan so as they forge outwards to find empty islands they can trade resources, animals, plants, ideas and genetic diversity. with the established groupings. What about the Polynesians establishing trading outposts in Indonesia then moving westwards and colonizing the Maldives and Mauritius?
The key thing in wanking the Polynesians is going to be greater localized population pressures and a greedy hierarchy of priests and nobles that desire luxury and high status items such as Iron goods and strange foods. they also need a reliable source of wood for canoes from the Americas or un-colonized island chains driving exploration meaning that New Zealand's and Hawaii will be reached earlier by more settlers with a broader farming and animal package and access to a developed trade network and iron weapons and tools. For islands like Easter Island If there is a desire to send out traders and there is a shortage of wood this might stimulate shipbuilding technology maybe with iron saws they could cut planking and come up with a Viking long ship catamaran analogue so using less wood?
 
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