GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

310 GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
We think of Australian Aborigines as desert people, but most of them
were not. Instead, their population densities varied with rainfall (because
it controls the production of terrestrial wild plant and animal foods) and
with abundance of aquatic foods in the sea, rivers, and lakes. The highest
population densities of Aborigines were in Australia's wettest and most
productive regions: the Murray-Darling river system of the Southeast, the
eastern and northern coasts, and the southwestern corner. Those areas
also came to support the densest populations of European settlers in modern
Australia. The reason we think of Aborigines as desert people is simply
that Europeans killed or drove them out of the most desirable areas, leaving
the last intact Aboriginal populations only in areas that Europeans
didn't want.
Within the last 5,000 years, some of those productive regions witnessed
an intensification of Aboriginal food-gathering methods, and a buildup
of Aboriginal population density. Techniques were developed in eastern
Australia for rendering abundant and starchy, but extremely poisonous,
cycad seeds edible, by leaching out or fermenting the poison. The previously
unexploited highlands of southeastern Australia began to be visited
regularly during the summer, by Aborigines feasting not only on cycad
nuts and yams but also on huge hibernating aggregations of a migratory
moth called the bogong moth, which tastes like a roasted chestnut when
grilled. Another type of intensified food-gathering activity that developed
was the freshwater eel fisheries of the Murray-Darling river system, where
water levels in marshes fluctuate with seasonal rains. Native Australians
constructed elaborate systems of canals up to a mile and a half long, in
order to enable eels to extend their range from one marsh to another. Eels
were caught by equally elaborate weirs, traps set in dead-end side canals,
and stone walls across canals with a net placed in an opening of the wall.
Traps at different levels in the marsh came into operation as the water
level rose and fell. While the initial construction of those "fish farms" must
have involved a lot of work, they then fed many people. Nineteenth-century
European observers found villages of a dozen Aboriginal houses at
the eel farms, and there are archaeological remains of villages of up to 146
stone houses, implying at least seasonally resident populations of hundreds
of people.
Still another development in eastern and northern Australia was the
harvesting of seeds of a wild millet, belonging to the same genus as the
broomcorn millet that was a staple of early Chinese agriculture. The millet