WINDFALL FILMS - "RIDDLE OF THE WORLD" [AUSTRALIA]

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10.02.01 If you'd been standing on this beach about two hundred and fifty years ago, you might have witnessed an extraordinary encounter. On the mainland of Australia was an ancient civilisation which had lasted for two hundred and fifty...

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10.02.19 If you'd been standing on this beach some two hundred and fifty years ago, you might have witnessed an extraordinary encounter. On the man... mainland of...

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10.02.33 If you'd been standing on this beach two hundred and fifty years ago, you might have witnessed an extraordinary encounter. On the mainland of Australia was an ancient civilisation, perhaps fifty thousand years of human development. And then coming in from the sea, Captain Cook and his expedition, bringing in a new technological world of shipping, weapons, food, social organisation and encountering here this ancient civilisation of hunting and gathering people, who had quickly evolved and then apparently remained more or less stationary for forty thousand years. So why had this place remained the same, and why had Europe and Eurasia developed so fast.

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10.03.27 If you'd been standing on this beach about two hundred and fifty years you might have witnessed an extraor...

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10.03.35 If you'd been standing on this beach about two hundred and fifty years ago, you might have witnessed an extraordinary encounter. On the mainland of Australia you had an ancient civilisation, perhaps fifty thousand years of human development. And then, coming in from the sea here, Captain Cook and his expedition. These people had already a developed technology of shipping, armaments, foods and so on and these people, much older, four times as old, had much simpler technologies which had not really developed beyond hunting and gathering. So why had these people remained more or less stationary, and these people developed so very fast. That is a real puzzle.

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10.04.28 Standing at a great distance, right at the edge of the world in Australia, the pattern of human history looks very simple. Basically for a very long period human beings, that is something like a hundred thousand years, there was very, very little technological development and then in the last two hundred and fifty years, suddenly it zoomed off, and this is the industrial revolution, just round that period, suddenly technologies developed. In fact, it's much more complicated than that. This long period of apparently slow growth is made up of a, periods of much more rapid growth tailing off. So the real picture looks something like this: first of all you get a rapid growth of hunting and gathering and then that tails off, and that's Australia. Then something like ten thousand years, you get the development of tribal societies and the cultivation of animals and plants. And then that tails off, and that's South America and Africa. Then something like five thousand years ago you get the development of cities and that grows and then you get the collapse of Rome and in the Western civilisations that tails off. But China, another variant of it, continues, and then about the 14th Century that stabilises and you get equilibrium. And so three or four hundred years ago there was nothing beyond this really, and then unexpectedly in north-west Europe you suddenly get this great curve. So in fact, rather than a straight line it's been a number of bumps and then equilibria. And the puzzles of history are really why you get the equilibrium at various points in time and why you get this last great surge.

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10.06.34 Standing well back from human history, as you can do in a place like Australia on the edge of the world, it looks pretty simple. Basically human societies, human beings, started about half a million years ago and for the first half million years almost, there was very, very little technological growth, more or less a straight line with a slight uphill gradient from five thousand years ago, but not much. That is in terms of the speed of transport and the amount of food you could grow and so on, there was very little development. And then a speeding up in the last thousand years, and then in the last two hundred and fifty years suddenly an exponential growth and this is the industrial revolution. So not much until two hundred and fifty years ago, when everything has speeded up and you can travel much more quickly and you can grow much more. But that's over-simplified. In fact, what the pattern looks like is a series of rises and then stabilisation, so for a hundred thousand years for example, you get hunting and gathering having grown and then levelling off. And that's the history of Australia, forty, fifty thousand years of hunting and gathering. Then for peculiar reasons in certain other continents, Africa, South America, Eurasia, you get the development of tribal societies, a growth of domestication of animals and plants. And then almost all of those level off, and that's the history of the Americas, Africa. And then what looks like stability turns into change when, about ten thousand years ago you begin to get the development of civilisations and more intensively they grow. And so you get ancient Chinese civilisation and ancient Mesopotamian civilisations, but Rome and Greece begin to level off and China continues to grow, but then in about the 14th Century levels off. So the equilibrium of technologies, social organisations, always seems to occur, likewise Islam goes on and then levels off. The extraordinary thing is that this having been the pattern, just about three hundred years ago in Western civilisation, you suddenly get this rapid growth. This is the scientific revolution and the industrial revolution. So there are a whole lot of puzzles, why the stabilisation of each continent, and why a renewed growth and the sudden spurt at the end.

