Lands of Red and Gold

The Sandman · Jul 11, 2019

As far as non-native plants go, most will probably be tested and then rejected for not dealing well with the Aururian drought cycle. For domestic animals, about the only large one I can see being brought over that isn't primarily a transport animal (horses, donkeys, possibly water buffalo, eventually camels) is pigs, because they don't require grazing land that's scarce and reserved for the invaluable transport animals.

That's in the Five Rivers, of course. There will be different considerations in the tropical north, where if nothing else sugar is pretty much guaranteed to become a major crop like it did everywhere it could be grown.

Jared · Jul 18, 2019

Zam said:
I'd caution against none native plants though, from what I've been reading they and the farming techniques associated with them have horrific impacts on ecology, also cloven animals are terrible.

As a general rule, non-native plants won't become staple crops for the simple fact that without access to fertiliser, they won't yield as well as native crops. Australian soils tend to be low in phosphorus, among other things, which reduces yields considerably except for native plants which are more tolerant of low phosphorus (and sometimes, high heavy metals in the soil). Also the lower drought tolerance as @The Sandman notes.

There will be some exceptions, of course. Some plants such as tomatoes have a lot of appeal and are manageable to grow. So would sugar, mung beans, some other legumes, and a few other crops. There are also parts of Australia where the soils are good enough that non-native crops would grow, at least for a while.

The Sandman said:
As far as non-native plants go, most will probably be tested and then rejected for not dealing well with the Aururian drought cycle. For domestic animals, about the only large one I can see being brought over that isn't primarily a transport animal (horses, donkeys, possibly water buffalo, eventually camels) is pigs, because they don't require grazing land that's scarce and reserved for the invaluable transport animals.

That's in the Five Rivers, of course. There will be different considerations in the tropical north, where if nothing else sugar is pretty much guaranteed to become a major crop like it did everywhere it could be grown.

Yes, as a general rule the most favoured use of non-native animals will be for transportation. Pigs are an (ecologically devastating) exception in that they can be raised semi-wild. Of course, pigs cause damage which the landowners will hate, and so might be hunted out of farming regions (although they will go feral elsewhere). Cattle will also have appeal in some areas where they can be left to graze on marginal lands while farming the more productive lands.

Sheep will also have appeal in a few regions (wool is valuable) where the soil is poor and thus the land is only really suitable for light cropping (eg much of Gippsland outside of the river valleys).

Zam · Jul 18, 2019

Jared said:
As a general rule, non-native plants won't become staple crops for the simple fact that without access to fertiliser, they won't yield as well as native crops. Australian soils tend to be low in phosphorus, among other things, which reduces yields considerably except for native plants which are more tolerant of low phosphorus (and sometimes, high heavy metals in the soil). Also the lower drought tolerance as @The Sandman notes.

There will be some exceptions, of course. Some plants such as tomatoes have a lot of appeal and are manageable to grow. So would sugar, mung beans, some other legumes, and a few other crops. There are also parts of Australia where the soils are good enough that non-native crops would grow, at least for a while.

Makes sense.

Based on Dark Emu Australia's soil was actually really good, but given your story is an alt history it is likely different here, and it was as good as it was because of careful management and specific plants anyway.

Jared said:
es, as a general rule the most favoured use of non-native animals will be for transportation. Pigs are an (ecologically devastating) exception in that they can be raised semi-wild. Of course, pigs cause damage which the landowners will hate, and so might be hunted out of farming regions (although they will go feral elsewhere). Cattle will also have appeal in some areas where they can be left to graze on marginal lands while farming the more productive lands.

Sheep will also have appeal in a few regions (wool is valuable) where the soil is poor and thus the land is only really suitable for light cropping (eg much of Gippsland outside of the river valleys).

Given this is alt history it is likely unnecessary, but just an aside, the sheep were especially devastating to Australia.

Jared · Jul 20, 2019

Lands of Red and Gold #87: The Wind That Shakes The Bunya

"Sweet slopes of Neeburra
Where the hills are so green
Sweet slopes of Neeburra
Glad I'm coming home to you."
- From the chorus of "Sweet Slopes of Neeburra", an iconic hit song from the band Great Artesians

--

History calls it the Darling Downs. A region of rolling hills on the western slopes of the continental divide, covered in abundant pastures and crops. The higher elevation of the hills attracts a decent amount of rainfall by the standards of this continent. Some of this water drains away down the sloping hills to the flatter interior, forming the Darling River that runs far to the southwest to join the Murray and then empty into the sea on the other side of the continent. More of the water sinks underground to be trapped in aquifers that form the world's largest artesian basin, covering a quarter of the continent. Some of the water that drains into the basin will not return to the surface for two million years.

Allohistory calls it the Neeburra. The headwaters of the Anedeli [Darling River], one of the ancient Five Rivers, and a crucial trade route since ancient days. The old trade routes, though, do not follow the main course of the Anedeli. Instead, the trade runs along some of the southern tributaries of the Anedeli, into the northern highlands [New England tablelands] and the ancient sources of tin and gems.

Most of the Neeburra lies north of the main trade routes. To the Five Rivers traders who travel along the waterways, the Neeburra is naught but a backwater. A lightly-settled land filled with poor, backwards peoples who have little of interest. Occasionally one of the Five Rivers kingdoms – Tjibarr, Yigutji or, in former times, Lopitja – sent armies north in conquest. Those conquests never lasted long; they might impose tributary status for a time, but the available resources were few, and transportation difficult. Inevitably the conquests would be abandoned when some other pressing concern further south distracted the kingdoms.

The Neeburra is inhabited by two related peoples, the Yalatji in the north and the Butjupa in the south, divided by what they call the Border River [Dumaresq River, Macintyre River, and Barwon Rivers]. Large volumes of water are often difficult to obtain here, and so the inhabitants live in scattered agricultural communities, with few large towns. Most of their farming regions are surrounded by larger rangelands. The rangelands are managed by regular burning, and provide habitat for kangaroos that in turn are hunted. The dwellers of the Neeburra do have domesticated birds – noroons [emus] and ducks – but they rely on game for much of their meat.

Politically, the Neeburra is divided into small chiefdoms, many of which do not endure for long. This is a region of region of frequent low-intensity warfare, fought over religion or access to water and rangelands. Endemic warfare over religion led to the gradual conversion of both Butjupa and Yalatji to the Tjarrling faith, which depending on who is asked is either a rival religion to Plirism, or a branch of that faith.

The Tjarrling sect (or religion) has much in common with orthodox Plirism, but treats the founding Good Man as a semi-divine figure, and views his spiritual successors as proper rulers. Plirites draws a sharp distinction between secular authority (those who rule) and religious instruction (those who guide individuals). Tjarrlinghi [1] have no such belief; on the contrary, their warrior-priestly caste seeks either to rule directly or to be highly influential advisors to those who do rule. Tjarrlinghi also believe that there should be a single leader to speak on religious matters and make binding decisions, unlike the much more amorphous Plirite religious hierarchy.

The Butjupa and Yalatji gradually adopted Tjarrling beliefs, and were converted as much by the spear as by the word. The Neeburra is the heartland of the Tjarrling faith, and every Butjupa and Yalatji chieftain is either a member of their warrior-priest caste, or is strongly guided by priestly advisors.

The Tjarrling faith calls for evangelism as much as does standard Plirism, but the inhabitants of the Neeburra have not been very adept at spreading their faith further. Partly this is because it took a long process of conversion before they were religiously united themselves, partly it is because of the constraints of geography and agriculture, but mostly it is due to the political divisions of the Neeburra meaning that the Yalatji and Butjupa exert little influence outside their immediate region.

To the east and north-east, the Neeburra is bounded by the mountains of the continental divide. To them, the most notable of these ranges are the Korroboree [Bunya Mountains]. The Korroboree contains a large number of bunya trees, which the Butjupa and Yalatji consider sacred. These trees produce nuts prodigiously but irregularly; those times are ones of sacred truce, when the usual raids are put aside for communal feasting. To the south-east are the northern highlands where can be found tin, gems and spices. To the south, the Neeburra is bounded by the Five Rivers, a region of more populous states and sometimes the source of would-be conquerors of the Neeburra.

To the west, the Neeburra is bounded by gradually more arid lands that eventually fade into desert. To the north, the land beyond the Tropic of Capricorn was long-unfarmable by the Butjupa and Yalatji; their staple crops of murnong and red yams did not grow there. So for centuries it marked a barrier to agriculture, with only hunter-gatherers to the north. The gradual spread of new crops – sweet potato and lesser yams – changed that restriction, and some Butjupa and Yalatji migrated further north. This was not a rapid migration, for neither of these peoples were particularly numerous.

Within these borders, the peoples of the Neeburra were constrained. For most of their history, they fought among themselves, and neither knew nor cared much for what lay beyond. Sometimes a particularly successful chieftain would launch crusades against the coastal-dwelling Kiyungu beyond the eastern mountains, or into the tin highlands. Such crusades rarely accomplished anything lasting, for after the death of a strong chieftain the Butjupa and Yalatji usually returned to fighting amongst themselves. Raids into the Five Rivers were sometimes conducted too, but rarely successfully, given that the riverlanders had both greater population and often better weapons.

Isolated as they were from so much of Aururia, the Butjupa and Yalatji heard little of the coming of the Raw Men, save as much-distorted, scarcely-believable travellers' tales. The Old World epidemics afflicted them, though even then the scattered nature of Neeburra communities spared some communities from most of the epidemics. The death toll was high enough, though, that it reduced the number of potential migrants further north. For gems – sapphires and emeralds - had been discovered in the north in 1626, and some miners headed north from the Neeburra in search of the earth's bounty. Not even the toll from epidemics of unknown origin could completely quell gem lust.

Inevitably, even the relative isolation of the Neeburra could not keep it forever unaffected by the coming of Europeans...

--

In the 1640s and 1650s, the Neeburra was affected by three trends: a severe loss of population from fresh epidemics, the emergence of more reliable (if still low-scale) trade links with the wider world, and the arrival of European goods and animals which began to reshape their society.

The red breath [tuberculosis] and the pox [syphilis] continued to spread throughout the Neeburra during the early 1640s. Later in the decade they were joined by another killer: light-fever [typhus]. Light-fever appeared in some communities and inflicted a heavy toll, before vanishing and reappearing elsewhere weeks, months, or years later. The light-fever epidemic did not strike the Neeburra as badly as elsewhere, since it did not spread well in their thinly-populated lands, but it exacted another toll on an already-reducing population.

