Some history of Australia from 4000-1BC

Uluru in central Australia

This post will look at Australian history from around 4000BC to 1BC. These dates are very arbitrary and I will be describing some things that come before this time to give context and, due to the nature of archaeology, describing some things that come after this time period. I normally start by stressing that I am not an expert in the subject, but in the case of Australian history I’m not sure I even deserve to be described as an amateur. I knew almost nothing of Australian history before beginning to research this blog. Needless to say, all my thoughts here should be treated with extreme caution. This is the work of a new amateur who has tried to find sources online. In many cases the sources are unclear or defective. It is not that Australian history is under-studied per se. But there are many questions that have been asked about history in other regions that do not seem to have been asked here.

The region that I will be looking at covers the island continent of Australia itself, the nearby large island of Tasmania, and the Torres Strait Islands between northern Australia and New Guinea. While nowadays New Zealand and Australia are often looked at together, at this point in history New Zealand was uninhabited. The Maori settlers would not arrive until later, so we will omit New Zealand from this blog.

Near Lake Mungo

All history can be culturally and ethnically tense. If a non-Irish person studies the Famine in Ireland, their conclusions may cause resentment among Irish people. Likewise, because the history of Australia in this time is by definition the history of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, conclusions drawn by outsiders may cause offence. The Aboriginal community in Australia was devastated by the arrival of the Europeans and there was officially mandated persecution of this community within living memory. Even when the Europeans tried to help the Aboriginal peoples, they usually did so in such a way as to cause far more harm than good.

The Aboriginal community today is still facing discrimination and major social problems caused by their disadvantageous position in Australian society. To sum up, there is a justified distrust of outsiders, including archaeologists, within the Aboriginal community and this has led to less archaeological work than may otherwise have taken place. The archaeological community and the Aboriginal people will have to work together to lay down guidelines and best practices to allow the study of history to continue in a way that does not do further harm to the community.

Australia had no records prior to the arrival of the Europeans. It does not seem to have even been written about (there may be some exceptions in later Indonesian text). This makes the period that we are looking at technically “before history” or pre-history. The extraordinary oral traditions of the Aboriginal peoples allow us to make some use of oral history, but this is not easy to do. The primary sources of the information in this blog is from archaeology with a smattering of historical linguistics and genetics thrown in.

According to the best guess by archaeologists Australia was inhabited perhaps 50,000-60,000 years ago. The lowest date on the current level of knowledge would be 40,000 years, as remains from Lake Mungo have been dated to this time. Human remains have been found, showing deliberate burial and with red ochre being used to decorate the dead. As an aside, I find it interesting that red ochre would be used at so many different times and places to decorate the dead. The Yamna culture from the Pontic steppe used red ochre, as did the Chinchorro peoples of the Andes and here we see the early Aboriginal cultures using this. It probably is just convergent cultural evolution, but it is interesting to see.

The Aboriginal peoples seem to have gained some unique genetic traits which seem to allow a greater than average tolerance to extremes of cold and heat. This is useful in Australia, which is a country of extremes. This would also affect archaeology however, as a culture whose inhabitants could survive great extremes of cold and heat might have less need to build shelters and thus would show up less in the archaeological record.

Torres Strait Islands

It is unclear how the Aboriginal peoples reached Australia. Australia and New Guinea form part of a large continental shelf called Sahul. While now the two countries are widely separated by the Torres Strait, during glacial maximums, when the ice-sheets were at their highest, the strait could be crossed. Perhaps the people at the time had already used boats (this is possible as Sahul is separated from the neighbouring plates by deep fault lines that would always have water in them regardless of ice-ages. But once Sahul had been reached it may have been possible to move from the coast of New Guinea to the northern coast of Australia without boats.

After the horrendous 2004 earthquake and subsequent tsunami in the Indian Ocean, some scholars speculated that coastal peoples could have been swept up what are now the islands of Indonesia and dropped on the coast of Australia. It has to be admitted that this is theoretically possible and it would allow reaching Australia at a very early date without the use of boats or land bridges but one would have to assume that only a very few would be swept over and this would lead to an extreme genetic bottleneck (as the Aboriginal communities would be primarily descended from just a handful of individuals). This does not appear to be the case so, to my knowledge, tsunami diffusion remains no more than an interesting speculation.