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10.09.34 So you get for a long period, a growth of hunting and gathering and then stabilisation, and that's Australia. You get, about ten thousand years ago, the growth of tribal societies, domestication of animals and plants, and those stabilise, and that's Africa and South America. Then you get about five thousand years ago the growth of civilisations, Mesopotamia, Rome, China, but those finally stabilise. And then finally you get an extraordinary spurt in north-western Europe, the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution and that's where we are. So...

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10.11.33 Australia, why choose Australia? Well it's a land of such fascinating contrasts. You'd hardly imagine that one of the highest waterfalls in the southern hemisphere would be located here in New South Wales. And yet this shows that there's plenty of water at times in Australia, there's lush vegetation, there are all the prerequisites for the development of human civilisations. And yet it was more than fifty thousand years after human beings came here that suddenly their way of life altered dramatically from hunting and gathering. So again one wonders, with all these wonderful resources, this paradise on earth, what was it that inhibited people as we view it, from moving on to our supposedly glorious civilisation. To answer that question, let's pursue a few thoughts.

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10.13.03 Australia is a wonderful place to investigate the early history of Man. Probably because it's the land of such great contrasts, it's not really our image of Australia that you should be standing beside a huge waterfall, one of the largest in the southern hemisphere. But there are many other curious things about it. One of them is that it was very early settled as a continent, about fifty thousand years ago probably and the people there developed a sophisticated hunting-gathering technology. And then for about forty, forty-five thousand years you got developments in hunting and gathering but no movement on to a tribal civilisation. Meanwhile, on the other continents you got the development of domestication of animals and plants and then later on, on Eurasia the development of settled agriculture and cities and civilisation. So it poses the great question, why did these people decide to remain hunters and gatherers. Now there are various theories: one is that the climate and geology of Australia makes hunting and gathering by far the best adaptable strategy for surviving on a place like this. With the climate changing all the time, El Nino bringing rather precipitous rain and then none for a long period, you can't really rely on settled agriculture, and therefore it's better to just keep your population very low and just cream off the surface. Another theory is that hunting and gathering is in fact an ideal way of life, it's a fairly leisurely way of life, it's one where you have ample resources and in many ways this looks like and feels like and must have seemed like for thousands of years, a Garden of Eden, an innocent world in which you didn't have the terrible travail of war and hard work which developed in Eurasia. A third reason that's been put forward is that the natural fauna and flora in this area were not suitable, and this is a theory which has been put forward also in relation to the other continents, to sub-Saharan Africa, to the Americas. The argument which we, many of us heard in our school days was that basically there were only one or two pockets on earth where you had a large number of domesticable animals and plants, one was in the fertile crescent in Mesopotamia, and another was in southern China. And only where you had these things could you evolve from hunters and gatherers into settled cultivation and into city life. Now that is a powerful and interesting theory to explain why only Eurasia seems to have developed into literally large-scale civilisations. And yet it's not entirely convincing, for various reasons.

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10.15.57 Australia is a very strange land, who would have imagined that you'd have great waterfalls, some of the highest ones in the southern hemisphere, in this apparently barren and dry desert land. It is strange in other ways, one is that it's had an old civilisation, one of the most ancient on earth, fifty thousand years of hunting and gathering peoples have lived here quietly, peacefully, until they were attacked, destroyed, driven off their land by Westerners. So one puzzle is, how was it that they managed to sustain this kind of life for so long and why was it that they didn't supposedly progress in the Eurasian way, but remained hunters and gatherers. So let's follow up that puzzle a bit later.

