The Story of Australia's People by Geoffrey Blainey

Author:Geoffrey Blainey [Blainey, Geoffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781760141035
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 2015-02-09T13:00:00+00:00

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Ancient Australia consisted of 250 or 300 mini-nations, each of which spoke a different language. It was divided into numerous territories, each of which had its own leaders. There was no national leader because there was no united nation. There were not even strong regional leaders, so far as is known. This was not the fault of the Aborigines. They happened to be one of the few surviving parts of the world that still lived a way of life which all peoples – including the ancestors of every one of us – had once followed. That way of life held many advantages but there remained the singular disadvantage that its inhabitants now were close to defenceless against the fast-growing outside world. And it did not know – how could it know – that it was potentially defenceless because it knew nothing about the nearby islands and the massed lands that lay in Asia and beyond. If the large ships of an invader sailed into sight along the Australian coast, the Aborigines could not unite in the defence of their realms.

In any coastal region they potentially far outnumbered any new colonists from Europe. They knew intimately their home terrain and their own neighbourhood. They were capable of waging guerrilla warfare. They were impressively brave when they did fight. But these benefits were nothing unless they were capable of adopting new weapons, political as well as military. They were to be intensely vulnerable when confronted by Europe’s industrial revolution.

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