The Story of Australia

A New History of People and Place

Louise Johnson, Tanja Luckins, David Walker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000423396
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Story of Australia provides a fresh, engaging and comprehensive introduction to Australia's history and geography. An island continent with distinct physical features, Australia is home to the most enduring Indigenous cultures on the planet. In the late eighteenth century newcomers from distant worlds brought great change. Since that time, Australia has been shaped by many peoples with competing visions of what the future might hold.

This new history of Australia integrates a rich body of scholarship from many disciplines, drawing upon maps, novels, poetry, art, music, diaries and letters, government and scientific reports, newspapers, architecture and the land itself, engaging with Australia in its historical, geographical, national and global contexts. It pays particular attention to women and Indigenous Australians, as well as exploring key themes including invasion/colonisation, land use, urbanisation, war, migration, suburbia and social movements for change. Elegantly written, readers will enjoy Australia's story from its origins to the present as the nation seeks to resolve tensions between Indigenous dispossession, British tradition and multicultural diversity while finding its place in an Asian region and dealing with global challenges like climate change.

It is an ideal text for students, academics and general readers with an interest in Australian history, geography, politics and culture.

1 Origin stories

DOI: 10.4324/9781003185970-2

Origin stories have captivated humans for thousands of years. From ancient Chinese and Greek myths to the foundation narratives of the New World settler societies, origin stories have been an important way for people to make sense of the world around them, to explain how lands and societies were made. Australia’s origin stories are complex and revealing. Geologists have described Australia as a continent adrift on a tectonic sea of movement as innumerable cycles of sinking and uplift took place across unfathomable spans of time. From Gondwanaland to Sahul, these geological transformations dynamically positioned Australia in relation to other land masses. A series of ice ages caused flooding, drying and numerous changes in sea level. During some of the most recent of these, dramatic changes in physical conditions were experienced by Indigenous peoples. Archaeologists have unearthed ancient burial sites and found deep caverns with signs of long-standing Aboriginal habitation. The evidence suggests that groups of humans moved from Asia into northern Australia, skirting around the edge and then across the continent at least 65,000 years ago. Indigenous Australians also tell stories of their origins by recounting ‘The Dreaming’, which describes how ancestral beings transformed a shapeless landscape into its many features and created human beings and their lore.

Figure 1.1 Mawalan Marika, Macassan prau, c.1960. This bark painting depicts three fishermen on the deck of a prau, a goat and a bird, sacks of rice and the knives for slicing the trepang harvested by the Macassans.

Source: Dorothy Bennett Collection, National Museum of Australia. Reproduced with permission from the National Museum of Australia and Aboriginal Artists Agency.

From such beginnings, around 500 different Indigenous groups came to live across the continent, further shaping the land, vegetation and waterways and generating distinctive ways of living. Artistic expression became an essential part of Indigenous culture. This included music, dance, body painting, rock art and bark painting. Sheets of bark were cut from stringybark eucalyptus trees, then flattened and dried over a fire. Using pigments ground from chalk, clay and ochre, artists depicted their land, animals, ancestral beings and aspects of daily life. Bark paintings from Arnhem Land, in northern Australia, for example, recorded the visits of Macassan traders and fishermen from Sulewesi (Indonesia). Yolngu elder Mawalan Marika’s bark painting depicts a prau, the fishing vessel used by the Macassans (NMA 2020) (Figure 1.1). These vessels, with their distinctive horizontal sails, visited the northern reaches of Australia from at least the 1700s. Travelling south with the prevailing monsoonal winds, Macassans stayed over the wet season and bartered and dried trepang (beche-de-mer, hai shen or sea cucumber), a culinary delicacy, and exchanged metal implements, food and clothing for pearl or tortoise shell and other items (Clark and May 2013). Indigenous peoples encountered the Macassans and other traders and explorers who ventured from Europe and Asia to the mythical Terra Australis (Figure 1.3). Then British navigators defined another set of origins, recording what they saw in terms of their imperial mission, scientific curiosity and sense of civilisation. Enticed by a belief that the ‘great south land’ would provide a new chapter in the story of empire, in the late eighteenth century they claimed the continent and irrevocably changed the lives of its Indigenous inhabitants.