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10.18.06 Some answers to the puzzle as to why hunters and gatherers remained hunters and gatherers are as follows: one is that basically they enjoyed what they were doing. Why leave the Garden of Eden. Hunting and gathering has been described as the original affluent society. Your ends were limited, your means were multiple, and therefore why drop this kind of way of life and go into more toil and difficulty. You had a lot of leisure, you had the fruits and plants, the, this forest here in Australia for example was full of marsupials, kangaroos, wallabies, possums, and so on. And so it was a very good life and there were lots of fruit and plants and vegetables, so why leave it. That's one theory. A second theory is that basically Australia was a place where it was very difficult to sustain intensive agriculture because of the climate, because of El Nino which made the rainfall very uneven, sometimes there was too much and often there was too little. So the hunters and gatherers had developed a very good strategy for minimising the, the risk by aiming at the time when it was really difficult and the rest of the time it was quite leisurely and easy. So they kept their population down and spread it very widely across Australia and for forty thousand years successfully dealt with a very difficult ecology. The third reason that's been put forward is one which we've probably many of us heard in our school days, which is basically there weren't the right crops and the right animals in many parts of the world to have a development into dense populations and cities and civilisations. But only in two areas, that is in Mesopotamia, the fertile crescent, and in southern China were there enough of the cultivatable grains and enough of the domesticatible animals to pursue that line. And it's a powerful and interesting theory, it is difficult to see how you could have had city civilisations where there weren't these things, on the other hand there are some criticisms one can make, particularly from the Australian point of view.

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10.20.18 To answer the puzzle of why Australian aborigines remained hunters and gatherers for forty, fifty thousand years, and in other areas of the world, historians and archaeologist and anthropologists have put forward various ideas. One is that in the long period of hunting and gathering, people were in fact in paradise, that this was the original affluent society. Your needs were minimal, your means were quite large, you had forests and savannahs filled with animals, here in Australia for example you had emus, and you have possums and you had kangaroos and wallabies, you had fruit and berries, and it was a pleasant life. Most of the time was, there was a lot of leisure, there was little warfare, little disease, so why leave it. Another theory is that in fact the ecology and climate of Australia made it very difficult to sustain more than a very light population because the rainfall was very sporadic, some years you had no rainfall for, and several years at a time, and therefore you had to aim at a minimum and you did this by keeping your population very low. So the low population densities and the way of hunting and gathering was a wonderful ecological adaptation to this difficult climate.

10.21.38 Another theory is that the only places you could really have civilisations were those where you had a large store of grains which you could domesticate and animals which you could domesticate, and the only two areas where these really existed in quantity were in the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia and in southern China, and therefore those were the only places you would have had the build-up of population and cities and civilisations. Now that's a very interesting theory and it may be one of the necessary features, but there are some criticisms one can make from the Australian angle.

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10.22.18 In answer to the puzzle as to why Australians remained hunters and gatherers for forty thousand years, it may be that they enjoyed the way of life, there was plenty of animals and plants and fruits, it was paradise, so why stop hunting and gathering. It may be that the rainfall being so intermittent in Australia, meant that you had to aim for the time when it was most difficult, and keep your population down, and therefore hunting and gathering was the best possible strategy. And it may be that there weren't the domesticatible animals and plants on this continent, the grains and the animals which you had in the Mesopotamian area and in southern China, which allowed civilisations to develop. That third idea is very interesting and attractive, but it has some difficulties from the Australian point of view.

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10.23.13 If one argues that the reason why hunting and gathering didn't develop into settled agriculture in a place like Australia, one has to face one big problem, which is that although it's true there were...

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10.23.29 If one argues that the reason why hunting and gathering didn't develop into settled agriculture and civilisations in a place like Australia was because there were few domesticatible animals and domesticatible plants, one has one big problem, and that is that next door to Australia was New Guinea, there was a short distance, there was often communication between them, and many of the animals and plants there were domesticated and were brought to Australia from time to time, and yet they didn't take it up here. It was clearly not the absence of these plants and animals that stopped them, it was something else, something to do with the way of life which appealed to people for such a long period.

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10.24.12 It's been argued that a place like Australia didn't develop settled cultivation out of the hunting and gathering because it didn't have the animals and plants which you could domesticate. There's big... one big problem...