Of course, the Butjupa and Yalatji had never been completely cut off from the wider world; some trade flowed through their lands. They were the main intermediaries for coral to be traded from the Kiyungu into more southerly lands of the Five Rivers, while the valued drug kunduri was traded in the other direction. Some coral was also traded into the highlands for tin to make bronze; although that trade had recently faded as the Neeburrans began to adopt iron working.

The Neeburra itself produced little that interested the outside world. The most valuable was opals, found in a few places such as Black Eye [Lightning Ridge]. Even opals were not particularly sought after; they could also be obtained closer to the Five Rivers. Apart from opals, a few other commodities were occasionally traded. Parchment from emu or kangaroo hide, which was of less demand to a largely illiterate people, and so more valued in the Five Rivers. Subtropical fruits that did not grow further south, and so were occasionally exportable when dried. Small-scale copper mining to send the red metal to the Kiyungu and tin highlands, to make bronze for peoples who had not yet taken up iron working. Other commodities were of similarly low volume. As such, the Neeburra had never conducted trade on a large scale.

The discoveries of the northern gemfields changed this dynamic. Sapphires and emeralds were highly desired in the Five Rivers, both for local use and because the Five Rivers traders had quickly realised how much Europeans valued gemstones. The lure of gemstones brought Tjibarri and Yigutjian traders north into the Neeburra, and with them came much larger quantities of goods to purchase the gems. Some of these were goods were of Five Rivers manufacture: jewellery, crafted objects of gold and silver, kunduri, dyes, incense and perfumes. Some of them were of European goods which were traded on. And a few were European-descended animals.

The introduction of European animals would, in time, change the Neeburra more than anything else. The first horses appeared in the Neeburra in the early 1650s, when Five Rivers traders started using them as transportation when visiting for gems. Inevitably a few escaped, and more were bought by Butjupa and Yalatji chieftains who were very impressed with the prospect of riding them in war and hunting. Cattle followed a few years later, after the Five Rivers traders took to bringing some cattle with them as mobile sources of meat.

Horses and cattle won some notice from the peoples of the Neeburra during the 1650s. But they would make the biggest difference in later decades, as a consequence of other changes. For in the early 1660s, the Neeburra was savaged by the single worst epidemic ever to afflict the Third World: the Great Death [measles]. A quarter of the population died, on top of previous epidemics which had between them killed almost as many people as the Great Death.

The severe toll of the Great Death accelerated the previous changes in Butjupa and Yalatji society. Changes which in time would lead to a transformation of their entire way of life.

Depopulation from the plagues meant the more marginal agricultural lands were abandoned. Fewer people meant less hunting, and thus the kangaroos bred much faster and recolonised the forsaken farmlands. In turn, the lack of labour meant that raising poultry for meat became much more difficult. The herding of noroons [emus] was almost abandoned entirely, with small-scale duck production being the only significant surviving poultry farming. The domesticated population of horses and cattle expanded rapidly through natural increase, and the surviving Neeburrans found that horses made excellent aids in hunting kangaroos in the expanded rangelands. Cattle could also be left to graze for all of their food, rather than requiring supplemental feeding from wattles or other cultivated crops.

The Butjupa and Yalatji came to rely increasingly on hunted kangaroos and grazing cattle for more of their diet. Subsequent plagues such as diphtheria, influenza and pertussis (whooping cough) only increased their dependence on herding and hunting, and reduced their remaining agriculture. The peoples of the Neeburra did not relinquish agriculture entirely, but they adopted a more minimalist approach. They relied more on tree crops such as wattles, and almost completely abandoned root crops such as red yams, or anything else which required much digging. They learnt the art of making and storing fodder for reducing the effects of droughts. They did not give up settled life entirely – being protective of their wattle groves – but they became much more horse-riders and herders than farmers.

To support their ever-growing herds of cattle and horses, the Butjupa and Yalatji relied not just on what grew in the soil, but what came up from beneath it: water. The peoples of the Neeburra had long known of the artesian water beneath their feet, discovered when they started to dig deep wells. Access to good bore sites [2] had long been part of their warfare. With the increasing take up of cattle and horses – which needed more water than noroons – they expanded their use of bores. They also started expanding further west than their previous agricultural limits, into lands which were more marginal for agriculture but where horses and cattle could be supported thanks to the fossil water which they drew from the ground.

The spread of domesticated animals happened alongside other social changes caused by the Great Death. The disruption of the plagues encouraged even more internecine warfare amongst the Butjupa and Yalatji, and this only increased as competition for hunting, grazing and water rights became more important. The great dying caused religious ferment, too. The Neeburra had previously seen sporadic religious visionaries who arose to proclaim their interpretation of Tjarrling doctrine and the best way to promote harmony. This behaviour only increased after the Great Death, with prophecies and proclamations about what new actions were needed to restore the balance. The new forms of the Tjarrling faith continued to be proclaimed and reshaped as new chieftains arose based on their own interpretations of religious authority, and as new plagues regularly swept through the Neeburra causing ever more social unrest.

At first, the main impetus of the new religious movements was for internal action. Over time, the Butjupa and Yalatji shifted to more of being horsemen and cattle drivers, which increased their mobility. They also developed ever growing awareness of the wealth of the lands beyond their borders – a legacy of the increasing trade for gems and other products (even dried cattle meat). This meant that they turned more to external warfare as part of their way of life.

By the 1690s, horsemen raids on the fringes of Five Rivers territory had become part of the way of life. In time, they would become much more than that.

--

"Be of one people and one vision, that you may conquer your enemies and bring them to harmony."
- Attributed to the Hunter

--

[1] Tjarrlinghi being the anglicised name for adherents of the Tjarrling faith, not the version used in their own languages.

[2] The Neeburrans lack any decent form of pumping technology (such as windmills). As such, they are limited to bore sites which have enough water pressure to bring water to the surface naturally.

--

Thoughts?

ScottishMongol · Jul 20, 2019

Always keep your eye on the steppe nomads.

EBR · Jul 21, 2019

The horse-lord cometh!

Radek · Jul 21, 2019

And thus began the bane of sedentary cultures the world over; nomad raiding parties.

Zam · Jul 21, 2019

A very fun piece, you did a marvelous job painting a vivid and detailed picture of the land and carried it through across the entire piece, every scene felt alive and well realized while showing a lot of interesting details and factors, thanks for sharing!

Jared · Jul 27, 2019

Zam said:
Based on Dark Emu Australia's soil was actually really good, but given your story is an alt history it is likely different here, and it was as good as it was because of careful management and specific plants anyway.

The soil was pretty good for Australian native plants, because they're adapted to it. It wasn't (and isn't) so good for most non-native plants.

Given this is alt history it is likely unnecessary, but just an aside, the sheep were especially devastating to Australia.

Sheep were and are devastating in Australian history. They will still be around and damaging in this timeline - no way to avoid them entirely - but on the whole less damaging. Net win.

ScottishMongol said:
Always keep your eye on the steppe nomads.

EBR said:
The horse-lord cometh!

Radek said:
And thus began the bane of sedentary cultures the world over; nomad raiding parties.

There's something about getting on a horse which encourages people to go and get something else off other people.

Zam said:
A very fun piece, you did a marvelous job painting a vivid and detailed picture of the land and carried it through across the entire piece, every scene felt alive and well realized while showing a lot of interesting details and factors, thanks for sharing!

Glad you liked it. This was one of those chapters I was trying to keep a sense of atmosphere.

Jared · Jul 27, 2019

Lands of Red and Gold #88: Pepper and Gum and All Things Spice

"If a man does not understand your message, is the fault with you or with him?"
- Pinjarra

--

Sandstone Day, Cycle of the Rainbow, 426th Year of Harmony (6.19.426) / 28 October 1665
Gogarra [Newcastle, NSW], Kingdom of the Skin

The man who stood before him bowed deeply, lowering his body so much that he went down on one knee. "Be welcome in my abode of business," the man intoned.

Berree Mudontji, a trading-captain of the nuttana [Nangu merchant association], inclined his head in acknowledgement. "Your hospitality honours me."

Dalwalinoo picked up the candle that burned beside him, and used it to light two sticks of Yigutji incense. Their fragrant smoke wafted through the room, giving a pleasing scent that Berree believed were sarsaparilla seeds.

The other man replaced the candle in its stand, then smiled. He wore long, flowing, almost-robes, coloured gold and ironwood-green [olive green]; Berree could never remember what name the Patjimunra give to their indolent clothes. The cuffs of each sleeve hung low and loose, and would make any practical work difficult. They proclaimed a man who needed to perform no practical duties himself, who could rely on others to work for him. The same message was conveyed by the short, conical, almost brimless hat that topped his head. The hat offered no useful shade; it just marked who the man was.

Despite the clothes of indolence, Dalwalinoo had attended to his guest personally. Such was a matter of status, amongst the Patjimunra. To them, a host should personally serve a guest of rank.

Dalwalinoo moved slowly and carefully, belying the awkward nature of his clothes. In fact, it made his steady movements seem part of a ritual. The Patjimunra made most things a ceremony; indeed, they would almost always refuse to deal with outsiders except via ceremony. He gestured to the waiting chairs, and only sat himself after his guest had settled into a comfortable position.

"May I offer you jeeree [lemon-scented tea]?" Dalwalinoo asked.

"That would be welcome," Berree said, and shook his head. He would have preferred gum cider rather than jeeree, but a man made accommodations with what was available. The Cannon War and the War of the Ear had destroyed much of the cider gum plantations in the Cider Isle [Tasmania], and the Great Death had consumed so many lives that few workers remained to harvest what was left. Gum cider was now found more in memory than on the palate.

Dalwalinoo clapped his hands, and a waiting servant brought in two steaming clay cups. He handed one to his guest, then held the other near his mouth while he inhaled the scent.

Berree did the same. The fragrance had a hint of ginger, as well as the expected aroma of lemon. Sure enough, he saw that the jeeree was coloured red; it had been flavoured with whole ginger [1]. He sipped from the cup, tasting the blend of sweet lemon and sour ginger. "A pleasing calmness," he said.

"A sip of the lemony peace," Dalwalinoo said. A ritual phrase; the Patjimunra had many of them. They believed that jeeree invoked serenity in a man [2], and so they consumed it before any negotiations. Not to mention on almost any other occasion when they invoked ceremony.

