ulture in New Guinea and Aboriginal culture in Australia. Nevertheless, there was one independent development of agriculture in Australasia/Sahul, and that was in New Guinea.
Our continent did not bypass the Neolithic revolution, as Pyne and Sheehan say. They might have known this had they read, for instance, A Prehistory of Australia, New Guinea and Sahul by Peter White and James O'Connell (Academic Publishers, December 1982), or the more recent Archaeology of Aboriginal Australia: A Reader, edited by Tim Murray (Allen and Unwin, 1998).
So much for Sheehan's experts, some of whome seem to be ignorant of the basic literature in the field. The inquiry into Australasian prehistory has really just begun. In reality, the achievements of Aboriginal society in Australia, and Melanesian society in New Guinea were quite considerable. The very first, and most amazing achievement, was getting to the continent at all, 60,000 years ago or thereabouts. The ancestors of Aboriginal and Melanesian society seem to have constructed boats or rafts and developed sufficient sailing skills to cross the large sea gap between Asia and Sahul. p> From the time of white settlement in 1788, the contact between white Australia and Aboriginal Australia has been brutal, ruthless and imperial, qualified by constant and sometimes fairly effective Aboriginal resistance to white conquest. Keith Willey's useful book, When the Sky Fell Down is a comprehensive reconstruction of what can be deduced about the destruction of Aboriginal society in the Sydney region. Eric Wilmot's wonderful novel, Pemulwuy, the Rainbow Warrior (Sydney Weldons, 1987) is an excellent artistic attempt to re-create the world of the well-documented initial Aboriginal military resistance to white conquest.
This resistance, undermined and finally defeated by a combination of the military superiority in weapons and resources of the invaders, and the devastating impact of the diseases introduced from white settlement into populations that didn't have immunity to those diseases, recurs throughout the history of white settlement all over Australia.
The disastrous impact of European diseases on Aboriginal peoples without immunities, is a common story in the Americas, the Pacific and Australasia, but that does not stop some historical revisionists even attempting to alter this history. There is even one medical historian, who laborioriously tries to construct a narrative in which smallpox didn't spread from white settlement, as almost all the witnesses at the time said it did, but came overland from the Malay contact with Arnhem Land. Predictably he, too, becomes one of Sheehan's "experts". p> In this context, Sheehan ignores the definitive book on this topic, Our Original Aggression, by the late Noel Butlin, the distinguished Australian statistician and economist (After whom the Noel Butlin Archives in Canberra are named), published in 1983, and his Economics and the Dreamtime (ANU Press, 1994). In these thoroughly reputable and pretty well unanswerable books, Butlin established quite clearly from the records that the epidemics close to the settled areas of Australia spread from the settled areas.
He also, as part of his research, using his skills as a statistician, satisfactorily proved for most geographers and anthropologists that the number of Aborigines in Australia at the time of settlement was probably between 600,000 and a million, many more than the 300,000 previously accepted as the likely figure.
Throughout the 19th century, as white settlement spread, there was a frequent effort on the part of British colonial authorities in Australia to kill off the Aboriginals, interspersed with much more episodic and less effective moments of attempting to "protect" them. Sometimes the protection was almost as bad as the more overt attempts to exterminate. In Tasmania, the Protector of Aborigines, the earnest and fairly well-intentioned George Augustus Robinson, eventually was forced, more of less by circumstance, to preside over a desperate scheme to create a reservation for the surviving Tasmanians, which ended up being on a bleak and unpleasant island, unsuitable for such a purpose, where the surviving full-blood Aboriginal Tasmanians died out, the last survivor being Truganini.
The present Tasmanian Aboriginal community is descended mainly from a mixed-blood community that developed on the islands of Bass Strait from white sealers and the Tasmanian women who they seized during the brutal era of European conquest of Tasmania. Perhaps the most vicious, appalling but effective feature of this war of extermination and conquest, was the recruitment of Aboriginal mounted police from the most brutalised group of young males from tribal remnants, who were unleashed by white colonial society on tribes other than their own, with a licence and encouragement to kill. Some of these ugly ep...