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10.24.26 It's been argued that the reason why a place like Australia didn't develop out of hunting and gathering into settled agriculture and civilisations was that it didn't have the right plants and animals to do this. But there's one big problem about this, which is that although that may have been true early on when all the mammals were killed off, most of them, in fact next door was New Guinea which ten thousand years ago developed very sophisticated agriculture and had many domesticated animals. And yet they didn't come here, that wasn't because of the sea, there were frequent contacts and people did bring animals and plants here. But in fact for some reason internal to the system of hunting and gathering and the way it adapted to the climate, there was no reason to change, and it wasn't just the absence of the animals and plants.

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10.25.25 There are few better places to tell the story of the encounter between the technologies of the West and the rest of the world, than here in New South Wales in Australia. This was a paradise on earth in many ways and for hundreds of thousands....

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10.25.43 There are few places on earth better to...

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10.25.47 There are few places on earth where it would be better to tell the story of the encounter between Western technologies and the Third World, than here in Australia in New South Wales. For twenty, thirty, forty thousand years, hunters and gatherers had wandered through these precise woods. The Biripi for example, were a local clan here and they had picked the fruits, they had hunted the wallabies and the koala and the other animals here, and lived in many ways an idyllic existence. And then only two hundred years ago or so, the Europeans arrived and they wanted the land and they didn't see why the natives should be allowed to remain on it. So in that famous encounter they destroyed almost all the native population of Australia. Why should they want an area like this? Well there were lots of reasons apart from keeping their livestock. For instance, the trees here, many of them were beautiful cedars, and they wanted them for the wood which they would use for instance for railway carriages. So the woods were logged, the pastures were raised to grow various kinds of animals, and the whole thing was destroyed and the peoples themselves who had lived here for all those thousands of years, were driven off and destroyed by disease and by raids.

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10.27.10 This forest in New South Wales is an ideal place to tell the story of the destruction of Third World peoples by the technologies of the West. Three hundred years ago there were no-one here except the local tribes such as the Biripi who were hunters and gatherers and who went through the forests taking the fruit and the animals. Then Westerners arrived, drove off the natives, came into these forests, logged the timber, the cedar for the railways, grew their cattle and corn, and massacred the natives and almost all the native population was destroyed. This happened not just in Australia but all over the world, and that is the terrible cost of technological growth in Europe and Asia.

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10.27.55 Many historians would think ten thousand years of history was a long time. But in the life of this planet it's nothing. This gorge in New South Wales is five hundred and fifty million years old and within that, homo sapiens is only perhaps half a million years old. So if you take this as five hundred thousand years, this five hundred foot drop of waterfall, the period we're talking about is the last ten feet of this waterfall, and the industrial revolution of course is, are the last inch or two of all of that.

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10.30.31 Three hundred years ago this would have been just woodland and inhabited by hunters and gatherers. Now you have these cows, you have the barbed wire, you have the, all the accoutrements of European farming. This is what some historians have called ecological imperialism, because one of the surprising things is that with the cows came everything else, not only the social organisation, the farming systems and so on, but also all the weeds, all the pests, all the diseases of Europe were exported to North America, Australia and all the regions of the globe where they could be supported. And that changed everything and made a pattern which tried to model Europe.

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10.31.20 Three hundred years ago, this area of Australia would have been woodland, with hunters and gatherers wandering through it. Now it's a part of Europe, it has the barbed wire and of course it has the cows. What is surprising is that this is an example of what some historians have called ecological imperialism, that is the imitating of European agriculture in totally different climates in North America, Australia and elsewhere. And you get a, a bundle of things, not just the cows and the barbed wire, but also all the diseases, the pests, the weeds, the dandelions, all those things came with it. And so it totally transformed the landscape as it transformed the people of Australia.

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10.32.04 Three hundred years ago, this bit of Australia would have been woodland with hunters and gatherers wandering through it. Now it's just an extension of Europe, imitating European agriculture. The barbed wire and of course the cows are just part of that pattern. And it's a pattern which extends beyond the animals and the wire to a whole bundle of things, which some historians have described as ecological imperialism. Because with the cows came all their diseases, their pests, and also the weeds which they had fed on in Europe were transported, so the empire of the dandelion as it's sometimes called, spread right to North America and to Australia. And it changed the whole ecology, the whole social system, and made most of the world look like bits of Europe.

