Blainey - The story of Australias people: the rise and fall of ancient Australia

This is a history of the Australian peoples during an exceptionally long span of time. They came ashore in two main streams, far apart in time and point of origin. The first arrived some 50000 years ago and settled what is the present continent and the present islands of New Guinea and Tasmania too. At that time these lands were one. Before the last great rising of the seas a person could walk from the buttongrass plains of Tasmania to the Owen Stanley mountains in New Guinea, and even further. The second stream of immigrants, a wider and faster and very recent inflow, began to arrive from Europe at the end of the eighteenth century.

My history of the first stream, called Triumph of the Nomads, was published in 1975. Five years later my history of the arrival of the second stream, called A Land Half Won, carried the narrative, by now primarily a British story, almost to the year 1900. Somehow my intention of writing a final volume faded away. Two years ago, I resumed the work and read carefully both books, sometimes with astonishment and dismay. In various chapters they had been left far behind by new research and changing intellectual interests and dare I say it changing fashions.

I set out to resuscitate and invigorate both books, revising large sections which were now less topical or no longer accurate, and deleting others to make space for the results of new investigations. I added again and again to the new narrative. This volume consists of fifteen heavily revised chapters from Triumph of the Nomads and nine chapters, revised in different ways, from A Land Half Won. This revised work differs in many ways from its parent volumes, which were based on the state of knowledge and intellectual atmosphere of the 1970s.

In the last forty years, knowledge of the changing climates of prehistoric Australia has grown: it will grow even more. It is now my view that the great rising of the seas, which began long after Aborigines arrived, is the most important event in the human history of Australia. Nothing like it has happened since 1788. The rising of the seas also exerted a long-term influence that still affects us. Australia, through its isolation by the advancing seas, remained one of the few inhabited lands that did not share in that revolution centred on the domesticating of plants and animals. Some modern critics imply that the Aborigines themselves should have invented their own kind of agriculture. This failure, if it was a failure, was not primarily their fault. Major inventions are rare in human history. Most countries in the course of their long history borrow far more ideas and techniques than they themselves originate.

The effects of this anomaly a nomadic way of life surviving in a world that became sedentary were often favourable for generations of Aborigines. In the end they were not favourable. Australian history since 1788 is unusual largely because two cultures, so far apart, had to confront and make sense of each another. It was not and sometimes is still not an easy marriage.

I remain deeply impressed with the ingenuity of traditional Aboriginal life. The ability of these people to survive the crises created by the great rising of the seas is also impressive; how they actually coped century after century with such crises can only be glimpsed. On some vital episodes of Aboriginal history I have changed my mind. The experience of writing a history of the world affected some of my earlier views. New research by experts on Indigenous history has moulded some of my conclusions.

So much talent has poured into Aboriginal history, from researchers in the sciences and social sciences and humanities, that it is now the most innovative, exciting and controversial sector of Australian history. There is almost an annual avalanche of books and articles on facets of Australian history, both ancient and modern.

This book naturally reflects my interests and biases: it has more economic and social than political history, and embraces more military history than I had intended. The book is primarily for the general reader, keen to know. Some parts will interest specialists. I realise now that this present volume assigns, for better or worse, more emphasis to Aboriginal history than can be found in any general history of Australia so far published.