26 December

Spending some of my Christmas break re-reading these amazing books. You’ll never look at Australia the same way again, if you read these. For tens of thousands of years, tens of millennia before the pyramids or anything the Chinese did, from tens of thousands of years before Christ until today, Australia was home to the most sophisticated civilisation on Earth. No other civilisation comes close, a few thousand years is considered remarkable, this civilisation went for close to 100,000 years. All the myths we grow up being told about aboriginal culture, my jaw drops every time I read these books. They turned this vast continent into a paradise, and managed to live in it that way for unimaginable periods of time. These books show the modern evidence for how we got the Aborigines completely wrong, in specific and gobsmacking detail. They weren’t hunter gatherers at all, they shaped an entire continent and its biogeography in ways we have no idea how to replicate today. It was the greatest act of genius, our modern technology is piddling by comparison.