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10.33.41 There are several reasons why watching this little girl playing with building blocks, one should think that human culture and technology would evolve very quickly. One is to do with the humans themselves, which is that they...

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10.34.11 Watching a little girl building with building blocks makes one realise that human culture and technology should have evolved very, very quickly. One sees the manual dexterity, one sees the curiosity, the ability to form patterns, to break things apart, to join things together and to project ideals and models of what you're doing and then to dream dreams and fulfil them. That's one reason why we should have evolved very quickly once we started using objects. The other is a law that basically as you add a new part to a set like this, it not merely adds one new feature but changes all the parts. So for example...

LILY:

Look, a helicopter.

ALAN:

10.34.55 It's a helicopter, you've dreamed and imagined a helicopter. Ooh, round it goes.Anyway a helicopter wouldn't work very well without wheels, would it, so once you've got a wheel then you can suddenly have all sorts of new things, can't you. So all the parts are changed by that, and that's the nature of technology, that each new gain in reliable knowledge about the world explodes and increases all the other parts. And that's why one would have imagined we should have shot forward much more quickly than we have.

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10.35.32 Watching a little girl playing with bricks like this, makes you realise two reasons why human culture and technology should have evolved much more quickly than it apparently has. One is to do with the human being herself, all this manual dexterity, this curiosity, this ability to fit and break parts, to imagine what this might be about to be and then to carry it out, all this is very unusual and leads to the development of all sorts of new skills and techniques. And the things that are developed are not just added on, when you get a new bit of technology, for example a wheel like this, it not merely adds one new piece to a set like this, it makes, it makes all the pieces better, doesn't it Lily. So that you can do all sorts of things, you can make a helicopter or you can make a train, yes, that's nice...

[CHAT WITH LILY]

10.36.38 So the real puzzle is, why did it take so long to invent a train, and someone like this was wanting to make it straight away.

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10.36.50 Look, where's the wheels gone. A very strange train, isn't it, don't think that would have worked very well. So you need the wheels at the bottom don't you, for a train.

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10.37.10 Right, let's have a look at this. The extraordinary thing about human imagination is that you can put it on a bit of paper, write it down, and then tell it to someone and they can fill in with their mind from what you say, what there is. So all I have to say is, Percy the Pork-Keeper couldn't sleep... and you immediately, this little girl will think about pork-keepers....

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10.37.44 The extraordinary revolution in which human beings turned from aural cultures to written cultures made it possible to write down ideas and sounds and then read them out to someone else, or send them to someone else and they could fill in with their imagination just from some...

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10.38.10 They could fill in from their imaginations the meanings. So when I read: Percy the Park-Keeper couldn't sleep. These are just black symbols on a white background, and yet this little girl will understand not being able to sleep. Outside his hut a great storm was raging, with thunder and lightning and pouring rain. Well this book could be multiplied a thousand times, a million times, using print technologies and all these imaginations could be stirred. So the two great revolutions: writing and printing, transformed our way of communicating and thinking about the world.

Shall we continue a little bit? Do you hear, there was lightning, you know what lightning is, Lily, don't you? What's lightning? Are you frightened by li....

[CHAT WITH LILY]

10.39.15 Two, two of the great revolutions in human history in relation to communications are shown here. Look at this, Lily, see? What's that?... A walkway isn't it, up into the trees. That is the origins of writing which makes it possible just to read a little bit from a book....

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10.39.48 These white settler graves in a remote cemetery in Australia remind us of one of the greatest tragedies of human history, that is the destruction of indigenous peoples all over the world. They are the unremembered, uncommemorated dead. For example in Australia itself, in 1788 there were probably three hundred million...

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10.40.15 These white settler graves, in a remote cemetery in Australia, remind us of one of the greatest tragedies of human history, the destruction of indigenous peoples. In Australia alone, something like...

