GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

YALI'S PEOPLE • 3 2 I
constitute a perfectly controlled experiment in the evolution of human
societies, forcing us to a simple racist conclusion?
The resolution of this problem is simple. White English colonists did
not create a literate, food-producing, industrial democracy in Australia.
Instead, they imported all of the elements from outside Australia: the livestock,
all of the crops (except macadamia nuts), the metallurgical knowledge,
the steam engines, the guns, the alphabet, the political institutions,
even the germs. All these were the end products of 10,000 years of development
in Eurasian environments. By an accident of geography, the colonists
who landed at Sydney in 1788 inherited those elements. Europeans
have never learned to survive in Australia or New Guinea without their
inherited Eurasian technology. Robert Burke and William Wills were smart
enough to write, but not smart enough to survive in Australian desert
regions where Aborigines were living.
The people who did create a society in Australia were Aboriginal Australians.
Of course, the society that they created was not a literate, foodproducing,
industrial democracy. The reasons follow straightforwardly
from features of the Australian environment.