GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

320 • GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
it possible to extend food production to arid areas of Australia unsuitable
for agriculture, and Eurasian cattle joined crops in moister areas.
Thus, the development of food production in Australia had to await the
arrival of non-native crops and animals domesticated in climatically similar
parts of the world too remote for their domesticates to reach Australia
until brought by transoceanic shipping. Unlike New Guinea, most of Australia
lacked diseases serious enough to keep out Europeans. Only in tropical
northern Australia did malaria and other tropical diseases force
Europeans to abandon their 19th-century attempts at settlement, which
succeeded only with the development of 20th-century medicine.
Australian Aborigines, of course, stood in the way of European food
production, especially because what was potentially the most productive
farmland and dairy country initially supported Australia's densest populations
of Aboriginal hunter-gatherers. European settlement reduced the
number of Aborigines by two means. One involved shooting them, an
option that Europeans considered more acceptable in the 19th and late
18th centuries than when they entered the New Guinea highlands in the
1930s. The last large-scale massacre, of 31 Aborigines, occurred at Alice
Springs in 1928. The other means involved European-introduced germs to
which Aborigines had had no opportunity to acquire immunity or to
evolve genetic resistance. Within a year of the first European settlers'
arrival at Sydney, in 1788, corpses of Aborigines who had died in epidemics
became a common sight. The principal recorded killers were smallpox,
influenza, measles, typhoid, typhus, chicken pox, whooping cough, tuberculosis,
and syphilis.
In these two ways, independent Aboriginal societies were eliminated in
all areas suitable for European food production. The only societies that
survived more or less intact were those in areas of northern and western
Australia useless to Europeans. Within one century of European colonization,
40,000 years of Aboriginal traditions had been mostly swept away.
WE CAN NOW return to the problem that I posed near the beginning
of this chapter. How, except by postulating deficiencies in the Aborigines
themselves, can one account for the fact that white English colonists
apparently created a literate, food-producing, industrial democracy, within
a few decades of colonizing a continent whose inhabitants after more than
40,000 years were still nonliterate nomadic hunter-gatherers? Doesn't that