3 September

I still recommend every Australian (and every human) read this book. It provides firsthand accounts from the first European settlers of Australia of what they found when they got here. What they found was the greatest wonder in all of human history, read the book if you don’t believe it. It’s nothing like the Australia we see today, our ‘bush’ is 235 years of possibly terminal damage to pre-1788 Australia. Aboriginal Australians engineered an entire continent, it’s the greatest achievement of all humanity. We have no idea how they did it, it’s impossibly complex, but Gammage has superb insight into parts of that puzzle. Here’s what they achieved. They managed to find a way to both use the land to sustain them, with food and water and shelter, while *at the same time* enriching that land for everything else that lives here. We can’t do that, again we have no idea how. It’s much, much harder than any of our ‘modern’ technologies and science can understand. No other culture ever figured it out and maintained it for tens of thousands of years. If you think they were just ’hunter-gatherers’, ‘living off the land’, read the book. The land looked completely different then, and the only change has been them no longer managing it. When you don’t engineer the landscape, it erupts into massive fireballs, the rivers clog and dry up, and the soil blows and washes into the ocean. It’s direct proof they engineered Australia, they weren’t just living in it like survivalists.