Abstract
Aboriginals in most parts of Australia appear to have had an impressive standard of living at the time of the European invasion. But the window through which we see them is so smoky or misted that only with difficulty can we recognize the kind of abundance in which they lived.
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Notes
Portulac plant: Wills, p. 30; Burke and Wills Commission, Vic. Park., 1861, no. 97, evidence of John King, Q. 900–2, 921; A. Moorehead, Coopef’s Creek (London, 1963), pp. 72, 99.
Fishing equipment: Kathleen Fitzpatrick, ‘The Burke and Wills Expedition and the Royal Society of Victoria’, Historical Studies, 1963, vol. 40, p. 471; A. Moorehead, Cooper’s Creek, p. 36.
Tasmanian food: J. E. Calder, Some Account of the … Native Tribes of Tasmania (Hobart, 1875), pp. 25, 31. Whereas Calder thought Tas had 7,000 people, it probably had closer to 4,000.
Tiwi: C. W. M. Hart and A. R. Pilling, The Tiwi of North Australia (New York, 1966), pp. 34–5.
G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History (London, 1944), pp. 432, 450, 452.
Finland’s famine: F. Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life 1400–1800 (New York, 1974), p. 42. Even France in the 18th century (p. 39) reputedly suffered 16 ‘general famines’.
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© 1975 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Blainey, G. (1975). The Prosperous Nomads. In: Triumph of the Nomads. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-02423-0_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-02423-0_13
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