Reconstruction of a Diprotodon

However the Aboriginal peoples reached Australia, they would have found a strange continent before them. The centre of the continent was a series of forbidding deserts with wild extremes of heat and cold. The flora and fauna had developed for time out of mind in isolation from the rest of the world. Giant marsupials had become the dominant life-forms on the continent, with the giant Diprotodon being the largest marsupial to ever exist. It is hard to imagine an animal related to the koala as a giant creature roughly the size of a rhinoceros but these, and marsupial carnivores similar to the thylacine, roamed the vast lands of Australia.

When the humans first arrived the creatures of Australia may not have paid them any heed. Humans are relatively small compared to creatures such as the Diprotodon and may not have been considered a threat. However, humans would have quickly made their presence known and the large marsupials of Australia would have had to adapt to this new threat. About 45,000 years ago the largest creatures of the Australian megafauna seem to have gone extinct. It is not clear that humans are directly responsible, but it seems likely that they played a part. Humans would change environments to suit themselves, would have competed for resources and would occasionally have killed large creatures when they could. When an ice-age or dry period would arrive this competition from humans could become deadly to other animals and the most likely scenario is that the large creatures went extinct because of the presence of humans, although not necessarily because humans hunted them to extinction.

There is the possibility that an Aboriginal legend about a water spirit called a bunyip, which inhabited the waters of the Murray River, and would catch and kill humans that went down to the water, is an oral tradition remembering the Diprotodon, which like hippos, may have been deadly to humans without being explicitly carnivorous. If this is the case then either the dates for the extinction of the Diprotodon are in error, with some surviving in refuges, or the Australian oral tradition is the most enduring in the world, as no other culture to my knowledge has a folk memory that would endure for over forty-thousand years. But more work is needed. It is quite possible that the bunyip and the Diprotodon have nothing whatsoever to do with each other.

As the prehistoric peoples of Australia spread out throughout the continent they inhabited what is now the southern island of Tasmania, which would then have been connected to the mainland. If the seas were much lower at various stages, many crucial Aboriginal sites may now be under water, as humans seem to have often spread along the coastal regions.

Bradshaw cave paintings (much later than the Gabarnmung
cave paintings)

Around 28,000 years ago, in the northern regions of Australia, the Gabarnmung caves were decorated with the oldest known cave art in Australia. This is considerably older than the dates usually given to the Lascaux paintings in present-day France.

Around 20,000 years ago, the last Glacial Maximum began. This may not have directly affected Australia but it would have made the climate far more arid and dry. This destruction of hunting grounds would have forced the inhabitants to flee to small areas that still had regular supplies of water and game. These are known as Ice Age refugia, with an example being the Lawn Hill Gorge site in present-day Queensland.

When the glaciers receded and the seas rose again, Tasmania was cut off for the last time from Australia, probably around 10,000BC. This would have also cut Australia off from the north, with the Torres Strait land bridge now simply existing as a chain of low islands between the lands of New Guinea and Australia.

Around this time the first securely attested boomerang was found, in Wyrie Swamp in southern Australia. While we sometimes think of the boomerang as a uniquely Australian tool it must be remembered that boomerangs were also used outside Australia and that not all Aboriginal peoples used boomerangs.

Around 9,000BC a stone alignment was made at Wurdi Youang in what is now Victoria. It is sometimes described as a circle but I find it more closely resembles a tear drop formation. It may possibly have been used as an astronomical tool, which is extremely interesting, as this would be one of the earliest astronomical observatories in the world if this is the case.

Sydney Rock Engraving

So, having given some account of the habitation and subsequent history of Australia, to give context to what will follow, we begin looking at the time period from 4000BC to 1BC. Around 4000BC the Sydney Rock Engravings were made. These were petroglyphs, pictures drawn upon rock, in the south-eastern region of Australia. Around 1500 of these are made, but there may have once been many more. Some of them may be much older, but at least some are from this period. As there were no metal tools, the engraving were difficult to make requiring some drilling into the softer rock and then extending lines between the points. Over the centuries and millennia the grooves would be deepened in ceremonies. It is not clear exactly what the purpose of the carvings were. The most frequent carvings were of a human foot or a fish.