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10.40.34 These white settler graves in a remote cemetery in Australia remind us of one of the greatest tragedies of human history, that is the destruction of indigenous peoples all over the world by the expansion of Europeans. For example, in Australia in 1788 there were approximately three hundred thousand Aboriginal peoples. A century later this had gone down to about fifty thousand. In one Australian State, Victoria, the numbers in 1830, the time of the Rocket, were something like fifteen thousand. By 1967 there were three pure Australoid peoples left. And this was just one part of the world. In Mexico the destruction by the Spanish was of a population estimated at twenty million, which was reduced a century later to one million. So why did this happen?

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10.41.31 These white settler graves in a remote cemetery in Australia remind us of one of the great tragedies of human history, which is the destruction of indigenous people. For example, in Australia the Aboriginal population in 1788 was about three hundred thousand and was reduced to fifty thousand a century later. Likewise, in other parts of the world, in Mexico a population of perhaps twenty million, after the Spanish invasion was reduced to about one million. So vast numbers of rich and complex civilisations around the world were destroyed by European expansion, and this is one of the greatest sorrows that we had to face.

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10.42.21 The destruction of indigenous peoples around the world was partly by warfare and plunder, but above all by disease. European diseases, typhoid, typhus, smallpox, measles, plague, dysentery, tuberculosis, these spread all around the world and they decimated populations which really had no resistance to these diseases and this was the main killer in most parts of the world.

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10.42.56 These European settlers may well have had some of the terrible diseases, measles, even smallpox. But they often survived, and this is because the Europeans had long evolved a relationship with dangerous diseases, the diseases themselves had been caused by animals which had been domesticated by Europeans and Asians. Pigs, dogs, cows and so on had had these diseases, the bacteria and the viruses had come from them, and human beings over thousands of years had learned how to protect themselves and cope with these diseases. But when these animals and the Europeans settled in new and virgin lands, the peoples had no resistance at all to them. So a whole population on a small island, for example, might be wiped out by measles which would hardly make a dent on children in Europe. And this is why, as Europe spread with its diseases, germs, weeds and pests, it cut a swathe through native populations around the world and now there are hardly any left.

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10.44.11 These white settler graves in a remote cemetery in Australia remind us of one of the greatest tragedies in human history, the destruction of indigenous peoples all over the world with the consequences of European expansion. For example, in Australia itself, in 1788, there were about three hundred thousand Aboriginals. A century later it was down to about fifty thousand. In Victoria, in 1830, there were probably about fifteen thousand Aboriginal peoples. In 1967 there were just three left. This happened all over the world, Mexico, South America, and it was a terrible tragedy. The diseases which these people brought, and their animals brought, were multiple: typhoid, typhus, plague, dysentery, tuberculosis, measles, smallpox, and they brought them along with their plants and their own clothing, often unintentionally, sometimes intentionally. And the people who lived in these remoter parts of the world just fell before these in their thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands.

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10.45.31 These European white settlers often had had many of the major European diseases, they might have had measles, they might even have had smallpox. But they often didn't die of these. This was because in Eurasia, these diseases had co-evolved with human beings, they'd usually come from animals, from pigs, from horses, from cows, and gradually over time human beings had built up immune systems. When, however, the diseases came to virgin territories, small islands which had never experienced it, even a great continent like Australia, there was absolutely no resistance, so everyone who caught measles or smallpox died. And this cut a huge swathe through the native populations. This is the main reason why, over the last two hundred years, nearly all the tribal peoples of the world have been destroyed.

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10.48.26 It seemed pretty unlikely that human beings would become the lords of creation...

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10.48.42 Seemed pretty unlikely that a creature like this would become the lord of creation. After all, it had no decent teeth, it had no decent claws and talons on its feet, fact its feet were pretty useless, it couldn't run fast and as with this little one year-old it took an awful long time to learn to walk. Its ears were not very sharp, its eyes not particularly good, its nose not particularly good and its tummy couldn't digest something like grass. So really one wonders how it managed to get anywhere at all, let alone dominate the whole world.

