A short sampler of one of the works up in the air, right now. While this is social history, we need to start with the geology, the rocks that shaped our home, and determined what lives here. It started as the 80,000-word Big Book of Australian History, published in for editions by the National Library of Australia, this is my own Director's Cut, more than three times as long.
This is all the hows and whys that lie beneath Australia’s history, like how the geology of Gondwana shaped its plants and animals and so shaped Indigenous lives, farming and land holding. How the convicts got here, what they wore, how gold was discovered long before Hargraves (and the conspiracy he pulled off), why ladies stood on chairs in Melbourne and waved their hankies, etc. etc. for 252,000 words. This is all the news that was fit to print—but wasn’t.
* * *
If the climate is cold enough to produce frost, water soaks
into the surface and changes to ice, which may wedge particles of rock off. Any
pointed bits and corners get more water, and are more exposed to the cold, so
off they go! Any rock hound looking at rock like this can read its story at a
glance, but granite has more surprises to offer.
Near Wave Rock in Western Australia, you can see
spheroidal granite—and a truly amazing shape in the rocks, the granite ‘wave’
that you can see just before the start of this chapter. Standing 11 to 12
metres high, the flared slope looks just like a giant wave, about to break.
Wave Rock was featured on 28 April 1965 in Women’s Weekly, and the magazine said the wave shape was a result of wind erosion, though adding the suggestion that the shape might also be due to the ‘action of glaciers’. Later reports said the cause was the action of an ancient sea, lapping the foot of the cliff, and as these tales leak into history, we need to consider them. Geologists asked: if the sea had been there, where were the marine deposits When somebody suggested sand blasting as the cause, the spoilsports explained that a noticeable feature of bare rock surfaces like Hyden Rock or Uluru was that a lot of water ran off them, when the rare rains came by.
That wet the soil around the rock and supported more
vegetation than in other places. So even if desert winds came rushing in, the
plants would absorb the force of the wind, and stop the sand grains that were
supposed to have shaped the ‘wave’. Flared slopes are also found around other
large bodies of rock, like the cave seen here, one of the ones around the base
of Uluru that visitors are allowed to enter. Similar shapes can also be found
on the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia.
A cave at the base of Uluru.
The simple answer is that the same water run-off that
knocked out the sand-blasting theory was a central part of the true cause of
these concave forms. Australia is an old land, with old soils that have been
exposed to dry winds over many years. Features like Wave Rock and Uluru that
now rear up out of the flat plains were once hidden underground, within the
plains. Over time, the winds uncovered them, but once the stone was exposed,
rainfall ran straight off it.
The cleverest early white explorers quickly got the idea
of asking the people who lived there, the Aboriginal Australians, where to look
for water. Some of them followed “native roads”, knowing the tracks made by
countless feet had to lead to water, because people who knew the area would not
go to dry places. Invariably, the “native wells”, the soaks, lay at the foot of
a rocky slope, and this steady supply of water explains how the wave shape
developed.
Weathering on the surface of Uluru.
Water weathers some of the minerals in rocks, whether the
rock is the granite of Wave Rock, or the arkose sandstone of Uluru. The
minerals break down, and in a sense, the rock just rots away under the
influence of the damp soil. The minerals that had been rock became dust, and as
the wind blew, or a rare flash flood gurgled across the plain, those minerals
were carried away.
About this book
I come to this matter as a science-trained observer who can
explain how the geology and biology have determined our past, and will
determine our future. I explore what
makes us Australian, and why that
matters.
When I was a
child, history was about learning lists of things, but never about the why questions I wanted to ask. And those
lists were of important people and places, not about the stuff of the everyday
life of life, or how people got their
daily needs. There is still too much of that traditionalism, so when the
National Library hired me to tell the story of us to the young ones, I jumped
in, and we did four editions of The Big
Book of Australian History.
Now the
National Library has lost its edge, and I want to deliver the same sort of
message to Australian adults in any case, because we seem to be losing our
edge. As I explain, early on, I like to sit in an overseas eatery or drinkery
and let loose an anonymous “G’day!” just to stir the other Australians up. I am
the larrikin trouble-maker our history needs.
Starting with Pangaea and Gondwana, I look at how our geology
shaped the soil, the climate, plants and animals: with no beasts of burden or
high-efficiency crop plants, I examine what makes Australians different, even
as those shared differences bring us together. Lacking suitable animals and
plants, Indigenous society and land management had to be different. To survive,
the first Australians used people rotation, rather than crop rotation.
The European invaders brought in unsuitable crops and unsuitable animals and dismissed
the local solutions as primitive, then tried to impose European practices on a
foreign clime. The Australians themselves experimented with assimilating a few
white people into their society, but these trials mainly failed. At the same
time, indigenous artists took to European art media and conventions.
Then we step back, to examine how the Europeans arrived
off Australia’s coasts, saw what was in Australia, and liked it enough to grab
it. Once they decided to make a land grab, the British invaded, and this is the
only way to describe what happened. Denialists may bray that there were no
arms, but even if we ignore the guns and flags at the settlement proclamation,
the parallels to the Norman invasion make a mockery of any denial.
The Normans looked around England and said, “This is
nice land: it’s ours now. Oh, and those laws of yours: forget about them,
because you’ll be using ours from now on, and you’d better start speaking our
language, as well.” Social disruption is what invasion is about, and that’s
what happened in Australia in 1788, along with land-grabbing.
The early white
Australians knew the horrors of a sea trip, and the next generation learned
from their elders of the sea sickness, heat in the doldrums, slop buckets and
dreadful food, but they started wearing their own sorts of clothes and speak
their own language. They mixed together so much that there are no regional;
dialects, just a few words that betray your colony or state of origin. By the
1820s, an Australian accent and even dialect began to emerge
Next came
expansion, but while the explorers may have believed they were going out into
trackless and unpeopled areas, they followed the tracks or native roads, and
saw either “natives”, or their traces, everywhere. Spilling over the Blue
Mountains, freed convicts and new arrivals grabbed more land, forcing the
original owners away. Australian ways of doing things began to emerge: bark and
slab huts, new clothes and new foods.
A mature
society was already there when gold was discovered, and new arrivals enriched
our society, Australia, thanks to the inflow of gold, probably had a higher
standard of living than any nation in the world, although Australia was not yet
a nation. All Australians feared snakes and spiders, they fought drought,
floods and fire, but by the 1850s, most people could find their way in the bush
and they had laid down roads over the old foot-padded tracks, bringing in
engineering to shape Country.
Australians
wore the same clothes, ate the same foods, drank the same drinks, sang the same
songs, knew the same legends and played the same sports. Becoming a nation in
1901, for a long while, we called ourselves ‘British’, but after gold was
officially found (and ever since), people poured in from all over the world,
bringing in new ideas and ideals, but all of these people were drawn into
speaking and behaving “like Aussies”. In their turn, they warned later foreigners
about drop bears and bunyips.
We went off to fight Britain’s wars, though in the 1940s, we changed to regard the USA as a better force to be allied with, and as we approach recent times, from Korea onwards, we joined in the battles of the US. In sport, in science and in the arts, Australia more than held its own on the world stage. We started wearing our own sorts of clothes and speaking our own language. Along the way, women started wearing trousers if they wished: we were forging a new future.
In the end, we started to look at our origins, and
sometimes felt less than pleased, but sometimes we thought all was bonzer.
Having explored Australia’s troubles, disasters and triumphs, we end with the
Voice referendum
Where do you
stand? At the end of this warts-and-all book, you will hopefully have moved a
bit.