"Does your tongue feel hunger?" Dalwalinoo said; a phrase spoken in the Nangu language, but of distinctly Patjimunra origin.

"Refreshments would please me," Berree said. He chose his wording carefully, not saying anything which might be interpreted as a command. The Patjimunra did not take kindly to a guest giving instructions of any form during the greeting ceremony.

Another clap from the Patjimunra merchant, and the servant returned carrying a platter. On it rested an array of dried fruits and cubes of wealth-gum-glazed roast kumara [wattle-gum glazed sweet potato]. Dalwalinoo held the platter out to Berree, who picked up a few fruits and cubes, then took some himself.

The conversation while they ate was a series of polite enquiries about the health of their family and broader kin, and banalities about how their ventures were faring. Such was the expectation for the Patjimunra; no true discussion of commerce while eating or drinking.

They each agreed that all of their living kinfolk were healthy – even those that truly were not – and that their commerce was generally prospering. Among some peoples, making such statements would be foolish, leading only to more vigorous haggling on the grounds that a prosperous merchant could afford to pay a higher price to buy goods. The Patjimunra were not like that; a wealthy man was expected to be open about his success. To them, the art of haggling involved proclaiming that the offered price would be what a poor merchant would accept, not a prosperous one.

When the food was nearly finished, Dalwalinoo said, "Trade flows well; men are beginning to move back and forth again."

Berree shook his head. "A development which will please all proper merchants."

To these Patjimunra, a merchant was someone who travelled for trade. Although Dalwalinoo had junior merchants to travel for him for business now, at least if going any further than the capital Kinhung [Maitland]. Not too different a principle from the Nangu, where the greatest elders or senior captains sent out others to do their trading for them.

Berree had taken the time to find out as much as he could about Dalwalinoo, as indeed he did about any potential trading partner. By all reports, Dalwalinoo had been a master trader in his youth, travelling amongst the Patjimunra lands to find the best sources of spices, and even following the spice roads west to sell his spices in the Five Rivers. Still, the greatest part of his success had come recently. Dalwalinoo was simply one of those fortunate not just to have survived the Great Death himself, but to have had most of his junior traders do the same. He had thrived where many had died. Well, if the Balance tilts in your favour for a time, you would be a fool not to take advantage of it.

With the last of the food consumed, Dalwalinoo leaned back in his chair. "Have you brought your usual tohu [sugar] for me, that we can discuss a price?"

"Tohu I have, but more also. Far I have sailed, into the lands of strange stars [northern hemisphere], to the realm called Barrat [India]. Much they make that is strange and wonderful, and samples of two I have brought here." Together with samples of several more which he would sell elsewhere, such as their exquisite lacquered goods from Coromandel, and saltpetre that commanded better prices in lands which had bought more muskets.

Berree reached down and picked up the larger of the two wooden boxes he had brought with him. "The Barratti have a fibre that can make the finest cloth. Lighter, more comfortable and more magnificent than the best linen. They call it cotton."

He opened the box and passed across several samples of their woven goods. Then he waited for Dalwalinoo to try them, to feel them, and in one case to wrap it around himself so that he could judge the weight.

"This new fibre may be of some use," the Patjimunra merchant conceded, eventually.

It would let him sell it for glorious prices, he meant, but Berree knew better than to point this out now. That would be something to say repeatedly once they began haggling over prices.

Berree reached for the second, smaller box. He opened it to reveal an assortment of dried fruit. Red, long and thin, and dried to two thin films of skin. The two sides were almost flat, so much had they shrunk when drying, and they ended in a sharp point. The fruit formed a slight crescent as it stretched from stalk to point.

"This is a new spice, grown in Barrat. Dried, naturally. Fry this spice in linseed oil, or cut it up and eat only small amounts directly. Do not eat too much at once. They are fiercer than the hottest purple peppers."

Dalwalinoo raised an eyebrow. "I will try them. What are they called?"

"The Barrati call them tjilee."

"Intriguing goods," the Patjimunra merchant said. "This Barrat is not a place I have heard of before."

More likely, a place he had been told about occasionally, but had not bothered to remember, Berree judged. Patjimunra merchants cared very little for where the goods they were sold came from, unless the place was well-known enough that it could be used as a selling point when trading the goods among their own people.

"It is a new place for our nuttana to sail to," he said. Or nearly new. For too long, the Nedlandj had not agreed to allow any Nangu traders to sail west past Batavia. Not that such restrictions bound the nuttana, in themselves, but few Nangu who sailed further west returned. It had been a matter of much suspicion and debate that the Nedlandj had attacked any Nangu ships they found. The Nedlandj did not like competition.

Now, though, the Nedlandj were in open war with the Inglidj. The two Raw Men powers focused on their war with each other. They had stopped caring much about where Nangu ships sailed, being far too busy with their own battles.

"Since you have brought their goods here, then you must know how much you think they are worth. How much strawberry gun and purple peppers are you asking for these?"

"That is not something we should discuss immediately," Berree said. And wait until you name the first price. "Have your servants prepare dishes with those tjilees first this evening, and show the cotton to any of your traders you wish. Then we can meet again to consider the price."

"A good notion," Dalwalinoo said, after a pause. Doubtless he had been hoping Berree would have been foolish enough to name an immediate price.

I have sailed further and traded in more lands than you riverbound Patjimunra can comprehend. Do you think I am so foolish? Let Dalwalinoo try these goods, think about them, and he would be more interested. Then they would agree on a good price.

A price that Dalwalinoo would believe was good, anyway. The Patjimunra's purple peppers had been traded for years; the price was high, but not exorbitant. Now, though, Berree believed that purple peppers would soon be worth much more. The Nedlandj and Inglidj had been selling the common peppers in Barrat for several years, but they had only few of the fiercer purple peppers grown here in the Kingdom of the Skin. They did not quite realise how much more the purple peppers could be worth, to the Barratti. With the Raw Men distracted by war, this was the ideal time for Berree to step into that market and sell the purple peppers in far Barrat.

Dalwalinoo stood, and Berree rose a moment later. "I will consider this tonight, and meet again tomorrow. Until then, please accept my hospitality in the rooms which have been set aside for you."

Set aside, where no Patjimunra would come except servants, of course. But Berree was used to their ways by now. "I am honoured," he said.

--

Serpent Day, Cycle of the Sun, Year of the Flatulent Goanna [3] / 13 December 1665
Kinhung [Maitland, NSW], Kingdom of the Skin

Keduna of Bedooree adjusted the grey, loose-hanging sleeves of his bogwadah [indolent clothes]. The motion was more from habit than from any need, as he awaited the arrival of the judging lord. The grey sleeves contrasted nicely with the white of his main robes; a reminder that the pure white of justice would never be left unstained when touched by mortal hands.

A scarlet-and-gold-clad young man stood in the doorway. He stamped his foot five times on the stone floor, then proclaimed, "He comes! Kneel before the bearer of justice!"

Keduna went down on one knee and bowed, as did everyone else in the room. He did not look up until the scarlet-clad Dhanbang [noble] had strode over to the one chair in the room, taken up the sapphire-topped Rod of Judgement from where it rested on an adjoining table, and placed his ample fundament upon the chair.

The scarlet-and-gold man – a Dhanbang of some minor rank – said, "Hearken to the words of the bearer of justice!"

"Who stands for the aggrieved?" the scarlet-clad judging lord intoned.

Keduna took a step forward. "I, Keduna of Bedooree, Keduna son of Wallanipee, stand for Dalwalinoo son of Moora Koorda, and his associate merchants."

"So let you swear," said the judging lord.

Keduna said, "By my blood and spirit, I swear to serve the White God faithfully and truly in all that I say and do in this place, to honour truth, the natural order, and the Skin."

"Who stands for the retorter?"

Mingeenyu of Gogarra rose and declared that he stood for a great list of people. Keduna did not bother to listen to all of their names; only the first one, Kurragwinya, truly mattered.

After Mingeenyu, too, had sworn to the White God, the scarlet-clad lord said, "The advocates and the scribes will remain. The aggrieved and retorters will leave until they are needed."

With much bowing, the clients of both sides withdrew. All as it should be. Clients could not be present during a trial except when called to answer any questions from the judging lord. They must not be seen to influence the proceedings by their stature, or lack of same. Their advocates were equal, and so could state their case.

"What says your client?" asked the judging lord.

"Dalwalinoo, my client, is an honoured trader and Paabay [service provider caste], who makes commerce within the lands of the Water Mother and in the Skinless lands beyond. He reached a sworn agreement with Geduna of Awaki [Whittingham] for ten years' worth of trade, beginning in the Year of the Fortunate Frog [1659 AD]. Geduna expired in the Great Death. Now his heirs, Kurragwinya and his brothers, refuse to honour this agreement. They have sold goods contrary to what was sworn."

"What was in the agreement?"

"The sworn agreement was for Geduna to supply, from his lands and associates, agreed quantities of whole ginger, lemon verbena, and purple peppers, to be sold to my client at an agreed price in incense, perfume and resin, or for grain and weeping seeds [wattleseeds and weeping rice] in substitute where the aromatics could not be provided. The agreement was that the first quantities of the harvest would be sold to my client, with any surplus free to be sold elsewhere. But Geduna's heirs have not sold the agreed quantities to my client for the last three years. He knows that this year and the last, they have sold purple peppers and lemon verbena along the Spice Road and to Skinless sailors."

"Which Warraghang [priestly caste member] delivered the sworn oaths?"

"Karoon son of Awigee, who also expired during the Great Death. No associate Warraghang were present to witness. Never the less, honoured one, I do have copies of my clients' records about the quantities of spices which Geduna's heirs sold-"

The scarlet-clad lord held up the Rod of Judgement. "Not necessary, perhaps. Let me hear first what the retorter's advocate has to say. Mingeenyu – first, does your client, or rather, clients, dispute that the agreement was sworn."

The opposing advocate said, "My clients do not disagree that an agreement was reached. Although I note that my opponent has not stated the quantities which were in the agreement. I would ask-"

"Is this a dispute over quantities?"

"It has become so, honoured one. The dispute is not what was agreed at first, but how fairness requires changes to the agreement."

"Is that so?" the judging lord said, turning to Keduna.

"My client asks simply that the heirs of Karoon follow what was sworn by their father, rather than trying to change a sworn agreement. But to simplify things, honoured one, I have a parchment with the quantities that were agreed." Keduna handed the parchment to the opposing advocate. "Do you disagree with those quantities?"