Deep time

The continent we now know as Australia was once (600 to 100 million years ago) part of the ancient primeval continent of Gondwanaland whose swamp forest, birds and fish left the legacy of extensive coal beds in what later became south and eastern Australia. From 90 million years ago, Gondwanaland drifted eastward, separating from Antarctica and New Zealand (Figure 1.2). The intervening seas allowed cold ocean currents to converge around the separating landforms. Gondwanaland began to break up and a gigantic inland sea divided the Australian continent. Sediments from this time remain in their original horizontal positions across western Queensland, and north-western South Australia, forming the vast groundwater trap known as the Great Artesian Basin. The Great Divide on the continent’s eastern rim began to rise rapidly, the Tasman and Coral seas opened and the ancient inland sea now became land. Carbonate sedimentation occurred on the margins of the continent, which laid the foundation for the Great Barrier Reef and the broad limestone Nullarbor Plain. Having reached its current latitudinal position, the continent became monsoonal in the north, covered by a type of rainforest, and arid in the dry centre (Henderson and Johnson 2016, 299ff).

Figure 1.2 Gondwanaland 180 million years ago

Source: David Johnson, The Geology of Australia, 2nd edn (Cambridge University Press, 2009, p 86).

During the last 100,000 years, Australia experienced a number of glaciations – around 100,000, 70,000–60,000, 40,000 and 18,000 years ago. At these times, ice sheets expanded across the globe and sea levels fell by up to 140 metres, increasing the Australian land mass to include Papua New Guinea and Tasmania. During the ice age which ended around 70,000–60,000 years ago, the edge of western Indonesia extending back into south-east Asia formed the continent of Sundaland, while the expanded Australian land mass formed the continent of Sahul. Between Sahul and Sundaland lay ‘Wallace’s line’, a very deep stretch of water named after British naturalist and Charles Darwin’s contemporary, Alfred Russel Wallace (van Oosterzee 1997). Wallace’s line snaked from Mindanao to Borneo and Sulawesi and between Bali and Lombok, effectively separating Asia from Australia. Never crossed by land bridges, this sea barrier presented a formidable obstacle to the invasion of new animals notably most placental mammals. Only rats, shrews and small reptiles were able to cross the sea on floating rafts of vegetation, allowing Australia to remain predominantly a continent of marsupials. These in time gave rise to an enormous array of marsupial megafauna – giant kangaroos and koalas and the equivalents of rhinoceros, hippopotamus, giant sloths, leopards and antelopes. There were giant emu-like birds, huge goannas, horned turtles and gigantic primitive snakes. Yet within a few thousand years after the arrival of humans, this diverse megafauna suddenly became extinct, promoting the growth of fire-prone plants that survive more readily in poorly fertilised soils (Flannery 2010). While subject to much debate as to the causes of their extinction – be it the result of climate change, over-hunting by humans or a combination of both – there was a period of co-existence between some Australian megafauna and Indigenous peoples, particularly in well-watered places, around 70,000–12,000 years ago (Saltré et al. 2019).

Modern humans can trace their ancestry back by mitochondrial DNA to an African woman who lived at least 150,000 years ago. How did her descendants reach Australia? Geological evidence suggests that during an ice age 70,000–60,000 years ago, sea levels to the north of the continent were much lower than they are today. This allowed a series of islands to appear in the waters between Indonesia and the Australian mainland separated by relatively short stretches of open sea. Humans using boats could then by ‘island hopping’ finally reach Australia (Norman et al. 2018).The Wallacean Archipelago is estimated to have measured about 1,000 kilometres from west to east. There seemed to have been two main routes to traverse this distance, each requiring between eight and 17 separate crossings, one of over 70 kilometres and three of over 30 kilometres, a remarkable feat using relatively primitive craft (Burnet 2017).

