GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

YALI'S PEOPLE • 319
overwhelmingly New Guinean, but its urban population is Indonesian, as
a result of government policy aimed at encouraging Indonesian immigration.
Indonesians, with their long history of exposure to malaria and other
tropical diseases shared with New Guineans, have not faced as potent a
germ barrier as have Europeans. They are also better prepared than Europeans
for subsisting in New Guinea, because Indonesian agriculture
already included bananas, sweet potatoes, and some other staple crops of
New Guinea agriculture. The ongoing changes in Irian Jaya represent the
continuation, backed by a centralized government's full resources, of the
Austronesian expansion that began to reach New Guinea 3,500 years ago.
Indonesians are modern Austronesians.
EUROPEANS COLONIZED AUSTRALIA, rather than Native Australians
colonizing Europe, for the same reasons that we have just seen in the case
of New Guinea. However, the fates of New Guineans and of Aboriginal
Australians were very different. Today, Australia is populated and governed
by 20 million non-Aborigines, most of them of European descent,
plus increasing numbers of Asians arriving since Australia abandoned its
previous White Australia immigration policy in 1973. The Aboriginal population
declined by 80 percent, from around 300,000 at the time of European
settlement to a minimum of 60,000 in 1921. Aborigines today form
an underclass of Australian society. Many of them live on mission stations
or government reserves, or else work for whites as herdsmen on cattle
stations. Why did Aborigines fare so much worse than New Guineans?
The basic reason is Australia's suitability (in some areas) for European
food production and settlement, combined with the role of European guns,
germs, and steel in clearing Aborigines out of the way. While I already
stressed the difficulties posed by Australia's climate and soils, its most productive
or fertile areas can nevertheless support European farming. Agriculture
in the Australian temperate zone is now dominated by the Eurasian
temperate-zone staple crops of wheat (Australia's leading crop), barley,
oats, apples, and grapes, along with sorghum and cotton of African Sahel
origins and potatoes of Andean origins. In tropical areas of northeastern
Australia (Queensland) beyond the optimal range of Fertile Crescent
crops, European farmers introduced sugarcane of New Guinea origins,
bananas and citrus fruit of tropical Southeast Asian origins, and peanuts
of tropical South American origins. As for livestock, Eurasian sheep made