Mingeenyu scanned over the parchment, then nodded.

The scarlet-clad lord said, "Let us dispense with the question of quantities, then. Mingeenyu – second, you said that your clients wish to change the agreement. Why?"

"Honoured one, my clients suffered as severely as anyone in the Land from the Great Death. Their lands, and their associates' lands, cannot produce what they once did, for want of workers and of craftsmen. The agreement was sworn for a more fortunate time, when my clients could expect that their lands would yield higher, giving them some spices to sell elsewhere. Fairness requires that the quantity of spices to be delivered to Dalwalinoo is reduced to account for this."

"Keduna- what says your client to this?"

"Honoured one, there are five things to be said. On the first finger, the sworn agreement contained no allowance for variation. If Geduna had wished changes to be permitted, he should have asked for them before making the agreement. On the second finger, my client has also lost traders and kin from the Great Death, but does not seek benefit from this. He could ask for higher prices for his own goods, but he has kept to what was sworn. On the third finger, my client is not asking the heirs of Geduna to provide spices which they do not have. If their lands do not produce enough, my client asks simply that all the spices which are produced are sold to him, as was sworn. On the fourth finger, the heirs of Geduna ask this not because of lower production, but because purple peppers and lemon verbena now command higher prices in the Skinless lands than when the prices were sworn between my client and Geduna. His heirs seek to breach the sworn agreement for greater profit, under the guise of losses from the Great Death. On the thumb, honoured one, what my client asks is nothing more than justice."

As he spoke, Keduna watched the judging lord. While he had never appeared before this judging lord before, and thus did not know his name, he had long schooled himself to recognise truth in men's faces. The scarlet-clad lord's eyes had widened slightly when he heard about the increased prices that the outlanders paid for spices. While the opposing advocate spluttered and wove his way through a denial of the points, Keduna knew that he had the matter won at that moment.

--

The Kingdom of the Skin. The lands surrounding the Kuyal [Hunter River]. The dominion of the Patjimunra, the people divided and united by ginhi [caste], miners of coal, growers of multitudinous spices, and wilfully ignorant of the wider world outside the borders of the fertile valley that forms their homeland (see post #79).

The Patjimunra could not, of course, ignore the European plagues that swept through their lands, claiming an ever increasing toll of their people, and culminating in the Great Death [measles] that took the total death toll to about 45% of their pre-1619 population. The social disruption was immense, as it was throughout most of Aururia; leading to severe shortages of labourers, and a generous measure of social and religious unrest.

The traditional Patjimunra social structure had a role for everyone, and expected that the caste they were born in dictated their station throughout life. The priestly caste supported the division into ginhi – indeed, they were its main advocates. Apart from that, they spent much of their time decrying each other, and had the habit of declaiming long speeches against the Kings of the Skin whenever some natural disaster or another affected the realm.

The Great Death, naturally, led to an increase in denunciations of the King of the Skin. Fortunately for his rule, the priests were mostly distracted trying to prevent too much movement between castes to orchestrate any campaigns to overthrow his rule. For the death toll had been higher in the cities than in the countryside. This led to shortages of workers in many of the urban occupations, those mostly performed by the Paabay [service providers] and Gidhay [higher craftsman] castes. The survivors in the towns made active efforts to recruit Baluga [agriculturalists] to move to the cities to take up the trades.

Despite the denunciations of the priests, many farmers did move to the cities to take up new occupations. Even a few of the more reduced priestly groups found it necessary to recruit (discreetly) a few Gidhay to join their ranks, mostly using the coal-mining subcaste who were viewed as working with the sacred black rock that burns.

The disruption to the occupational codes was exacerbated by migrations of the gwiginhi [skinless] from the south. This process had begun even before the Great Death, when peoples disrupted by the earlier plagues were driven to relocate. The formerly independent Patjimunra city-state of Ghulimba [Morriset / Dora Creek] had been conquered by the Malarri people in 1630, and the migrations meant that the Malarri now formed over half the town's population.

The Great Death, and other warfare to the south, set off a greater chain of migrations. The Rrunga people had lived in the northern and western parts of what another history would call the Cumberland Plains (Sydney basin). Since 1646, that region had been engulfed in war provoked by the English East India Company (EIC), and the Rrunga were mostly the losers. They were pushed north, and in turned displaced more of the Malarri and Nyabba peoples who lived to their north [the Central Coast, NSW], and those peoples in turn pushed into the southern Patjimunra lands.

Keeping out the migrants was impossible, with the reduced population of the Kingdom of the Skin. Despite the prohibitions of ginhi, there were also those among the Patjimunra who welcomed the idea of additional labour, provided that a place could be found for the migrants. That place was, naturally, at the bottom of the social order.

The migrants were not permitted to own land or to take up the higher prestige occupations. But the Patjimunra already had a lower subcaste of transient workers, itinerants who did not own lands or a business. Many of those workers had found land or roles for themselves as a result of the Great Death. The migrant workers fitted nearly in replacing the missing transients, albeit even further down the social order. The names which the Patjimunra gave to the migrants – variants of outlander (polite) or outcast (more common) – reflected the way the migrants were viewed, but nonetheless the migrants had found the beginning of a place in the social order.

Migrants, of course, were only part of the broader social and religious unrest triggered by the Great Death. This unrest was reflected in the pressures on the ginhi social code, in proclamations by the priests against both breaches in ginhi and of the impiety of the King of the Skin, in some unrest by nobles, and in some religious conversions.

The Dhanbang caste [nobles and warriors] had, of course, a long tradition of challenging royal authority. This was sometimes manifested in bids to unseat the king, and sometimes in Dhanbang seeking to establish independent realms for themselves in outlying areas of Patjimunra lands. Indeed, the Kingdom of the Skin had a long history of losing and then regaining control of outlying regions.

At the time of the Great Death, there were three outlying regions which were independent of the King of the Skin's rule: Torimi [Corlette] on the northern harbour [Port Stephens], Gwalimbal [Wollombi] in the uplands to the south-west, and Ghulimba on the southern lake that the Patjimunra called the Flat Sea [Lake Macquarie]. Ghulimba had been lost to Patjimunra rule entirely, but the other two remained independent Patjimunra city-states. In the aftermath of the Great Death, several other nobles bid for the crown itself, but were ultimately defeated. Due in part to the threat of migrant Skinless peoples pushing in, no other regions sought to assert independence during this period.

The religious unrest during this period was partly manifested through priestly argument, but was also notable for increased conversion. Plirism had already established itself in the Kingdom of the Skin, spread by Nangu traders, but formed only a small proportion (less than 10%) of the population. The disturbances of the Great Death made Plirism's message more appealing. The era saw a steady increase in converts who accepted the Plirite message that the discord had been brought about by an impious king and priests – or by the Raw Men – and that proper harmony needed to be restored. In the decade and a half after the Great Death, Plirism increased to nearly 15% of the Patjimunra population.

While the Great Death brought incredible suffering to the Kingdom of the Skin, the surviving Patjimunra had some good fortune when it came to rebuilding their lives. The kingdom received growing wealth in goods imported from the Skinless lands. Their key spices commanded ever-increasing prices from European, Nuttana and Maori traders; the depopulation across the Third World only made the remaining spice production more valuable. This allowed them to reorient the surviving workers toward spice cultivation. The broad-based nature of Patjimunra trade meant that unlike many other Aururian societies (such as the Atjuntja), the wealth from that commerce was widely distributed amongst the survivors.

The Patjimunra were also spared from too much European meddling in their internal affairs, thanks to their studious indifference to any proposed pacts by individual European powers. The Kings of the Skin consistently refused to sanction any trade agreement or permanent trading posts for particular European powers. The monarchs bought some European weapons to defend against the restless peoples of their own lands (and neighbours), and the Pakanga (Maori) raids, but that was the limit of their agreements with the Skinless.

During the Proxy Wars (1640s and 1650s), this practice denied the English and Dutch East India Companies their usual levers for gaining influence over the indigenous powers, i.e. by arming one group and supporting them against their rivals. The small city-state of Torimi held no illusions about its ability to conquer the Kingdom of the Skin, and so the only pacts it concluded with European powers was to act as a resupply point, not as a permanent trade outpost.

Despite the suffering of the Great Death, the Patjimunra gained some additional breathing space with the outbreak of official war between England and the Netherlands. The Anglo-Dutch Wars would continue – with some periods of peace – into the 1680s. This meant that for a time the two leading European powers were far too committed to their own warfare to organise a major invasion of the Kingdom of the Skin. In terms of Patjimunra trade, the main beneficiary of this warfare was the newer French East India Company, which took advantage of the rival powers' distractions to build up much stronger trading contacts with the leading Patjimunra merchant families. Even then, though, the Kings of the Skin maintained their refusal to countenance any permanent foreign presence in their lands.

So, perhaps more than any other Aururian state, the Kingdom of the Skin maintained its stability and its independence from the Raw Men during the troubled times after the Great Death.

--

[1] This "ginger" is the indigenous Aururian spice which is historically called native ginger (Alpinia caerulea), but which allohistorically is most commonly called white ginger. It is a shrub whose fruits, new shoots and tubers produce different varieties of gingery flavours. The flavour used here comes from the fruit. Aururians most commonly use the fruit fresh, in which case they only use the white pulp of the fruit (hence the name white ginger). Sometimes, as here, the whole fruit (including skin and seeds) is dried and ground to use as a flavouring in food and drink. When it does, it lends a reddish tinge to the final product. This means it is sometimes called red ginger, although most commonly the Aururians call it whole ginger.

[2] And the Patjimunra are right to believe that. Jeeree leaves – what is historically called the leaves of the lemon-scented tea-tree (Leptospermum petersonii) – have a mild sedative effect.

[3] The Patjimunra use the same basic Gunnagal calendar (see post #18) that has been adopted by most eastern Aururian farming peoples. That calendar divides the year into thirty 12-day cycles (with several intercalary days), but does not give any standard names to the years. Each Aururian society tends to adopt its own way of naming the years. The Nangu date their calendar from their first year of conversion to Plirism (1240 AD), a practice which has been followed by some societies that have since converted to the Nangu school of Plirism. Tjibarr and the Yadji Empire name their years based on the reigning monarch. The Patjimunra use a complex rotating cycle of mythical aspects to name the years.

--

Thoughts?

