Jayb.
1. Tubers ain't tubers. Harvest a carrot, and you pull out the whole root. Harvest a potato or a daisy yam and you can collect lots of tubers but leave the green plant above and lots of fine roots below. You can encourage more to grow by cultivating around the plants as you harvest them, leaving some tubers there, or planting or scattering loose tubers elsewhere (or in the case of potatoes, sprouting sections of tubers). The point I was making is that it wasn't just about not depleting everything in one spot, but spreading the plant into new spots.

2. Yes, I said that fruit seeding started accidentally, but once you see it happen accidentally, you can help it along, as some of the evidence suggests.

3. Yes, eels do amazing migrations, but not exactly new 'news'.

4. 'They didn't (farm)'. My post listed the things that characterise farming: increased productivity, increased geographic range, genetic selection. These things can be done without the need for neat fenced fields or 'farms'. The first two definitely happened in Australia, the last is unknown but could be studied. So, they didn't farm in the Eurasian way - fenced fields, horse and plough, etc., nor indeed in the tropical slash and burn subsistence farming (though Aboriginal burning had a similar effect), but in a way adapted to the environment in Australia.

5. 'So you are right on that point'. Well, I realise that you are being facetious, but it's good to know that after 50 years research in this and related fields, I can say something that meets your high standards.

Joe

You missed my point. Harvest all the already-grown seed (from the historic descriptions it was thorough) and there won't be enough left to produce another crop. The care taken with seed storage was likely for future sowing as well as consumption. It wasn't just a matter of wandering along and gathering a few seeds, and coming back after the next rains in the hope of finding some again. It was a substantial labour-intensive exercise requiring planning, and quite a few people.

Farming may or may not include not 'clearing ground, cultivating, planting, weeding, waiting'- less intensive techniques may be sufficient. If deliberate techniques were used, and increased productivity, distribution and selected for better varieties, then it's farming.

I omitted another regular observation in early records: burning the grass, basically stubble burning as used today. Last year I toured a wheat farm in NW Victoria whose owner pioneered no-till farming about 15 years ago. The seeding and harvesting is of course a modern mechanised process, but the dramatic benefits of minimal cultivation to the soil and productivity were impressive.

I think this has become a semantic argument, you and others are hung up on the word farming. You note that 'pastoralism' is not 'farming'; you're probably aware that land usage in Australia was much influenced by the belief that crop agriculture was more civilised than pastoralism, leading to many often failed attempts to break up big pastoral stations into small 'yeoman' farms. Some of the comments made here could be lifted from the 19th century. (See Joe Powell's 1973 book 'Yeomen and Bureaucrats').

Whatever words used, the evidence indicates that Aboriginal people used deliberate strategies to improve the soil, increase production, and spread the range of some food plants. (Similarly with eels). These strategies probably increased the human population and led to semi-sedentary behaviours in some places.

Cossomby,

You would still have seen large machinery on the farms you visited. Because 'no till' or 'low till' is about saving diesel by not ploughing all of the ground before planting. Cut a narrow furrow or seed drill - which is what usually happens when planting except that all of the soil have been overturned, mainly to clear of existing vegetation and later weed regrowth by burying it below.

Whether it is better to plow humus in or leave it to rot down, the debate continues and farmers are always trying to produce more with less.

C: "Harvest all the already-grown seed (from the historic descriptions it was thorough) and there won't be enough left to produce another crop"

That is unlikely. Even with highly efficient mechanisation there is still some loss of seed to the ground.

C: "stubble burning"
Wouldn't that defeat the whole idea of retaining humus in the soil? Apart from other problems.

While of indigenous being 'intentional land carers' through burning off bush, what that did was dramatically hasten the encroachment of eucalyptus on rain forest, destroying forever the existing and far more productive and soil retaining rain forest and its flora and fauna.

As for indigenous being able to manage fire to selected postage stamp sized patches (postage stamp where Aus is concerned), exactly what technology, data and manpower did they have that was superior to and should be informing present day management? I am being sarcastic regrettably, but I believe understandably in the circumstances and particularly where the same 'environmental experts' who support indigenous bushfires are adamantly opposed to fire breaks and other management strategies.

I submit that the reason Aborigines used fire was to incapacitate and reveal animals, par-cooked as many would be. It wasn't for any understood land, fauna and flora management.

There is a plenty of sloppy 'science' where government gives grants, jobs and careers that encourage it.

To be blunt, you see what you are intent upon seeing, which is not how science , good science, works.

Dear Jayb,

«Hey! It's them that always go on about reviving their heritage, & that's their heritage. Isn't it.»

Yes, but whether and to what extent they will do so is completely up to them.

Nothing should prevent aboriginals from selecting and hand-picking new customs, technologies and/or people and to do so at their own suitable and convenient pace. After all, this is their land.

---

Dear Doog,

Thank you for your touching comment.

Cossomby, firstly, if you think ants don't climb trees then you obviously haven't much experience with them. No seed stored in trees would be safe from ants, or possums, or Native rats. And I have a problem accepting that kangaroo grass seed could be confined in any type of mesh bag anyway because it is tiny, much smaller than wheat or barley and would just trickle out through the mesh. What platforms in trees were for was bodies. When someone died, in most tribes the body was stored in a tree or on a platform to keep it safe from dingoes whilst the flesh was removed from the bones by ants and the weather. Once clean and dry the bones were generally wrapped in paperbark and put into caves, or crevasses or buried under a mound of rocks. I have a photo of a body platform in the Kimberley, including the body.
As far as the spread of native fruit trees around camp sites, well that's an easy one. Most bush fruit is full of seeds and most got swallowed, then, due to the practise of burying faeces to prevent it getting into the hands of enemies for purposes of sorcery, seeds were buried with the faeces, providing it with instant fertiliser.
Beyond that no care could be given because aboriginal people had enough problems carting and storing water for drinking purposes, certainly they wouldn't be carting water for plants.

Hi Paul,

Yes,a treaty is an agreement between two distinct entities: at Waitangi, those entities were the Chiefs on one side and the British on the other, and they agreed on something very substantial: the transfer of sovereignty to the British in exchange for protection, mostly from each other.

I firmly believe that Indigenous Australians are Australians, and that they have every right to participate in all aspects of Australian life, live where they like and marry who they damn-well like. The great majority of Indigenous people live in our towns and cities, THEIR towns and cities, and they have every right to stay there and build their lives and careers there, regardless of whatever racist directive is ever imposed on them by their 'leaders' in the name of 'recognition'.

Yes, in the very unlikely event of a separate State being created - and with the above proviso - who would go there ? What would its boundaries be that allowed an Indigenous majority to rule over others ? That would mean, no towns, since (unless we count large Aboriginal settlements like Wadeye and Yuendumu) almost all 'large' population centres have non-Indigenous majorities, who surely would have voting rights.

Even trying to identify such boundaries would end up with an entity impossible to govern, even from Wadeye (or somewhere similar, Mutitjulu perhaps) where of course all the elite would move to, to be near Uluru.

I respectfully suggest that such a higgledy-piggledy 'State' would have maybe fifty thousand residents, almost all of whom (except of course the elites - no, even the elites) would have to be supported on welfare, in the station to which they have become accustomed, and to which they are accustoming their children and grandchildren. Which brings us to financing .........

Of course, everybody trapped in this Brand New State can always re-learn the techniques necessary for foraging, to offset the decline in funds from the Canberra money trees :) Perhaps Canberra could fund only standard welfare payments and major cultural-economic re-training activities, and no more: everything else could be funded out of any GST collected.