GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

296 GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
Both of us stopped talking. As we walked, we concentrated on listening
to our breathing, calculating the distance to the next landmark, and estimating
the remaining time. My mouth and tongue were now dry, and
Marie's face was red. When we at last reached the air-conditioned ranger
station, we sagged into chairs next to the water cooler, drank down the
cooler's last half-gallon of water, and asked the ranger for another bottle.
Sitting there exhausted, both physically and emotionally, I reflected that
the Aborigines who had made those paintings had somehow spent their
entire lives in that desert without air-conditioned retreats, managing to
find food as well as water.
To white Australians, Menindee is famous as the base camp for two
whites who had suffered worse from the desert's dry heat over a century
earlier: the Irish policeman Robert Burke and the English astronomer William
Wills, ill-fated leaders of the first European expedition to cross Australia
from south to north. Setting out with six camels packing food
enough for three months, Burke and Wills ran out of provisions while in
the desert north of Menindee. Three successive times, they encountered
and were rescued by well-fed Aborigines whose home was that desert, and
who plied the explorers with fish, fern cakes, and roasted fat rats. But then
Burke foolishly shot his pistol at one of the Aborigines, whereupon the
whole group fled. Despite their big advantage over the Aborigines in possessing
guns with which to hunt, Burke and Wills starved, collapsed, and
died within a month after the Aborigines' departure.
My wife's and my experience at Menindee, and the fate of Burke and
Wills, made vivid for me the difficulties of building a human society in
Australia. Australia stands out from all the other continents: the differences
between Eurasia, Africa, North America, and South America fade
into insignificance compared with the differences between Australia and
any of those other landmasses. Australia is by far the driest, smallest, flattest,
most infertile, climatically most unpredictable, and biologically most
impoverished continent. It was the last continent to be occupied by Europeans.
Until then, it had supported the most distinctive human societies,
and the least numerous human population, of any continent.
Australia thus provides a crucial test of theories about intercontinental
differences in societies. It had the most distinctive environment, and also
the most distinctive societies. Did the former cause the latter? If so, how?
Australia is the logical continent with which to begin our around-the-