The best thing about all the ignorance being displayed in the Aboriginal reconciliation debate is that there’s a cure available to the racists — a jolly good book.
It’s entitled Guns, Germs and Steel and subtitled A History of Everybody for the last 13,000 years.
It’s written by Jared Diamond and it contains a certain cure for those who care to read it. It puts paid to the nonsense that somehow Aboriginal people are “inferior” to their British colonisers because, as some would have it, the white boys won and the blackfellas lost.
It puts paid to the shallow comparisons between migrants and Aborigines. Bill Mandle and others have argued, for example, that while Aborigines have “”done nothing” for 40,000 the migrant whites developed the place. They have argued that if it is possible for Arvi Parvo and other migrants to arrive on the shore penniless and made good, surely some Aborigines should be able to do the same thing.
Diamond’s book explains why not. Diamond is one of America’s finest scholars who has made a brilliant contribution to evolutionary biology. Guns, Germs and Steel won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction but because it’s a long book – about 500 pages – with not many pictures it has not attracted mass readership. It has not even fed its way down to commercial talk-back. The ideas are too complex for that media, though they are compelling.
So, a summary is in order. Diamond says the inequality in human fortunes cannot be laid at the door of race or inherent features of the people themselves. Instead, it stems from the differing natural resources available to the people of each continent.
This is not really surprising. We are one people, roughly 3600 generations – about 120,000 years – old. As we spread out from Africa we encountered differing climates, topographical conditions and flora and fauna. Some of us stuck around areas that seemed congenial; others pressed on to find new lands.
But wherever they found a home, 13,000 years ago all humans were hunter-gatherers. The conditions that then wrought changes to lifestyle had to do with several things, none of which bear upon “superiority” and “inferiority” but rather what was in the environment. Most important was the availability of domesticatable plants and animals. Wheat, barley, millet, beans, cattle, pigs, goats, horses and sheep were domesticated in the Fertile Crescent and could easily spread village by village along the same latitude with the same climate. North America, Australia and to some extent Africa did not have those plants and oceans, deserts and jungles separated the people from them.
Some grasses were suitable for breeding as were some animals. Some – like the dry grasses, the marsupials and the emus of Australia – were not.
We know this because in the 200 years since the European settlement-cum-invasion no skilled farmers have managed it. We have yet to establish our first viable kangaroo farm or emu industry.
It’s not that Aboriginal Australians were somehow less able in the area of animal and plant husbandry, merely that they had less suitable species to work with. The macadamia nut is the only Australian native plant or animal that has been successfully domesticated on a commercial scale. Our ancestors in Europe were just lucky that they found plants and animals that they could domesticate. They were not superior human beings because it, they were just fortunate. Who knows, if Australia had all the domesticatable plants and animals and the ancient Britons had marsupials and dry grasses, white Britons might have been conquered by black Australians.
If the plants and animals had been here, they would have domesticated them. When the Aborigines – and native North Americans – were introduced to the horse, for example, they quickly became expert (and were exploited for it).
We know that Aboriginal people used Dingoes up to 5000 years ago to help them in kangaroo hunts. Diamond says, “Within a decade of Tasmania’s settlement by Europeans with dogs, Aboriginal Tasmanians, who had never before seen dogs, began to breed them in large numbers for use in hunting.”
The domestication process had another great advantage – it exposed people to germs that crossed species and gradually inoculated them. So when European conquerors moved into new areas, such as Australia, they brought the deadliest weapons of all in measles and other animal based bacteria for which the Aboriginal people were unprepared. The Aborigines and American Indians died from diseases than the Europeans were immune to.
Diamond says,” The major killers of humanity throughout our recent history – smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, measles and cholera – are infectious diseases that evolved from diseases of animals.”
Having the luck of domesticatable plants and animals meant also that a large number of people were freed from the chores of food production because there was a surplus of food. Freed from hunting a gathering, they could develop a bureaucratic class who developed a need to keep records and hence develop writing. Without the domesticatable plants and animals, writing does not develop. It has nothing to do with superiority.
Diamond says, “Writing was never developed or even adopted by hunter-gatherer societies, because they lacked both the institutional uses of early writing and the social and agricultural mechanisms for generating the food surplus required to feed scribes.”
Hunter-gatherer societies developed other different skills to survive in their harsher environments. They did not have the opportunity to domesticate animals and plants which yielded the luxury of surplus food which gives time for writing and developing metal and guns.
The conquest of the Americas and Australia is about opportunity and luck, not about superiority, greater intelligence or better civilisation.
Note: Macklin and Hull discovered to each other’s chagrin on Thursday that they had independently planned to write the same theme for Forum this week. So they combined efforts.