23 October

I’m using AI to do something that I think is wonderful. You may have seen me post here in the past about how our understanding of Australia is based on a set of really crazy prejudices that we brought here with European settlement. That before we arrived, this was a ‘wild’ landscape, and the Aboriginal people had been living here for tens of thousands of years as simple hunter-gatherers. Firsthand accounts collected by Bill Gammage make it clear this was an outrageous lie. He collected descriptions by first European settlers. They overwhelmingly described something entirely different, a cultivated landscape, made by human hands, that looked (in their words) like a country English estate. A thing of exquisite, supernatural beauty, crafted over tens of thousands of years but they assumed just the ‘natural’ landscape. I’m using AI to recreate the scenes these first settlers actually described. Rather than the racist, stupid mythology that dominates our view of this since. Open grassy plains, with beautiful open forests. Like an estate, maintained mostly to generate food through hunting and harvesting. The ‘bush’ we see today is this same engineered landscape allowed to collapse into ruin. This is the greatest story in all of human history, how Aborigines turned an entire continent into an extraordinarily rich garden of Edenesque delights. The most complex achievement in all human history, going to to the moon is a doddle next to this. We’re too far gone, too ignorant now to understand why. Nothing is as complex as living IN a landscape, for tens of thousands of years (!! I mean, this should take our breath away), rather than ON it, as we do now, destroying it. Nothing is harder to understand or engineer. Tens of thousands of years before the pyramids or Stonehenge were even thought of. Here’s the Bathurst plains, as described by the first Europeans who encountered them.