Triumph of the Nomads: A History of Ancient Australia (Revised Edition)

Almost any other book on Australia's Aborigines that you can find will be an anthropological description of Aboriginal life as seen in its declining years or modern Aboriginal problems in the 20th century. Some may record the awful history of injustice, the fatal impact of alcohol and white police---maybe even the deliberate policy of breaking up cultures and families that existed until recent times. There are a lot of books out there and I certainly am not familiar with all of them. Geoffrey Blainey wrote this highly original book back in 1975. I first read it a couple of years later and have kept it in mind all these years as a book that looked at the whole picture of Aborigines and their life in Australia in an entirely different way. I am basing this review on the original edition. He begins by pointing out that Australia was the only continent to be discovered by sea---and not by Europeans, but by pre-neolithic, island-hopping peoples of the distant past. When in later ages, much of the low-lying area north of present-day Australia was flooded by rising seas, the continent was isolated for millennia. Blainey tells how the Aborigines "terraformed" Australia by fire, how they learned to exploit every plant, insect, animal, and water source, how they coped with the volcanic eruptions of five to eight thousand years ago, how they developed the technology they needed, using all the materials available. Without any domesticable animals except dogs, which had come with them, and without any metals, they managed to maintain a stable lifestyle for thousands of years. Neither were they totally ignorant of the outside world, as northern Aborigines had contacts with Indonesian sailors, traders, and slave-catchers long before Captain Cook "discovered" Australia. Some of the materials bartered found their way far inland. Though infant mortality and incidence of violent death in war and quarrels was higher than in Europe, in the year 1800 it was probably true that the average Aborigine had as good a standard of living as the average European---or better. They may not have had houses, but they felt no need for them in most parts of the country. They were nomads who didn't have sheep or cattle, but who wandered their beloved country in conjunction with natural seasons of plenty. Their diet was better than that enjoyed by many European peasants or factory workers, they had more leisure time, working fewer hours to get what they needed to live (and did not rely on child labor) and a richer cultural life in which all participated. The way in which the Aborigines conquered their environment and managed to wrest from it such a standard of living is indeed nothing less than a triumph. If you tend to think of Aborigines in terms of losers in the battle for survival, read this book. If all you know about Aboriginal triumph is Cathy Freeman winning that gold medal at the Sydney Olympics, read this well-written, interesting volume to know she came fro