Zam · Jul 28, 2019

Jared said:
The soil was pretty good for Australian native plants, because they're adapted to it. It wasn't (and isn't) so good for most non-native plants.

I may be interpreting the information in the book correctly, the author references some of it in this video, but I'll leave it at that:

Jared said:
Sheep were and are devastating in Australian history. They will still be around and damaging in this timeline - no way to avoid them entirely - but on the whole less damaging. Net win.

There's something about getting on a horse which encourages people to go and get something else off other people.

Glad you liked it. This was one of those chapters I was trying to keep a sense of atmosphere.

Makes sense.

Hahahahaha.

You did an excellent job, kudos!

Jared said:
Thoughts?

An excellent chapter, I loved the conversation inter-cut with the more brutally honest and sharp internal monologue, the tit for tat of the host and subtle plans for trade, along with the eloquent and flowing descriptions that painting a gloriously vivid and elegant picture particularly for the opening scene.

Yo did a solid job turning me, not quite against but definitely muting my support for the one noting that the deals were made for a more bountiful time, that was quite impressive.

The development and subtle breakdown or at least wound in the established caste system was really clever and haha. I confess the image of priests who spend the majority of their time bickering, and taking potshots at their king is amusing, the enforce caste system obviously less so, but all very realistic and intriguing.

Jared · Aug 2, 2019

Lands of Red and Gold #89: Words Yet To Come

"The Tjagarr Panipat was first gathered in Tapiwal [Robinvale] in 1646 as a colloquy of physicians to assess and consider the first typhus epidemic to reach the Five Rivers. Initially the term Tjagarr Panipat referred to the conference rather than the location, with several such colloquies being called in other places in the Five Rivers over the next two decades to assess disease outbreaks.

The Tjagarr Panipat became a permanent institution under the auspices of Lopitja Dalwal [Lopitja the White]. In 1666, he donated his family's residence in Tapiwal to serve as a permanent library for physicians' texts, and to provide a meeting hall for physicians to discuss and review cases. That building became the first great hall of the Tjagarr Panipat. It was later demolished to be replaced by the Grand White Hall, which still stands today as one of the central buildings of the Tjagarr Panipat."
- From the English-language version of a plaque which stands near the entrance to the main Tjagarr Panipat compound

--

"The Kurnawal are in rebellion. The Yadji armies are busy in the east. If we declare war on the Yadji now, we will have victory over them. We just must ensure that we do not have complete victory."
- Lopitja the White (son of Wemba of the Whites), addressing the Tjibarri Council in the Hall of Rainbows, 1673

--

"The League's pleasure, glory and profit are all more advanced by sugar than by any other commodity we deal in or produce, gold and jeeree [lemon tea] not excepted."
- Titore, An Account of the Growth of the Nuttana, 1715

--

"The seemingly endless bounty of Aururia provided a lesson to those who had the wit to learn: mining gold is not the same as mining money."
- Archibald Simpson-Green: The Foundations of the Modern World, ch. 6 "A Surfeit of Currency"

--

"But since the time of Queen Elizabeth there has been only a continual fluctuation in the conduct of England, with which one could not concert measures for two years at a time."
- Johan de Witt; 1659

--

"The Devil hath made too many Dutchmen."
- William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and former Duke Regent of England, 1665, speaking after the successful Dutch raid on the Royal Navy anchorage at Harwich

--

"The Fronde began by breaking windows, but ended by breaking Liberty."
- Charles de Batz

--

"England: the land where every man has as much democracy as he can afford."
- Antimony Bryant, 1871

--

"The history of seventeenth-century Central Europe can be summed up as follows: everybody loves Poland – every village of it."
- Lars Løvschøld, The Development of Early Modern Europe

--

"In the ride, there is truth."
- Attributed to the Hunter

--

"The Sawtooth revolutionaries speak of making one nation of many. What a travesty of absurdism! Mere vapid slogans cannot unmake the natural order. The nation is the sum of the character and the history of each man. It cannot be altered by a storm of words and a new rectangle of dyed cloth. A new government can declare a new state; it cannot declare a new nation."
- Lincoln Derwent, from a letter written to Aurelia Swan

--

"What misbegotten declaration, that dishonourable fiction propounded in the Commonwealth that all men are equal before the law! The Revolution established that a man could not claim privilege by right of birth, but replaced that with privilege by right of gold. For the fundamental truth is that an advocate, by endless rhetoric, is permitted to rewrite the law in favour of privilege. Just as gravity distorts space, so gold distorts the law. A black hole is where light dies; a gold hole is where justice dies."
- "Steelfoot" Barker, Battle Call

--

"Whereby it is confirmed by His Majesty Nyiragal that the laws of the League [Nuttana] stand in concert with the laws of the land. In all judgements pertaining to men of the League, His Majesty or his chosen judge will take counsel together with a representative of the Nuttana, to jointly determine the proper course."
- From the treaty signed in 1658 between the Nuttana and the kingdom of Ngutti [Yamba], a breakaway state formed during the Daluming civil war

--

"I claim this land in the name of the League and the Six Lords."
- Karnama Nyawala, after planting the Coral Flag on what he called the Bleak Islands [Kerguelen Islands] in 1692

--

"Easy to change a flag. Hard to change nationality."
- Myumitsi Makan, better known in English as Solidarity Jenkins

--

"From Valk Land [Eyre Peninsula] in the west to Rarotonga [Cook Islands] in the east, from Papua in the north to Maungahuka [Auckland Islands] in the south, nowhere could be considered safe from Pakanga [Maori] raids."
- Claude M. Overton, A Brief History of Merchant Venturers

--

"This much I desire to accomplish in my life: to ride my horse into the sea to north and east and south, and know that I have brought harmony to all the lands through which I have ridden."
- The Hunter

--

"In a free government, we are told, the rulers are the humble servants and the people the proud sovereigns. Which means that under a free government, a man is free only to agree with the people."
- "Steelfoot" Barker, An Enemy Called Freedom

--

"Democracy bestows neither liberty nor sovereignty. If a government created by popular vote determines to tax a man of half his property, how is that different to a bandit robbing a man of half of what he owns?"
- Elliott Moreton (agitator and traitor, or revolutionary and martyr, depending on the perspective of the author), during a speech to the Arborist League

--

"The reasons for slavery [1] are deed or contract; the former for war or punishment, the latter for term, life or blood. Plirites may be enslaved for punishment, term or life, while non-believers may be enslaved for any reason. The Flesh-Eaters [Solomon Islanders] are like other non-believers, whether they are Maori, Kiyungu, Bungudjimay, Christian, Motuan [Papuan], or any others who adhere to paganism and do not embrace the Seven-fold Path... This means there is no difference between the non-believers in this respect. Whoever is enslaved in a condition of non-belief, it is proper to own him, whosoever he may be, and no matter whether he may voluntarily embrace the Seven-fold Path afterward. The condition of slavery in the non-believer will continue in the believer, even in the blood if that is in the contract... But where manumission has been granted to a Plirite slave of the blood, it is not proper for any punishment to restore slavery of the blood to that Plirite or his progeny, except where they have forsaken the true path."
- Wolya gan Moning [Wolya son of Moning], legal interpretation, c. 1696. Wolya gan Moning was a Nuttana priest and jurist, expressing his views on the emerging contract law and practices of Nuttana slavery.

--

"Winning a popular vote does not make a tyrant legitimate. It merely makes him a popular tyrant."
- Antimony Bryant, 1894

--

"Old evils never die, they just take on new guises."
- "Steelfoot" Barker, Battle Call

--

"The secret ballot is a licence for men to harm their fellows. It is a breach of solidarity."
- Spencer Jackson

--

"In the world: order and discord. In the mind should be only order."
- Pinjarra, Aururian social philosopher (among many other things)

--

"As the blue gum is cut down but regrows, so must a man rise again after defeat."

"That which is sprung from the earth will be returned to the earth."

- From Oora Gulalu [The Endless Road], a text composed in Tjibarr in the fifteenth century, and widely respected by both Plirite and Tjarrling believers

--

"Politics consists more in profiting from favourable circumstances than preparing them in advance."
- Maximilian III, Grand Duke of Bavaria (among other titles), speaking on the eve of the Nine Years' War

--

"Bohemia is the portion of the Habsburg heritage to which we have the strongest claim and which is most suitable for the house of Wettin. It is consonant with justice to maintain one's rights and to seize the opportunity of the death of Leopold II to take possession. The superiority of our troops, the promptitude with which we can set them in motion, in a word the clear advantage we have over our neighbours, gives us in unexpected emergency an infinite superiority over all other powers of Europe. If we wait until Sweden and Bavaria start hostilities we could not prevent the aggrandizement of the latter which is wholly contrary to our interests. If we act at once, we keep her in subjection..."
- Christian Albert I, Elector of Saxony, memorandum, 1740

--

"It is time to show the Raw Men what we are."
- Gurragang son of Lopitja (grandson of Wemba of the Whites)

--

[1] The Nuttana word translated as slavery includes all forms of indentured labour, including that voluntarily entered into for a term of years.

--

Thoughts?

EBR · Aug 2, 2019

A lot of railing against democracy and freedom.

Zam · Aug 2, 2019

This was really well written and cool, some of those were pure fire and tea, I love em!

Jared said:
"What misbegotten declaration, that dishonourable fiction propounded in the Commonwealth that all men are equal before the law! The Revolution established that a man could not claim privilege by right of birth, but replaced that with privilege by right of gold. For the fundamental truth is that an advocate, by endless rhetoric, is permitted to rewrite the law in favour of privilege. Just as gravity distorts space, so gold distorts the law. A black hole is where light dies; a gold hole is where justice dies."
- "Steelfoot" Barker, Battle Call

This one was in particular great and frustratingly apt for both the past and modern day, super well said.

Jared said:
"Democracy bestows neither liberty nor sovereignty. If a government created by popular vote determines to tax a man of half his property, how is that different to a bandit robbing a man of half of what he owns?"
- Elliott Moreton (agitator and traitor, or revolutionary and martyr, depending on the perspective of the author), during a speech to the Arborist League

I think Mr Elliot doesn't understand how any government system works if he thinks that someone having their property taken my those in power could only happen in Democracy and that isn't even getting into what else he said wrong XD

Jared said:
"It is time to show the Raw Men what we are."
- Gurragang son of Lopitja (grandson of Wemba of the Whites)

Good luck!

Jared · Aug 3, 2019

EBR said:
A lot of railing against democracy and freedom.

