Foxy,

Considering that the only native Aus plant that resembles grain in any way is Kangaroo grass which is scrubby and if cultivated would in no way would resemble fields of wheat. Secondly, the yield is so small that several hours of reaping would be required to yield a handful of grain.

It is this uncritical cherry picking of information that shreds one's credibility.

SM,

I'm currently reading the book - "Dark Emu,"
by Bruce Pascoe. He quotes from a variety of
original sources - from people like archaeologist Peter
White, to Rupert Gerritsen, explorer and
surveyor Major Thomas Mitchell, Charles Sturt,
explorer George Grey, to name just a few.
He gives footnotes and references.

I would highly recommend the book to you.

It's not my credibility that's at stack here but
that of individuals who make judgements without
even bothering to read the material being given.
How can anybody have any kind of a discussion under
those circumstances?

Best to simply walk away.

Foxy,

SM has a point: kangaroo grass grows all over the place, and in India and Africa, where it is known as 'famine food'. The seeds have very little nutritional value. The leaves do have much nutritional value, so graziers/pastoralists (or to please Banjo, farmers) advertise it when selling a station lease. But Aboriginal people did not have pottery, so could not boil up those precious leaves. How different things might have been if they had.

So what did Aboriginal people farm, if not kangaroo grass ? Tuber crops, yes, up on the tip of Cape York. But elsewhere ?

Banjo,

So, in your childhood, you distinguished between farms and stations - between farmers and graziers/squatters/pastoralists/leaseholders ? Isn't it amazing what we forget as we age :)

Joe

Banjo,

About farming - cultivating the soil, planting seed, ensuring water, harvesting, transporting, storing, etc., - I don't know what on earth you are on about: immigrants were cultivating the soil from the first weeks of settlement/invasion across what is now the city of Adelaide, and across huge areas of SA within five and ten years: much of the Barossa Valley, for instance, around Port Lincoln, up in the lower Flinders, across the South-East - all within five and ten years.

True, Governor Grey found a huge number of people living on rations and not working, when he took up his office in 1841, but he simply cancelled those rights and ordered those men out to work on farms. Perhaps some to work on stations too :)

Certainly, much of southern SA was taken up with pastoral leases, but that's in the nature of pastoralism - it needs much more space, usually on more marginal country, than farming does, being much less intensive.

Later, into the 1860s, the grain frontier was pushed up into the Flinders Ranges, in the belief that rain would follow the plough, and that grain-growing would be possible everywhere inside the Goyder Line. Then the usual droughts returned: many towns had been surveyed but eventually never built, as the grain frontier retreated.

Hope this helps.

J0e

And for those who enjoy a good laugh, here are descriptions of PC topics such as dog-parks as rape sites, feminist astronomy, male masturbation as meta-violence, curing male homophobia using anal dildos, and so on:

https://leiterreports.typepad.com/files/project-summary-and-fact-sheet.pdf

Pascoe's spoofs would fit right in all that. Brilliant !

The only real harvesting of grain that I have observed by Aboriginal people was the gathering of seed where it had collected in depressions in the ground or up against stones and other obstacles where it had been blown by the wind.

I have also observed and taken part in, a bit of night time harvesting of corn; which someone else had planted!