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Dear Loudmouth, Dear rhross,

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Thank you for your posts.

I'm about to catch a train to Normandy for the weekend.

I'll try to get back to you both as soon as I can next week.

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Hi Banjo,

Bon voyage, et bon retour :)

Joe

@Banjo,

Plenty of time to read and ponder. Normandy has good wi-fi access, but probably better to relax. :)

I wonder at this desire to paint Aboriginal peoples in 1788 as something other than human. They were called stone-age because they never learned to smelt metals. Indeed they did not use local clay to make pots. They had remained, for whatever reason at a stone-age level. Why seek to deny their reality and pretend that unlike all other stone-age humans they lived in some fantastical utopia, destroyed by Europeans?

If any of the Aboriginal peoples really did live in Utopia then NONE of them would have wanted any of the 18th century artefacts the British had and were prepared to trade. But they pretty much all did. Of course they did. They were no more stupid than the Britons who may have hated the Romans but certainly appreciated the advanced equipment, tools, weapons that the Romans brought, and their ability to build.

This fantasy of an Aboriginal Utopia is a new form of racism.

Here's some food for thought:

https://www.theage.com.au/national/life-was-not-a-walkabout-for-victorias-aborigines-20030313-gdvd81.html

Fish- and eel-traps are advanced forms of foraging, human intervention in the environment, and they point up the complex nature of the relationships between foraging, pastoralism, fishing and farming - probably from the beginning of farming, people have mixed all of those. In S-E Asia and southern Africa today, foragers trade their forest or bush products for grain and tobacco, etc., from local farmers and pastoralists. In fact, some Bushmen groups also farm a few cattle. In this way protein is exchanged for starch/carbohydrates.

Foragers have immense knowledge of the available plants and animals in their environments, and there is no reason to suppose that farmers also don't exploit whatever resources are in their environments too. It's pretty rare, probably unknown, for a rice farmer, for instance, to do nothing but farm rice: they also raise fish in their waters, raise all manner of other crops alongside, or as well as, rice; they hunt and trap water-birds, grow oil-palms, coconuts, tuber crops, etc., where it's suitable, etc.

So we have to get rid of the either-or idea in relation to farming: in that sense, farming simply added a vast new range of ways to produce - and exchange - food. And one key to all that might have been trade: that many foraging people in, say, riverine environments caught great numbers of fish to salt and sell on to sea-farers or farmers (to supplement their protein intake) in exchange for desired products from elsewhere - these days exchanging their salt fish for flashlight batteries and tobacco.

Hundreds of years ago, foragers in Borneo would exchange their salt fish for rice and other exotic items, and their fish could end up in Chinese or Indian ports, for distribution to the wealthy across those vast countries. But since it was profitable, they stayed foragers. Trade with non-foragers may make an enormous difference to the production dynamics of foraging economies.

Did Victorian Aboriginal people farm eels ? You make up your own mind. I think it was enhanced/advanced foraging, much like commercial fishing these days.

Joe

@Joe,

The interesting question is why, since Aboriginal peoples in the north of Australia certainly traded with Macassans and others, why rice never came to this country, or the pig, or any other domesticated animal which would have supported a more settled existence.

The Indians who migrated here around 4,000 years ago brought their native dog which became the Dingo, but why would they not bring other small animals from India?

Or did they and they died out?