The underlying ideologies in this timeline are rather... different to what we know in our world. I don't want to go too much into detail about the future, partly to avoid spoilers but also because without seeing how ideologies developed over time it's hard to make sense of them at the end.

I can say that one key aspect of the difference is that the view of identity is rather different to what we have in OTL, and some of the anti-democratic comments must be understood in that context. "Tyranny of the majority" is an OTL phrase, but would be said with rather more emphasis ITTL.

To give an example which isn't a major spoiler because there's already been a lot of foreshadowing about it, take the Congxie who have been shown to form an ethnoreligious minority in ATL North America. Some of the Congxie live in areas which are majority of European descent, and which would naturally enough practice democracy of a fashion. The Congxie would form a small minority within those states, say less than 10% of the population, and have interests which they consider as rather distinct from the European-descended majority. What value would they be expected to place on democracy, when if every single Congxie voted a particular way, their interests would still be massively outweighed by the democratically-elected leaders of European descent. The actions of a democratic government that doesn't need to place much weight on their interests would be to them just another form of tyranny.

To put it another way, the general Congxie view of democracy would be that it says: "if 50%+1 person in the population elected a legitimate government, the 49% of the population would be expected to follow that government regardless of whether it gave any weight to their interests." They would view things such as constitutions and protection of rights as being something separate to democracy, and something that's needed to protect against "popular tyranny" (ie democratically-elected majorities doing whatever they want to minority interests).

Some of the comments against freedom are harder to explain without giving away too much of the context, but let's just say that some of the "authors" quoted here would feel most comfortable with anarchism in OTL, although the ATL ideologies don't line up exactly with anarchism or with anything else in OTL.

I'd also note that in many times in OTL, when people speak of democracy they talk as if it's synonymous with "liberal democracy." That isn't always the case even in OTL, and it's even less so ITTL.

Zam said:
I think Mr Elliot doesn't understand how any government system works if he thinks that someone having their property taken my those in power could only happen in Democracy and that isn't even getting into what else he said wrong XD

Again, it's hard to give the full context without spoiling things to come, but I'd note that Elliot never had any belief that undemocratic governments would be less inclined to take property. He's just of the belief that democratic governments are just a more polite form of tyranny. His argument isn't that "democracy is worse than other forms of government," it's more that "democracy is no better than other forms of government." It's not entirely defensible even within the history he knows, but it does make more sense there than it does in our history.

Good luck!

It's a proud sentiment; whether it will turn out to be an accurate prediction is harder to say yet. :grin:

Zam · Aug 3, 2019

Jared said:
I'd also note that in many times in OTL, when people speak of democracy they talk as if it's synonymous with "liberal democracy." That isn't always the case even in OTL, and it's even less so ITTL.

This was extremely interesting and insightful, thanks for sharing!

Jared said:
Again, it's hard to give the full context without spoiling things to come, but I'd note that Elliot never had any belief that undemocratic governments would be less inclined to take property. He's just of the belief that democratic governments are just a more polite form of tyranny. His argument isn't that "democracy is worse than other forms of government," it's more that "democracy is no better than other forms of government." It's not entirely defensible even within the history he knows, but it does make more sense there than it does in our history.

I see, with that and the other context that does explain a lot.

Kinda makes me also think about how the USA, Australia ETC said "we are a free democracy' then denied tons of people tie right to vote and or even in the modern day how the consequences of colonialism, continued prejudice and more stymie the voices of many.

Jared said:
It's a proud sentiment; whether it will turn out to be an accurate prediction is harder to say yet.

I hope it does

yaitz331 · Aug 4, 2019

Jared said:
"This much I desire to accomplish in my life: to ride my horse into the sea to north and east and south, and know that I have brought harmony to all the lands through which I have ridden."
- The Hunter

OoOoOoOo foreshadowing OoOoOoOo

Jared · Aug 9, 2019

Lands of Red and Gold #90: A Matter of Institutions

"Tjibarri lie in only two ways: everything they say, and everything they do."
- Gutjanal saying

--

The arrival of the Raw Men, and the wondrous and advanced goods they brought, gave a clear lesson to all Aururians who encountered them. Here, it was plain, were a foreign people whose marvellous goods would be wondrous to acquire. Raw Men weapons were desirable almost everywhere, and their luxury goods were also keenly sought-after in most regions.

Some Aururians took this realisation further: obtaining Raw Men goods was useful, but obtaining the knowledge to produce those goods themselves would be even more beneficial.

Some Aururian societies which came to this conclusion sought to apply it only in relatively limited ways. That is, they sought to gain knowledge of particular technologies, most notably weapons and domesticated animals. Even where they tried to acquire broader realms of knowledge, they were still quite focused in their aims. For example, the Atjuntja ironsmiths were successful (by 1645) in persuading the Dutch to provide some metallurgists to teach about blast furnaces and related ironworking technology.

A few Aururian societies adopted a broader approach. They sought to acquire not just particular Raw Men goods and technologies, but a wider spectrum of knowledge and European institutions. For different reasons, the Five Rivers states (particularly Tjibarr) and the Nuttana were both well-placed to adopt their own forms of European institutions and technologies. Both these societies were inspired in part by the recognition that in specific areas, they had knowledge better than the Raw Men.

In the Five Rivers, the greatest recognition came from their physicians. Five Rivers physicians had an ancient tradition of medical diagnosis and a system of peer review which encouraged them to pass judgement on their fellows' practices. This tradition had its own misconceptions, but it was free of some mistaken beliefs found in European medical practices. Five Rivers physicians quickly concluded that in several respects Raw Men medicine was inferior to their own practices. In particular, they viewed European doctors has having a disturbing fixation with bleeding men who were already ill or wounded. Attempts to use this practice on Tjibarri patients led to it being thoroughly condemned by the reviewing physicians. This realisation in turn led to Five Rivers physicians making a critical examination of new European knowledge: they did not simply adopt European practices or technologies directly, but they reviewed what was available and decided what they wanted.

For the Nangu and their Nuttana successors, a similar realisation came from navigational technology. The Nangu had adopted Polynesian navigational techniques via the Maori, and added some shipbuilding refinements of their own. Thus, they had access to an independent navigational tradition to Europeans. Nangu sailors who met the Raw Men quickly realised that despite Europeans' ability to sail across vast distances, in some respects their technology was notably inferior. This was manifested in some simple ways such as the Nangu technique (borrowed directly from the Maori) of reading the waves to identify when a shore was near and the best places to change direction while sailing. Visiting Europeans could not match this. But the most notable examples were when visiting Dutch sailors were trapped on the Island because they could not reliably sail against the prevailing wind. This meant that the Dutch vessels could not make a timely return west back to the Atjuntja realm, while Nangu ships that used Polynesian-inspired tacking technology could undertake the westward voyage even when the winds were not favourable.

In these circumstances, people from both Five Rivers and Nuttana societies drew a clear conclusion: the gap between them and the Raw Men was vast, but not impossible to bridge. They concluded that just as they had things which they could teach the Raw Men, so they in turn were capable of following necessary lessons to acquire that knowledge the Raw Men possessed. And in their own ways, both of them set about gaining this knowledge.

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The Five Rivers societies were the oldest agricultural societies on the continent. This meant in turn that they had a long history of technological development and expanding their own knowledge base, independent of Old World models. As part of this, they had their own forms of educational institutions for preserving and extending knowledge. They did not have libraries or universities on the same scale or structure as in Europe. However, they had predecessor social institutions of study such as temples and guild schools, and were at a socio-political level where they could quickly grasp the benefit of developing these further.

Tjibarr became the first Five Rivers state to put this into practice. This process began with convocations of physicians which gathered to treat the outbreak of Old World diseases. The first great convocation was conducted at Tapiwal [Robinvale] in 1646, to study the outbreak of epidemic typhus in the Five Rivers. This convocation endured for so long and produced so much argument that one of the attending physicians nicknamed it "the place of great disputation" – or, in the Gunnagal language, Tjagarr Panipat [see post #75].

The appellation endured. The same name was applied to future gatherings of physicians over the next two decades, as they met to study and discuss treatments of other diseases both foreign and domestic. These assemblages included the traditional Five Rivers' medical practice of having five-man panels pass judgement on another physician's treatment of the diseases. They were also supplemented by the collection of medical treatises, both locally written and those imported from Europe, whether available in translation or only in European languages. The physicians studied these texts as part of their discussions.

The convocations were held at several locations over the next two decades, and sometimes in the other Five Rivers states of Gutjanal and Yigutji. In 1666, the physicians' conclaves received a permanent residence in Tapiwal. This happened when a wealthy Tjibarri land controller [noble] named Lopitja the White donated his family's Tapiwal home to serve as a library and meeting hall for physicians. He supported this new institution by providing copies of a wide range of European texts that his family had acquired over the previous few decades. Lopitja's donation turned the Tjagarr Panipat into a permanent gathering that became Aururia's first institution of higher learning.

The Tjagarr Panipat thus began life as an institution for the study of medicine, among already accredited physicians. Due to its large collection of reference materials, it quickly evolved into an institution for teaching new physicians. At first, this followed the traditional physicians' model: a student began as an "apprentice" with one physician, progressed to an "initiate" with another physician, and would be declared "accredited" when three other physicians deemed the initiate worthy to progress to a full physician.

However, in time the physicians expanded their knowledge of similar institutions, and they also now found themselves in a situation where each student was in proximity to many experienced physicians. So this evolved into a system where several accredited physicians taught groups of students about different aspects of medicine, generally in those areas where each physician was recognised as being particularly skilled.

In 1682, senior Tjibarri physicians reached an agreement that they would only allow a student to progress through each grade of membership if they had studied at the Tjagarr Panipat. Physicians in Gutjanal and Yigutji were not so strict in their standards, but studying at the Tjagarr Panipat became an excellent way to build prestige for student physicians from anywhere in the Five Rivers. In 1689, this progression of grades (apprentice, initiate, accredited) became standardised in an official roll maintained at the Tjagarr Panipat. Admission onto the different stages of this roll became the Tjibarri equivalent of university degrees.

The Panipat – or so its name was usually shortened – was created to study medicine. However, the European texts provided by Lopitja and other factional sponsors covered a wide variety of subjects. This meant that the great library of the Panipat attracted would-be students in other fields. Those non-medical students came to learn about other European technologies. In time, they also came to discuss these new technologies with other like-minded students who also gathered at the Panipat. The factional sponsors encouraged this form of attendance, since they were also interested in some of these other fields of knowledge.

