GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

YALI'S PEOPLE • 309
Australia was the paucity of domesticable wild plants. Even modern European
plant geneticists have failed to develop any crop except macadamia
nuts from Australia's native wild flora. The list of the world's potential
prize cereals—the 56 wild grass species with the heaviest grains—includes
only two Australian species, both of which rank near the bottom of the
list (grain weight only 13 milligrams, compared with a whopping 40 milligrams
for the heaviest grains elsewhere in the world). That's not to say
that Australia had no potential crops at all, or that Aboriginal Australians
would never have developed indigenous food production. Some plants,
such as certain species of yams, taro, and arrowroot, are cultivated in
southern New Guinea but also grow wild in northern Australia and were
gathered by Aborigines there. As we shall see, Aborigines in the climatically
most favorable areas of Australia were evolving in a direction that
might have eventuated in food production. But any food production that
did arise indigenously in Australia would have been limited by the lack of
domesticable animals, the poverty of domesticable plants, and the difficult
soils and climate.
Nomadism, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and minimal investment in
shelter and possessions were sensible adaptations to Australia's ENSOdriven
resource unpredictability. When local conditions deteriorated, Aborigines
simply moved to an area where conditions were temporarily better.
Rather than depending on just a few crops that could fail, they minimized
risk by developing an economy based on a great variety of wild foods, not
all of which were likely to fail simultaneously. Instead of having fluctuating
populations that periodically outran their resources and starved, they
maintained smaller populations that enjoyed an abundance of food in
good years and a sufficiency in bad years.
The Aboriginal Australian substitute for food production has been
termed "firestick farming." The Aborigines modified and managed the surrounding
landscape in ways that increased its production of edible plants
and animals, without resorting to cultivation. In particular, they intentionally
burned much of the landscape periodically. That served several purposes:
the fires drove out animals that could be killed and eaten
immediately; fires converted dense thickets into open parkland in which
people could travel more easily; the parkland was also an ideal habitat for
kangaroos, Australia's prime game animal; and the fires stimulated the
growth both of new grass on which kangaroos fed and of fern roots on
which Aborigines themselves fed.