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10.49.26 One wonders how a little creature like this could come to dominate the whole of the globe, become the lord of all creatures. After all, it really had nothing going for it, the toes were pretty hopeless...

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10.49.46 It's a mystery how human beings represented by this little creature could ever have become the lords... the lords of all creation. They had pretty hopeless...

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10.50.04 In fact the absence of any decent tools on the human body was one of human beings' greatest assets, 'cause they had to make all the tools. Another great asset was here, in the vocal passage, which led to development of un... unique human speaking. And another great advantage was in the hand, which with its thumb and ability to grasp and manipulate tools and to pick things and to look at them, made it possible for all sorts of technologies to be extensions of the arm. But above all, of course, it was here that the secret of human success lay, because this was applied to all those weaknesses and turned into strengths. And so finally, after a, half a million years, these little creatures came to dominate the planet.

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10.51.04 The reasons why human beings were so successful really lie in three parts of the human anatomy: one, is in the hand, which is so good at grasping and manipulating things and can hold all the tools that humans will invent. A second is in the vocal chord, which is unique and allows human beings both to, as it were, chew chewing gum and speak at the same time. And the third thing, of course, is the human brain which is full of curiosity and is the most complex organism on earth. And this combined with the weakness of the body, led to the development of technologies and to a world where this little creature would come to dominate all other species.

[CHAT]

10.52.43 This is the ultimate in auto-filming, no cameraman, just myself in a wood in Australia. And I'm just doing this to fill up the rest of this tape. Just a few random reflections on the Australian experience and what one learns about the human race, looking at it from Australia. I realise the light is not very good, too bright, but there we are. See, just put it on record. The first thought that occurs to one is the, about the basic nature of human beings. Australia is a place which has been inhabited almost solely by hunters and gatherers for fifty thousand years, and these combine the two salient characteristics of homo sapiens, one was his or her predatory nature, hunters, gatherers, going out foraging, killing, destroying and living off the surplus of Nature. And this terribly powerful drive to compete successfully by destroying other species and living off them is something which we tend to forget in our industrial civilisation, but it's so obvious here, with the destruction of the larger mammals probably forty thousand years ago, and the, predating on everything around them. And of course we still do that, but we mask it from ourselves and do it in a more elegant and refined way through the Stock Exchange etcetera. So that side of human nature. Then the other side is the social bonds, the immensely complex social organisation of the hunters and gatherers, their kinship and marriage systems and systems of myths which enabled them to be so successful in this rather difficult terrain. And that is the other side, the co-operative, helpful sort of life that human beings need to lead and above all, they are social animals, careful about what other people think of them, and trying to communicate all the time effectively. And that, combined with their predation, makes them so effective.

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10.55.18 A second sort of reflection, and a very sad one as one sits in these woods in Australia, is on the contact between Western white settlers and the Aboriginals, just three hundred years ago these woods would have had hunting, gathering bands wandering through them. They hunted up in the mountains fifty kilometres away there, and then they came across in the summer to fish down on the seaside here. And they lived a simple existence, picking and, berries and killing animals. And then two hundred years ago the whites arrived, they needed and wanted the land for their cattle and their grains and they even wanted these forests, they came in and cut all the beautiful old cedar for railway carriages and so on. And so gradually they pushed the Aboriginal populations back, killing off a number of them and others died of disease. So finally they changed not only the human landscape, but also the forest landscape. This would have once been much more open with huge trees and very little undergrowth, because the hunters and gatherers burned off the undergrowth to create shoots for their animals that they were going to kill. But now it's gone back to a different kind of eucalyptus forest, so the whole ecology, the climate as well as the social organisation was altered by the invading white colonists.

