Hi Joe, nice convoluted attempt at justifying British colonisation. All along I have been saying this argument has more to do with some peoples fear of what recognition of Aboriginal sovereignty might lead to. Rather than anything to do with how Aboriginals interacted with the land, or their relationship with that land.

Paul,

What on earth has all of this got to do with British colonisation ?

I suppose one can find some sort of link between any two phenomena, but are you suggesting that widespread Aboriginal farming is a necessary condition to asserting Aboriginal sovereignty ?

That respect for the ingenuity - and pre-eminence - of hunting and gathering societies somehow cuts across any rationale for sovereignty ?

That to point out that Aboriginal groups were fragmented, somehow casts doubt on the ideal of a single Aboriginal sovereignty ?

You could be right .....

You've got a job in front of you, haven't you ?

Joe

Rather than anything to do with how Aboriginals interacted with the land, or their relationship with that land.
Paul1405,
Interesting, how did they interact with the land, apart from roaming over it & surviving on it ?

Difficult to see why so many want us to believe our first people lived on not with the land
Even now the ties to country can be seem'
Far more than eel farming too
Bush management by controlled burning, once,not now, stopped runaway fires destroying forests and wildlife

If they were all cultivating as farmers why did they need rations.... which initially were for the elderly, and children as it was reckoned that the able men and women could forage - sorry cultivate their many fields to survive. Thus no need to move to ration depots and later mission stations for the majority to enable easy and regulated distribution of rations.

Tench describes the conditions of the Aborigines - their huts consisting of "pieces of bark laid together in the form of an oven open at one end and very low ... long enough for a man to lie at full length in", but they rely more on caverns and caves. P53

huts "consist only of pieces of bark laid together in the form of an oven, open at one end and very low, though long enough for a man to lie at full length in." and "too low to admit the lord of it to stand upright, but long and wide enough to admit thre or four persons to lie under it." p 260

"their hunting-huts which consist of nothing more than a large piece of bark, bent in the middle and open at both ends, exactly resembling two cards set up to form an acute angle;" P112

Yet Pascoe persists in claiming there was"housing construction."
Where is his evidence of all this construction?
He also includes Australian aborigines as being the same as Torres Strait Islanders who did cultivate and did have advanced construction of huts and villages compared to the mainlanders. They had this because they had to stay in one place to cultivate their crops.
Lastly if Pascoe's "evidence of Indigenous agriculture, textile manufacture and housing construction." is true then why was the population so low - 1 million or less.

The ABS comments "Recent archaeological evidence suggests that a population of 750,000 Indigenous peoples could have been sustained."

https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Previousproducts/68AE74ED632E17A6CA2573D200110075?opendocument&fbclid=IwAR3YYp83VIc1ugjjSktSLgwxhzTT9_n0fQ4cCO5AnVVZfhAYiLVPjQ-Xx3U

Narelle,

>>The ABS comments "Recent archaeological evidence suggests that a population of 750,000 Indigenous peoples could have been sustained." <<

At the best of times ? Or at the worst of times ? There wasn't an 'average' population - it would have fluctuated over a century or two, from very low during long droughts, perhaps down to 250,000 across the country (depending how widespread and long the droughts were) to a build-up of half a million or more, depending on how long the next droughts held off. And another long period . to re-build numbers.

After all, it takes time for human groups to build up their numbers after catastrophic droughts. During droughts, Aboriginal women would not have got pregnant, their youngest children might not survive if they don't have milk (which in turn depends on reliable food supplies), so they have to be sacrificed. Older people, especially women, would not be able to keep up with the group if it had to move quickly outside the drought-affected areas.

So the numbers would have declined, partly through mortality, but mainly because women could not bear children during a drought (and the children born four or five years earlier also would have died). So a drought of, say, five years, would mean no new children for ten years, and older people, say those over fifty, dying as well. A very long drought, say ten years, would leave a population aged only from fifteen to fifty to re-populate their country again over the coming decades and centuries.

One drought in the thirteenth century lasted thirty two years. Characteristically, the longer a drought, the more widespread it would be. And so the longer it would take to build the population up again.

Joe