Foxy,

Grotesque how your mind works. No, they would be in the 160 (chronologically organised, thankfully) boxes of correspondence out at the SA State Archives. Bureaucrats tend not to throw away anything, although I suppose librarians may do so in their eagerness to get rid of anything on paper, with the greatest of respect known to humankind.

I should have typed them up, but the Protector wouldn't have any reason not to reply clearly and honestly - although you may know better, of course. It's more difficult now since the State Archives have been moved from the centre of Adelaide out to Cavan, and one can view them only (unless the rules have changed again) on Wednesdays, 10 am - 12 pm. But whenever you're in Adelaide on a Wednesday, you can always just get a taxi and go out there.

No ? So what do stewed prunes in paranoia taste like ?

BTT: Australia's landscape, from a foraging point of view, would have been (and still is) a land of contrasts: highly productive river valleys and coastal areas, with an endless supply of food of all sorts, animal and vegetable; and extremely barren areas with very low and variable rainfall; and small areas in between, somewhat away from rivers with variable soil quality and rainfall.

There wouldn't have been any interest in farming in riverine environments - already plenty of food there every day. And it would have been a bit pointless to try to farm out in the deserts and semi-desert country. And even the in-between bits would have had such unreliable rainfall, like these days - although plenty of grasslands - that people would have either moved over the landscape regularly gathering limitless grass-seed and following the animals, or moved (through inter-marriage) to those more productive areas.

In his "First Farmers", Peter Bellwood

[TBC]

[continued]

teases out the difficulties facing the first farmers ten thousand years ago, in shifting from a foraging technology to something like a farming technology - not to mention the drastic changes in daily life and work required. It must have been a step-by-step process, involving penning animals and having to feed them (the women, of course), at first for food but (again thanks to the ingenuity of the women) for breeding.

There may have been an intermediate stage where women realised the value of sheep's wool, etc., for making clothing, rather than killing animals and using their skins - therefore the value of penning the most woolly animals; therefore the need to find the best grain-food for them; therefore the (mostly likely accidental, many times repeated) the slow realisation that - again, incredibly counter-intuitive - one should SAVE the best-headed grain stalks and NOT eat them, for planting.

Even then, they must have had difficulties in persuading the men to get involved, instead of going off hunting and fishing. Perhaps larger-scale production, not just part-time by the women but full-time by entire families, may have taken hundreds if not thousands of years to bring about.

But it appears that early on, those first farmers were producing enough to put some by in case of bad seasons: maybe it's a rule that farming has no attractions for others until it can assure a surplus. Even then, daily food satisfaction may have over-ruled the longer-term planning (and sheer physical work over long hours) required for farming.

The practice of farming spread across Europe over five thousand years - not by 'example' but by displacement of foragers by rapidly reproducing populations of farmers and their families. Bellwood estimates that that farming frontier moved across Europe at only 0.4 of a mile each year, i.e. about ten miles for each generation of new farmers as they moved out and colonised (invaded, if you like) more land for farming. That was us. Our ancestors. Perhaps inter-marrying with forager women as they went, and founding new farming settlements gradually across all of Europe.

[TBC]

[continued]

In fact, farming may have taken far longer to reach colder areas such as the Baltic where foragers may have still been predominant barely a thousand years ago. After all, how can you farm if it's too cold for a crop ? In New Zealand, Maori groups moving into the South Island found their crops couldn't grow for that reason, being originally sub-tropical tubers like taro and yams, so they went back to hunting and gathering.

Bellwood suggests that there were maybe only five areas in the world which independently originated farming: modern-day Kurdish areas in the Middle East, the north China Plains, Papua-New Guinea, Mexico and Peru/Ecuador/Bolivia. Maybe the Mississippi Valley, parts of Brazil, central China, West Africa and south-western India, but it's likely that farming populations spread from those first five areas. For example, from the central Middle East to the Lebanon-Palestine coast to the Nile valley and into Africa.

Nobody wakes up one morning and says, bugger it, instead of hunting or gathering today, I think I'll do a day's farming. There's a hell of a lot more to it than that.

Joe

Oops, sorry, Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber, I got you two mixed up.

It was Paul who made that paranoid crack about destroying letters. How on earth did I confuse you two ?

Joe

"My record for the reverence for facts has been clearly
displayed over the many years on this forum"

I must have missed that post.

"as have your
own bloopers"

for which you'll show examples as soon as you've made them up.

"Your zest for, and continued attempts to
put people down that you see as a threat,"

Its only putting people down when they make deliberate/convenient errors and then refuse to own them. You are the great exemplar of that trait in this group.
Keynes wrote "When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?"

Foxy says, when my information changes I (circle one):
*ignore it
*look for different information
*attack the messenger
*never alter my conclusions.

So for example she chooses to ignore the 'exposed' site because its pushed by News Corp. Having been shown that it wasn't NC (and frankly how anyone even mildly aware of NC papers would think Cairns News was one is beyond me) she just carries on as though nothing changed and demands that all others do likewise.

Its not a question of putting others down, but trying to get them to acknowledge that conclusions based on wrong data are also wrong. But Foxy's conclusions are rarely based on the data and thus her data being wrong is immaterial in her mind.
I find that offensive and not at all conducive to intelligent discussion.

Blow me down, I go to the Firstsources.info website to read the SA Protector of Aborigines, Matthew Moorhouse's report of 1841 to the SA Governor, George Grey concerning the Rufus River Massacre of Aborigines in which Moorhouse took part, a lot of "protection" there! It has been shown Moorhouse lied about the whole incident to cover his backside. I could be wrong, I couldn't find the report, it could be there, but I just can't find it.

If it is there, all good and well, we can read Moorehouse's lies, if its not, well such a vital piece of South Australian Aboriginal history missing.