Linguistic Map of Australia
The yellow regions show Pama-Nyungan languages

Around 3500BC the wet season seems to have been disrupted. This may have had something to do with the earlier 5.9 kiloyear event that brought climate change to Europe and Africa and contributed to the drying of the Sahara or it might be a completely unrelated event. Regardless it seems to have been involved in the drying out of the continent. A vast drought lasting centuries would have placed great stress on the peoples of the region and caused many groups to die out.

Around 3000BC the Proto-Pama-Nyungan language would have been spoken. This is the language family that covers by far the most territory in Australia. Linguistically the northern coast of Australia has many different language families, while the entire southern region now speaks Pama-Nyungan languages (Pama-Nyungan would be analogous to Indo-European). It is unclear where Proto-Pama-Nyungan was first spoken and how it came to dominate the lands, but I suspect that the Pama-Nyungan speakers had found some way of adapting to the increased aridity of the land. This would have allowed them to expand their territory in regions that others may have found uninhabitable. The increased ability to survive may have seen other groups adopt the cultural practices of the Pama-Nyungan speakers, including their languages. This is speculation on my part however. The mechanism of expansion of this language is not fully understood.

Crater at the Henbury Meteorite Conservation Reserve

Around 2700BC a meteorite crashed into the land not far from what is present-day Alice Springs in Central Australia. The impact would have been akin to a nuclear explosion and carved out a number of craters in what is now known as the Henbury Meteorites Conservation Reserve. To this day the Aboriginal peoples of the region speak of a fire-devil attacking the land and carving giant holes. This is an oral preservation of the meteorite event and yet another testimony to the longevity of the Australian Aboriginal oral tradition.

Around 2000BC the rains seem to have returned to a more normal pattern. The end of the dry period would have allowed the land to bear more plants, support more wildlife and thus support more people. The Bradshaw rock paintings in north-western Australia seem to have stopped being produced around this time and a different style, the Wandjina style of paintings, were used in its stead.

Wandjina Cave paintings

The tools used by the Aboriginal peoples shift around this time as well. The heavier stone implements were replaced by what is known as the Australian Small Tool Tradition. This included Bondi Points, Pirri Points and Tula Adzes, all of which appear to be technological advances. It is probable that these were natively developed, but the return of a wetter climate seems to have brought renewed contact between Australia and islands to the north. The dingo was probably introduced from Sulawesi around this time and it is possible that the Melanesian inhabitants of the Torres Strait Islands came to the region at this time, although this is unknown.

There are theories that the dingo is related to the Pariah dog in India and that there were Indian sailors who reached Australia. This is possible, as the Indus Valley Civilisation was flourishing at this time and was trading with Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf. But it is more likely that the dingo is related to the Singing Dog of New Guinea rather than the Pariah dog. Further research is needed but regardless, around this time dingoes appear in Australia. Dingoes were primarily wild, but some Aboriginal tribes domesticated them to some extent. This was the only domesticated animal on the Australian continent and the arrival of the dingo threatened the thylacine, which now had competition for that ecological niche.

Dingo

At some point the Aboriginal communities along the coasts began to develop towards agriculture. They did not perhaps develop full agriculture but there were definite practices of replanting gathered foods and the use of fire to terraform lands and regenerate the productivity in the soil. Certain areas saw semi-permanent settlements. Agriculture may indeed be too strong a term, but it is fair to say that the Aboriginal peoples were at least proto-agricultural. They may have resembled the people of Watson’s Brake in North America, where a hunter-gatherer culture could nevertheless maintain a steady enough source of food to establish permanent settlements. Or perhaps the Natufians of the Levant could be used as examples of similar behaviour, where they engaged in the preparation of grains long before they engaged in full farming practices. Whatever the case, not all Aboriginal societies engaged in these practices, as most of the inland regions were too arid to rely on anything other than hunting and gathering.

There is not much more that I can say about the period. Around two millennia ago, (circa 1BC) the thylacine went extinct in Australia, probably due to competition from the dingo, but survived in Tasmania, which did not have dingoes. I am sure that there is much, much more that can and should be said about Australian history but I do not know enough to confidently say more so I will leave the account here. Hopefully this gives at least an introduction to the history of the Australian continent and gives context to what general trends were happening here when we are discussing the rest of the world.