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10.57.08 Sitting in this Australian forest here brings sad thoughts about the destruction about the indigenous peoples of the world. In this area, for example, of New South Wales there used to be the Biripi nation, hunters and gatherers who hunted in the winter about fifty kilometres over there, and came through these woods down to the sea to fish in the summer. And they would have burned off the undergrowth here, so that you'd have had huge trees standing well apart, very little vegetation except the green shoots coming from afar, which the animals, which the Biripi lived off, would have eaten. And then came the white settlers, they needed the land, they thought for making another Europe, with their animals and their crops. So they pushed the Aboriginal populations back, often killing them, rounding them up, and they even came into the forests here, the huge cedar trees that had stood here for hundreds of years, were sawn down for making railway carriages and houses. Then gradually the whole ecology, as well as the social system of Australia, was changed and it looked different and it feels different. From being an ancient land forty thousand years old, it became one of the first absolutely born modern nations, except for the older peoples who were pushed out.

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10.58.51 Another valuable lesson on looking at the world from an Australian point of view, is to break down one of the deep assumptions we have about the development of human civilisations. In a first year anthropology course at a university you tend to lay out the history of human species in the way that it's been laid out since the 18th century, in a series of progressive stages. First of all, and for most of human history, there were hunting and gathering bands, creaming off the surface of Nature. Then about ten thousand years ago you got the development of what are called tribal societies, and there were two kinds, there were one kind that lived in forests such as these, and there were the other kind that lived off animals in savannahs and deserts. So you get the domestication of animals and the domestication of plants, mainly by burning down, what's called swiddening, in forests and then growing crops in the burnt area. And that lasted for, until quite recently, but it was the predominant form for four or five thousand years. And then you got the development of settled agriculturalists, what we roughly call peasants, cities, writing, pottery, weaving, all those things, iron-working. And alongside them a vast rural population living, using ploughs and animals in settled agriculture. And that peasant stage, we're told, lasted up till two or three hundred years ago, the whole world was a large peasant civilisation. And then suddenly, about three hundred years ago, you get the beginnings of something new, which we now mostly take for granted, which is hunting...

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11.00.41 ....and then about three hundred years ago you get the beginning of something new, which we tend to take for granted, which is our industrial, scientific civilisation. So those are the four big stages, hunting-gathering, tribal, peasant, industrial. But Australia's different, it had hunting-gathering for a very long time. It didn't evolve in.... [end first side of audio tape]

11.01.21 ....hunting-gathering society, and then in a very, very brief period, in a hundred years, it switched from that, leaving out the supposed necessary stages of tribalism and peasant agriculture, straight into an industrial, basically urban, scientific kind of civilisation which you see now. So it's a very peculiar place, because having extinguished more or less the hunting-gathering stage within a hundred years, it is even more than America, a born modern nation. All the assumptions of modernity, its assumptions about politics, about equality, about status of women, about how you should earn a living, even about religion, all those things suddenly swept in here, destroyed a hunting-gathering way of life. So it moved from one stage to the last stage that we know of, although no doubt this isn't the last stage, without the middle stages. So it warns us aga... against thinking that all civilisations have to move through these stages.

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11.02.44 A last reflection from Australia is the deep way in which the reflection...

11.02.51 A last reflection from Australia is of the way in which climate and geography and ecology shape human beings. It's become rather unfashionable for us to think of this until quite recently when we've become aware of the effects of climate change, but in Australia it's so very visible, the whole organisation and history of Australia is deeply affected by two things: one is by the nature of the soil which is very poor, for a long period there has been no volcanic activity and the topsoil is very leeched away. So as you can see in this forest, the growth is very sporadic, the grass is very coarse, it's really very empty of animals and bird life because of the poor soil. And that was one of the determinants of Australia. The second was the climate, El Nino, which was only recently discovered, its effects. But basically it led to a situation where you got reasonable rainfall for a few years and then for eight to ten years complete drought. And this is probably the main reason why for a very long period the population of Australia was very, very light, it adapted to the difficult times, maintained a hunter-gatherer way of life and the result is that you had, for forty thousand years, some ecological stability, and both those things are shaped by the climate. We tend to forget that but really the history of the world is very deeply influenced by the different climatic and geographical regions, though human beings interact and then re-shape it. That re-shaping can be seen very well in Australia, because what human beings brought was the systematic use of fire, and that's another thing I really hadn't understood. We tend to make a big division between hunting and gathering and the domestication of animals and plants, but Australia is one of the recent examples to show that in fact.... [tape cuts out at 11.05.01]