By a combination of gifts and pressure, the Panipat's governing council was persuaded to recognise two other disciplines as worthy of study at the institution. The first was a discipline which they called Gambirra. This word can be loosely translated as "engineering", but which in the Gunnagal language also refers to ironworking, silver and gold smithing, and other metal working. At the Panipat, the study of Gambirra included all aspects of incorporating Raw Men metallurgy and engineering.

The second discipline was Maranoa; a word which can be approximately translated as "chemistry", but again, the Gunnagal term is broader. Maranoa includes the study of any material collected from plants and animals, which includes the processes of obtaining that material, and thus had some overlap with biology.

This new discipline begun in part by the physicians themselves, since they had begun trying to understand the foreign products referred to in Raw Men medical texts. Under factional encouragement, study of Maranoa expanded to include applications of indigenous products such as incense, dyes, resins and perfumes. It also included wider use of distillation, a technology which in the pre-Houtmanian era had been kept a guild secret amongst physicians and perfume makers. This secret was broken thanks to European knowledge of distillation. So further study included some of the more practical applications of distillation, most notably in methods for maintaining positive spirits among both students and teachers.

Maranoa incorporated study of the most highly desired of all European commodities: gunpowder. However, this was largely a source of frustration to Tjibarri chemists. They had sufficient access to Raw Men texts to know the approximate proportions for gunpowder, but actually producing workable quantities was another matter entirely.

A couple of chemists succeeded in making small quantities of gunpowder-like substances. However, they had severe problems with both purity and scale of production. Producing charcoal was straightforward to a society which had been practicing coppicing for millennia, but obtaining sulphur and saltpetre was much more difficult. Meaningful quantities of sulphur were difficult to obtain. With saltpetre there were difficulties both in obtaining the product and in ensuring purity of what they found. So for a long time, Tjibarri chemists were unable to produce gunpowder except as a curiosity.

From its inception, the Tjagarr Panipat applied strict admission standards for both students and teachers. Five Rivers physicians had long followed rigid methods regarding those whom they would accept as apprentices, largely because their own professional reputations could be affected by those whom they chose as students. As the Panipat evolved into the core institute for Tjibarri medicine, admission became a general process rather than relying on the discretion of individual physicians. The governing council of the Panipat set high merit standards for admission to the roll; this involved detailed oral questioning, and often practical demonstrations of skill.

When the Panipat expanded to include scholars of other disciplines, similar strict benchmarks were established for admission in any capacity. Panipat scholars prided themselves on resisting all outside pressure about who was suitable to study at their institution. Occasional exceptions were known for less capable students who were favoured by a particularly influential factional sponsor – usually involving some expansion of facilities or resources. But on the whole, the institution maintained its extremely high admission standards.

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Where Five Rivers societies developed strong educational institutions, the Nangu and their Nuttana successors adopted strong commercial institutions. The Nangu had been strongly commerce-focused long before contact with the Raw Men; they were the premier traders of pre-Houtmanian Aururia. When European contact made them aware of the broader world, the Nangu were keen to expand their trade networks wherever they saw the chance for profit. Indeed, when they encountered European and Asian goods which were demonstrably superior to local commodities, the Nangu were as keen to go visiting to trade for them as Europeans had been in earlier centuries when learning to navigate to Asia in pursuit of spices.

The Nangu became explorers and traders on a wider scale. They took advantage of European charts or geographical knowledge when it was available, or simply ventured into the unknown when they had no other alternatives. The earliest major examples were the three great voyages of Werringi the Bold (later known as Kumgatu): the first circumnavigation of Aururia (1630-31), the first Aururian voyage to Java (1635-6), and the first Aururian voyage to the Philippines and Okinawa (1643).

As part of his voyages, Werringi pioneered two things which would form much of his legacy. Inspired in part by knowledge of the Dutch East India Company, Werringi helped to negotiate the formation of a great Nangu trading association – nuttana, in their language – for cooperative ventures outside of Aururia. He also established a resupply station at Wujal [Cooktown, Queensland] that would grow into the first of the Nuttana city-states.

The Nangu homeland on the Island, and in turn their entire commercial empire, relied on imported food to prosper. With the plagues and major warfare in the Seven Sisters [Eyre Peninsula], most Nangu had to leave the Island or starve. The largest group of those exiles ended up in the thriving Nuttana lands. From there, they set about expanding on Werringi's discoveries and building a new commercial empire.

Improvements in Nangu shipbuilding had begun even before the Nuttana was founded. Indeed, part of the motivation for Werringi's second exploration voyage had been to take advantage of the capabilities of the new ships designed after seeing European examples. Wherever they could, the Nuttana continued to take advantage of opportunities to sail and trade further. They continued to improve their indigenous ship-building tradition, developing larger ships and better navigation. For the most part, they progressed by their own efforts. The only major European contributions were from some early acquisition of charts and tales, the introduction of the compass, and the spread of paper that permitted more convenient chart-making and other navigational record-keeping.

The development of better ships allowed much greater Nuttana exploration. The main part of this exploration was local. The Nuttana began a vigorous exploration and (where possible) establishment of trade contact with coastal societies in northern Aururia, New Guinea and elsewhere in Melanesia, Aotearoa, and nearby parts of Polynesia such as Tonga and Samoa.

Some of this exploration and trade spread much further. Since Werringi's third voyage, the Nuttana were one of the few societies permitted to trade with Japan, via the subject kingdom of the Ryukyus. This trade was strictly limited and mostly on Japanese terms; the Nuttana bought mainly muskets and sold mainly jeeree [Aururian lemon tea], which had become a desired commodity in the upper echelons of Japanese society. In the 1660s, the beginning of the Anglo-Dutch Wars meant that those countries' trading companies were much less capable of preventing trade competition from other powers, and the Nuttana took advantage of this to expand their exploration and trading contacts westward into India.

The greatest testament of Nuttana exploration during this period came from the accomplishments of Korowal the Navigator. In 1683, he led the first Nuttana expedition to circumnavigate the southern hemisphere. He led his ships on the circumpolar route that followed the strong winds of the Roaring Forties, visiting all three of the great capes along the way (Cape Horn, the Cape of Good Hope, and Cape Leeuwin) before returning home to Wujal.

The Old World plagues affected the Nuttana, naturally, but they maintained their population much better than any other Aururian society. Partly this was because their geographic isolation allowed them to make much more effective use of quarantine. Partly this was because many Nuttana had caught the plagues while on trading voyages to the Old World, and so were able to care for the sick during the epidemics. Mostly, though, it was because the Nuttana had built up systems of recruiting labour, voluntary and otherwise, that allowed them to maintain an effective labour force despite the plagues.

Between the 1640s and the 1680s, the Nuttana established a wide-scale commercial empire (and, partly, colonial empire) across much of the Western Pacific. The biggest component of the trading network was in slaves/indentured labourers, and the commodities produced by them. For the Nangu descendants who formed the core of the Nuttana were mostly non-agricultural specialists: shipbuilders, craftsmen, sailors, and traders. The early Nuttana had obtained food by recruiting Kiyungu from the south on five-year terms to work as farmers inland from Wujal. Many of those Kiyungu remained as free farmers afterwards, and in their heritage the Nuttana were almost as much Kiyungu as they were Nangu.

With the population collapse of the plagues, and with desired expansion into new products, the supply of Kiyungu labourers was not sufficient for Nuttana demand. So they turned to new sources for recruiting indentured labourers and, eventually, slaves. Their preferred early recruits were Motuans [Papuans], who were familiar with growing sugar, and who were mostly immune to Old World diseases. These were supplemented by peoples from Melanesia and Polynesia, particularly the Solomon Islands and Kanakee [New Caledonia]. Sometimes these labourers were willingly recruited for a term of years, but sometimes they were made slaves by their own people; chiefs were keen to obtain Nuttana goods, but often had few commodities other than people to offer in exchange.

The largest source of slaves, though, came from Aotearoa. The large population and endemic warfare of the Land of the Long White Cloud meant that there was a large supply of slaves available, to those who had commodities which the Maori wanted in exchange. The Nuttana grew sugar in abundance, and when they came to Aotearoa, they often sold the sugar in exchange for slaves who would in turn produce more.

In keeping with Maori practice, most of these slaves were male; female slaves were mostly kept in the home kingdom. The Nuttana did not permit slaves to marry except to other slaves, believing that a marriage between slave and free would bring disharmony. So while Maori made up a large percentage of the Nuttana population in any given year, few of those enslaved Maori would leave descendants.

In their homeland in north-eastern Aururia, the Nuttana used slaves to grow large amounts of sugar, and smaller quantities of jeeree and spices. The sugar was traded across Aotearoa and southern and eastern Aururia. The jeeree was traded into the East Indies, the Ryukyus, and sometimes further afield into India and China; the spices were traded across all of those regions as well as into Melanesia. They sold some iron tools into Motua [New Guinea], and to a lesser degree elsewhere in Melanesia and Polynesia. From Motua they bought some sugar as well, together with bird of paradise feathers and other minor commodities, occasionally food such as sago, but often they bought people. From the rest of Melanesia, they traded for coconuts which became a delicacy in the Nuttana-city states, but the main commodity they purchased was people. The Nuttana sold sugar and muskets further south into Aururia, with the main products they received in exchange being larger supplies of spices and jeeree which they would on-sell into Asia, and sometimes gold when they went far enough south to the Yadji realm and the Cider Isle (Tasmania). In Aotearoa they sold sugar and muskets, and bought rope and textiles of harakeke [New Zealand flax], as well as a large supply of slaves. From India they brought cotton textiles, gunpowder, and some manufactured goods; from China they bought silk and other luxury goods such as porcelain.

The expansion of the Nuttana trading network brought with it an expansion in influence and informal colonialism. Their Nangu predecessors had developed colonial outposts and in some cases economic hegemony over much of southern Aururia; the Nuttana did the same across much of their new trading network. The Nuttana did not claim formal control over other territories, partly because they were wary of angering the Raw Men too much, and partly in keeping with the ancient Nangu tradition of informal influence. But they established effective client states in some of the northerly Kiyungu city-states such as Quamba [Mackay], and the kingdom of Ngutti [Yamba] that had been carved out of Daluming during the civil war there, and in parts of Melanesia. In Aotearoa, they did not establish client states in the same way, but wielded some influence over the Plirite kingdoms which fought against their traditionalist or French-backed rivals.

