continued: So was this 'farming'? I think it was. Harvesting and storage were so extensive, seeds for future growth would be removed from the landscape. Although there are no records, some of this must have been resown for later crops.

Why no records? 1. The assumption that Aborigines didn't farm, 2. a lack of awareness by men from rainy Britain that grain-growing in semi-arid conditions works differently. In dry farwest NSW, Qld, and northern SA, rains are unreliable, good seasons alternate with years of drought. Grain cultivation here has to be opportunist; you need a seed bank to sow when the ground is wet, especially if you removed all the grass seed over miles of country last time there was a crop.

Opportunistic cropping is exactly what we do now beyond the zone of reliable rain. Along the Murray/Darling, this happens on dry lake beds after they have had a soaking during floods, not just wheat, but chick peas etc. I've seen some of this personally over the years - once went to a harvest party on a lake bed, another time brought home a sack of chick peas. There's a historic record (ca 1890s) of opportunistic wheat cropping on the bed of the Murray River at low water level.

As with the daisy yam (murnong), this Aboriginal farming practice was wiped out very fast when sheep were introduced to these areas.

We still seem to be stuck in this mind-set of agriculture as we know it in wetter climates, or dry climates where reliable rivers could provide irrigation. We were able to do a lot in Australia with introduced, already domesticated plants and animals in areas that were suitable. But we should give credit to Aboriginal people for learning how to produce anything in a land with such irregular rainfall and river flow (even today with high tech irrigation on the Murray, droughts can have a big impact) and very few plants and no animals suitable for domestication.

PS I've eaten bread made out of native millet flour, contrary to other comments (including Mitchell's!) I found it very tasty.

Jayb,

'Macon' and other protein,

Some Notes on Cannibalism
Among Queensland Aborigines, 1824-1900

http://tinyurl.com/yallf9lu

However I don't believe I have ever come across evidence I found credible. Not that I have looked for any though.

It may be that many of the stories about indigenous 'cannibalism' were fanciful and bear a lot in common with the myths about the dangers of the bush, which some Europeans found very threatening, even alien, it being so unlike what they were used to, even the colours.

What we are afraid of can become the source of myth-making to 'cope'. Blending Aboriginals and Chinese in a horrific, nightmarish tale (where one was eating the other) would also have served the purpose of negatively stereotyping the Chinese who were not well accepted as competitors on the gold fields and were also accused of shipping any gold found back to China.

Hi Joe,

It looks like you and I are somewhat in agreement on this subject. if there was ever to be a treaty it should have been the 'Treaty of Bennelong' signed in 1817 not 2017, So the boat has well and truly sailed on that one. Besides the European, given his track record with indigenous treaties, would never have respected any bloody treaty anyway.

From an Aboriginal point of view, I would see the new country of Aboalia, with its capital city of Namatjira (formally Sydney) consisting of the former Australian states of Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland, minus any crappy bits. along with a few external territories located in parts of what is now the diminished country of Australia, in South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory, good bits only. I would send our ambassador ASAP to the new Australian capital of Oodnadatta to establish diplomatic relations.
Unfortunately our capital, Namatjira, is looking more like the capital of Somalia, Mogadishu, than what it once did, the transformation of Aboalia to a third world state should be complete in about 12 months, we are working on it. That is the reality.

Just a question, what do you suggest I do for a feed, now all the Supermarkets in Aboalia are empty, I took the last can of beans on Wednesday, also none of the electric lights are working, did someone forget to pay the bill, and I couldn't fill my car at the servo, nothing was coming out of the pump. I checked the big tank, but it seems someone forgot to fill it with petrol. Why is that?

To Mansell, Indigenous people face a fundamental question — are they "Australian Aboriginals" or "Aboriginal Australians"?
It is a question I have wrestled with all my life.
I recall as a boy at school in the early 1970's, how uncomfortable I felt reciting the oath: I honour my god, I serve my Queen, I salute the flag.
Australia did not feel like mine — from where my family lived on the margins, clinging to the fringes of town, Australia was for other people.
What would Indigenous people get? Return of lands, compensation, and more control over their affairs.
Opponents maintain that a treaty divides Australia, creates an us-and-them. As former prime minister John Howard used to say, a nation can't have a treaty with itself.
Mansell acknowledges this is a big stumbling block to winning political support. Australians, he says, think "just as immigrants want to be absorbed within Australian society, so too should Aboriginals".
But Mansell resists assimilation. He is wary of efforts to recognise Indigenous people within the constitution, because it accepts that "whites have a right to govern, and Aboriginals a right to be governed".
Mansell sees Australian democracy as one where we all contest power and Indigenous peoples have a voice that protects their unique position and rights.
"If Australia is to be a country of peoples of many backgrounds sharing a vision of living together in peace and prosperity, then a treaty is a mechanism for achieving it," he writes.

Hi Cossomby,

Harvesting already-grown seed is called ' gathering'. It's what hunter-gatherers do, or at least the women do. Pastoralism is not farming, either, it involve pasturing animals across large areas of pasture. Farming involves some form of cultivating the soil: clearing ground, cultivating, planting, weeding, waiting. In foraging societies, people simply respond to what the environment provides, and starving when it doesn't (as happened in almost every environment at times, usually winter and/or very dry conditions, even the most productive). Check out 'First Farmers', by Peter Bellwood.

Re-planting tops of tubers may have been something people on the Cape learnt by diffusion of the technique from the highlands of Papua-New Guinea. After all, Papua-New Guineans have been doing o for maybe thirty thousand years, and had/have much more advanced societies than traditional Indigenous Australians. It probably represents the very beginnings of 'agriculture' - and of course was carried out by women. I have a crack-pot theory that women were the first farmers :)

Interestingly, more than thirty years ago, Annette Hamilton wrote that, in most traditional Aboriginal societies, women provided around 90 % of all food for groups, while the men were involved in their incredibly important deliberations over secret knowledge and ritual: after all, as they saw it, nature/the environment responded to secret knowledge and ritual and song, not to any 'careful management of the environment' which is obviously a Western concept.

Cheers,

Joe