During the ice age that occurred 40,000 years ago, Australia’s climate was much cooler and wetter. Inland water bodies were more extensive than they have ever been since, supporting abundant aquatic and other wildlife. This in turn fed significant Aboriginal populations. In 1968, the ancient lake-beds at Willandra in western New South Wales, dry for 18,000 years, revealed remains of megafauna and the skeleton of Mungo Lady. Buried after cremation, she has been dated to at least 40,000 years ago – the world’s oldest cremation. Half a kilometre away was Mungo Man, whose skeleton (uncovered in 1974) was also dated at 40,000 years (Griffiths 2018, 81–95). These remains are as old as the entry of modern humans into Western Europe. Mungo Man’s body had been anointed with ochre taken from sites 200 kilometres away, signifying that he had undergone an elaborate burial ritual. Extensive fish remains in 30,000-year-old hearths, provide evidence that Mungo people engaged in gill net fishing. Much later, as the lake dried out, their food increasingly came from the surrounding grass plains, suggesting an ability to adapt to greatly changed physical conditions. This drying out might also have brought the megafauna into closer contact with humans, accelerating their demise (Westaway et al. 2017). The Mungo remains provide powerful evidence of the long-term Indigenous occupation of Australia. After being kept, controversially, for many years at the Australian National University, the remains of Mungo Man were returned in 2017 to join Mungo Lady, who had been repatriated in 1992. They were greeted and reburied by their descendants, the Paakantji people, the traditional owners of the Willandra Lakes, who still live in this area today (Tuniz et al. 2016). Willandra Lakes is their ‘Country’, a place people have intimate knowledge of, and connection to, a place which informs their identity and belonging.

Evidence of many other ancient sites of human habitation in Australia has now accumulated, supported by ever more sophisticated methods of scientific dating. These include: Lake Gregory in the Kimberley region (45,000–50,000 years before the present (BP)); Cuddie Springs in the north-east (38,500 BP); rock shelters near Lawn Hill in Queensland (41,500 BP); Allen’s Cave on the Nullarbor (40,000 BP) and Puritjarra (40,000 BP) on the western edge of the central Australian ranges. The Malakunanja (also called Madjedbebe) rock shelter, in Arnhem Land, has been dated to 65,000 BP (Clarkson et al. 2017; Tuniz et al. 2016). These sites all testify to the early spread of Aboriginal peoples across Australia to occupy a wide range of changing environments.

Aboriginal origin stories

Indigenous stories of origins complement those of geologists and archaeologists. They too speak of beginnings for landforms, waterways and vegetation across the continent. The great diversity and number of Aboriginal stories of origin confirm their very long-term connections to their Country and forebears. These stories retain great power of moral guidance. Anthropologists have labelled the earliest period of which these stories speak ‘The Dreamtime’, and recognise that for Aboriginal people, The Dreamtime continues to imbue the present. For Mussolini Harvey, a Yanyuwa man from the Gulf of Carpentaria, ‘the Dreamings made our Law’ and this guides ‘the way we live, our rules … our songs, our stories’. Unlike European law, which can change, ‘our Law cannot change, we did not make it. The Law was made by the Dreamings … and given to our Ancestors and they gave it to us’ (cited by Hume 2002, 24). The Dreaming is an origin story, containing both sacred knowledge and moral truth; Dreaming events permeate and guide Aboriginal life, and reflect a notion of cyclical rather than linear time – ‘everywhen’, a time that is not only past but also present. Through ritual, humans can enter The Dreaming. As Yiman and Bidjara academic Marcia Langton explains:

The Aboriginal ancestors trave...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Origin stories
• 2. Manifest destiny?
• 3. Dispossessing and settling
• 4. An immigrating world
• 5. City lights and suburban dreaming
• 6. A continent for a nation
• 7. Sacrifice
• 8. Reforging a nation
• 9. Land of tomorrow
• 10. Shifting temperaments
• 11. Reimagining the land
• 12. Global visions
• Index