"The Future Eaters"

"It makes an enormous amount of sense... to see the lack of agriculture by Australian Aborigines as a fine-tuned adaptation to a unique set of environmental problems, rather than as a sign of 'primitiveness.'" -- The Future Eaters, p. 282

My previous review is here:
The Future Eaters

Imagine a human society that became stable tens of thousands of years ago in an environment that differs widely from that of the European or North American temperate climate zones. Members of this society own no fertile fields where grain grows, no large domestic animals raised for food like pigs or cows, and no great forests. Small bands of these humans hunt exotic game such as large lizards or marsupials -- the limited resources of the Australian continent. Until European settlers arrived, several years after the 1770 visit of James Cook and his ship Endeavor, these bands of highly adapted people managed the continent. They utilized the available resources in an efficient but unexpected way that's hard for us to grasp. 

Rereading the 1994 book The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australian Lands and People by Tim Flannery made me think about how totally this unfamiliar reality differs from ours  -- a whole way of life that seems more like fiction than like history.

Members of the small bands of people throughout Australia during the 60,000 years or so of their history lived by gathering bush foods from a variety of sparse woodlands and scrublands in the large territories that belonged to them. They managed the game and the growth of the woodlands by "firestick" -- that is, controlled burns of the forest, which over thousands of years had evolved to ensure the continuity of plant and animal species that they depended on. These were not plentiful, so as my initial quote mentions, agriculture, with its intensive use of localized resources, would not have been practical as an extension of their culture.

Although these bands of people lived in widely dispersed areas, they would gather from time to time to celebrate, to socialize, and to finalize marriages between couples who had long ago (even before they were born) been destined for each other. Individuals in one area might know the family tree of another group living a thousand miles away. This activity, like most of the things they did, contributed to the survival of their way of life, adding to the genetic diversity and collective wisdom of each separated group.

The lifecycles of animals and plants used by these groups were partly dependent on the seasons, as they are in the Northern Hemisphere. However, there were other cycles, often less predictable. Because the vegetation in the extremely dry territories grew very slowly, some plants produced edible fruits only every several years. Animal lifecycles could also vary; for example, one breed of sea lions -- a possible prey species for seacoast dwellers -- had their young every 15 months; that is, at varying times of the seasonal year. The most critical non-seasonal variation in Australia was the periodic drought caused by changes in Pacific Ocean currents: the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which to this day affects the Australian continent drastically. 

Living in this environment for such an eternity (compared to our few thousand years of settled agriculture and what we call civilization) the Australians were very much in tune with the resources that they needed, and they manipulated many things. They used controlled fires, and they paid careful attention to the life cycles of the species that they depended on. They had religious prohibitions on hunting in certain sacred places, for example, which gave some prey animals a chance to breed undisturbed, and thus prevented over-hunting. 

In 1845, the explorer Edward John Eyre made a prediction which Flannery finds very accurate. He wrote that Aboriginal culture was:

"so varied in detail, though so similar in general outline and character, that it will require the lapse of years, and the labours of many individuals, to detect and exhibit the links which form the chain of connection in the habits and history of tribes so remotely separated; and it will be long before any one can attempt to give to the world a complete and well-drawn outline of the whole." -- The Future Eaters, p. 271.

Explaining the extraordinary extent of the Aboriginals' coexistence with their natural environment is the central, eye-opening subject of Flannery's book, which also includes much more information. He covered the pre-human evolution of Australia. He documented the early era of humans in Australia, during which the newly arriving Aboriginals disrupted the prior status quo, and in fact drove a number of native species to extinction. Further, he provided a general history of the human settlement of the lands of the South Pacific. Finally, Flannery described the tragic destruction that occurred when the English took over the continent.

Some of the scientific basis for this book has probably changed since it was written in 1994. I'm sure that the much more accurate methods of gene sequencing that have been developed since then will have added much, and perhaps changed interpretations of natural and human history. The chapters about the way that present-day Australians cope with the special features of their environment have no doubt also been made somewhat obsolete by the drastic nature of climate change as we have experienced it since publication; also by the greater impact on Australia of our warming world. Despite these doubts about the continued accuracy of the book, I think it is most fascinating. I'm glad I have reread it, as I have often thought about it in the years since I first became acquainted with it.

I dedicate this blog post to my Australian blog friends, including Sherry, Francesca, Johanna, and all the others. I very much hope I can again visit Australia and see some of the landscapes and animals that are described in the book.

Review © 2021 mae sander.