The expansion of their trade network, and particularly trade with Europeans and Japan, led the Nuttana to develop new commercial institutions. An early form of this was their development of the Nuttana trading association itself, which was based on the then-limited Nangu understanding of joint-stock European trading companies. With their increasing commercial links and far-flung trade outposts, the Nuttana were quick to take up or adopt other foreign institutions to suit their needs.

The Nuttana were among the first Aururian societies to adopt coinage. They gained knowledge of the principles from European inspiration, and used bullion obtained from their own trade with the Cider Isle and the Yadji. Coinage greatly facilitated trade within the internal Nuttana economy.

Record-keeping had always been an essential part of Nangu commerce, but their methods became much more sophisticated. In large part this was due to knowledge of paper-making, which allowed them to keep much more extensive records. Over time, and thanks to numerous enquiries by inquisitive Nangu, the Nuttana learned about Arabic numerals and European accounting systems, including double-entry bookkeeping. This permitted much more accurate commercial records, and so this, too, facilitated the expansion of Nuttana trade.

In some instances, the Nuttana did not adopt European institutions even when they became familiar with them. For instance, at first the Nuttana had a limited understanding of joint-stock companies, and thus formed their own trading association. However, when they learned more about the European form, they still did not adopt it. The Nuttana had developed their own system of profit-sharing from their trading voyages, where a set percentage of a vessel's profits went to its crew, and another set percentage to the owning bloodline, while the rest was divided amongst the other five Nuttana bloodlines in specified proportions. As their economy expanded, the Nuttana developed their own system of shared equity and transfer of trading rights or profits between individuals and bloodlines, but they did not adopt any direct equivalent to joint stock companies.

The expansion of equity and profit-sharing systems in turn became part of the broader Nuttana legal revolution. In this case, they were only indirectly inspired by European contact, and more precisely by trading disputes. Other inspiration came from managing the different customs and practices of the other peoples (especially Kiyungu) who were being incorporated into Nuttana society.

Their Nangu predecessors had relied mainly on sworn agreements, with disputes being either mediated by honoured priests or referred to their Council. Such practices became impractical with so many different peoples and customers. Being Plirite they had a keen interest in orderly conduct and resolution of disputes, and so a new field emerging in codifying contracts and other forms of law. Plirite priests developed broader roles as jurists and were heavily involved in developing the new legal codes, including those regarding slavery. The Nuttana legal system had a heavy emphasis on contract law, with harsh penalties for breach of faith or failure to deliver on contract.

Some of the new institutions which the Nuttana developed were industrial, not commercial. From the Javanese and then the Indians, they acquired technology for processing sugar cane: mills for grinding and crushing the sugar cane, then boiling the juice to produce the gravelly sugar that was the foundation of Nuttana wealth. From their contact with China and the tea produced there, the Nuttana were inspired to try new forms of processing jeeree. They developed new flavours by allowing the leaves to fully ferment in a similar manner to the production of Chinese black tea. The new forms of jeeree had both stronger flavours and preserved better than traditional jeeree, which added to the export potential of the crop.

The Nuttana's new institutions brought them increasing wealth, despite the ongoing problems of Old World plagues. Yet these institutions did not eliminate the threat from foreign powers; in some ways, this made them a more attractive target.

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"Trade involves a constant struggle in peace and wars between the countries of Europe as to who carries off the greatest amount. The Dutch, the English and the French are the main combatants in this struggle."
- Jean-Baptiste Colbert, memoir to King Louis XIII of France, 1662

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Thoughts?

The Sandman · Aug 9, 2019

Surprised that emu guano isn't an adequate saltpeter source for at least some degree of gunpowder manufacture; at the very least enough to keep a small number of musketeers and cannons supplied.

Also, once the guano-saltpeter connection is established, the Nuttana probably grab Nauru and start selling guano throughout Oceania for gunpowder manufacture.

I assume that over in the Atjuntja lands, the local astrologers have already started purchasing telescopes?

I also wonder what the chances are of any of the Tjibarri physicians making the connection between the tiny lifeforms only visible through microscopes and people getting sick earlier than Europe did IOTL? I don't recall if they've already made the connection between cleaning surgical tools and patients dying less frequently, but just developing the linkage "animalcules eat stuff we're made from and make us sick -> animalcules can move between people in fluids or on objects -> boiling water or very strong alcohol kills animalcules -> using boiling water to clean our tools and alcohol to clean our hands keeps us from transferring them between patients" would be a huge deal.

Zam · Aug 9, 2019

A really solid chapter, kudos!

I seriously relished in the wide variety of details and point for point summary of developments, each one feeling like a mini story in their own right.

I also honestly enjoyed seeing not only some positive impacts from all this, but one's that were self determined, showing agency and intelligence, not to say there's been nothing like that before, I just enjoyed it, made for a pleasant read.

The slavery stuff was naturally incredibly depressing. However I adored the Panipat and its development, that was brilliantly done, and the details on the issue of making gun powder, the perfume aside and the distinct sailing styles were great!

Jared · Aug 11, 2019

The Sandman said:
Surprised that emu guano isn't an adequate saltpeter source for at least some degree of gunpowder manufacture; at the very least enough to keep a small number of musketeers and cannons supplied.

Also, once the guano-saltpeter connection is established, the Nuttana probably grab Nauru and start selling guano throughout Oceania for gunpowder manufacture.

Emu guano can be used for saltpetre manufacture reasonably well if done right. The problems are twofold:
(1) Learning how to make saltpetre on a large scale is actually quite a difficult, cumbersome process (as shown by the example a few chapters back where a Yadji-captured master cannoneer spent years trying to get the saltpetre right, and not having much luck); and
(2) Using emu guano as a base needs some variations in process to that which is more familiar to Europeans or Asians, so even importing some experts to teach the process in (1) doesn't completely solve the problem.

Eventually some Aururians will figure out the process, but it's not instantaneous. Even whenthey figure it out, importing saltpetre from India will be significantly cheaper than local manufacturing, as it was historically in Europe. (From memory, French local production of saltpetre was four times more expensive than saltpetre imported from India).

Once someone notices the guano islands such as Nauru, of course, things may change.

I assume that over in the Atjuntja lands, the local astrologers have already started purchasing telescopes?

Oh, yes. Very much yes.

I also wonder what the chances are of any of the Tjibarri physicians making the connection between the tiny lifeforms only visible through microscopes and people getting sick earlier than Europe did IOTL? I don't recall if they've already made the connection between cleaning surgical tools and patients dying less frequently, but just developing the linkage "animalcules eat stuff we're made from and make us sick -> animalcules can move between people in fluids or on objects -> boiling water or very strong alcohol kills animalcules -> using boiling water to clean our tools and alcohol to clean our hands keeps us from transferring them between patients" would be a huge deal.

Germ theory is quite a conceptual leap, given how hard it was to come up in OTL. Possibly the reason was that tiny lifeforms were known to be everywhere all the time, and yet people weren't getting sick all the time, and so it wasn't a leap that was made? (A bit like the mosquito vector for malaria; hard to spot because mosquito bites happened all the time, but most of the time they didn't bring malaria). Whatever the reason, it's not going to come up constantly.

That said, if the Tjibarri physicians remain around as a viable occupation, they would probably come up with it a bit quicker than Europeans, given their stronger tradition of practical experimentation.

Zam said:
I seriously relished in the wide variety of details and point for point summary of developments, each one feeling like a mini story in their own right.

I also honestly enjoyed seeing not only some positive impacts from all this, but one's that were self determined, showing agency and intelligence, not to say there's been nothing like that before, I just enjoyed it, made for a pleasant read.

Thanks; glad you liked it.

Jared · Aug 16, 2019

Lands of Red and Gold #91: Answers for Gunya

"It is the cause, and not the death, that makes the martyr."
- Tjewarra ("strong heart"), Atjuntja activist

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From a letter that arrived in London on 29 April 1649:

To His Majesty Charles the Second, King of England, France, Scotland and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, from your brother Gunya Yadji, Regent of the Never-Born God, Sovereign of Durigal, King of Wyelangta, Wyelidja, Wyenambul and Wyeyangeree [1]: May the days of your reign be long and prosperous. May you know good fortune and pleasant company through all the days of your life.

Word has come to me from your servants who are permitted trade with Durigal. They speak of the church that you lead, as the supreme worldly representative of your Divine, that you choose the bishops that guide your church in your stead, and that as Defender of the Faith you are the final arbiter on all decisions involving the church. They speak that much as the men of the Regency do, your church too knows the truth that the end of times will come, and that the world must be made ready for this.

I ask that you choose from among your bishops a man strong of wisdom and understanding of the royal bulwark of faith, and send him to Durigal in your stead, that he may give me more answers about your church and its conduct.

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While not a pious man himself, Gunya Yadji knew that much of his royal authority stemmed from the fervent religious beliefs of his subjects. They believed in the great struggle between the good Neverborn, the god within the earth, and the evil Firstborn, the Lord of Night, the treacherous deity in the sky. The Regent drew his authority, even his usual royal title, from that religious claim.

In most circumstances, these beliefs strengthened the authority of the royal family. Unfortunately, they came with a significant drawback: a large number of often-turbulent priests. Priests were both indispensable and infuriating to the Yadji rulers. Yadji communities were organised collectively, with a form of central planning and communal allocation of resources. The local priest-bureaucrats were the effective administrators of this system, following the broad dictates of the Regent's policies, but coordinating all local activities. Those priests were regularly rotated between towns or communities to prevent them building up a local power base.

In the capital itself, Kirunmara [Terang], the priests were usually much more turbulent. Senior priests in Kirunmara were traditionally appointed into roles for life, and usually accumulated a great deal of power. In part, this was based on simple necessity. Coordinating the economy of the Empire required a specialised, talented corps of administrators who followed the Regent's will. Priests were generally more reliable in this role than quarrelsome princes. But part of this was simple religious authority. Priests claimed considerable status, and were often capable of influencing a weaker Regent to follow their lead. In times of unclear succession, they could also play a considerable role in determining the next Regent.

Nowhere were these priests more turbulent than during the events of what the Yadji of the time called the Year of the Twisted Serpent; that is, their civil war of 1629-1638 [2]. The assassination of the mad Regent Boringa Yadji led to a disputed succession between Gunya Yadji and his cousin Bailgu. Bailgu had a greater reputation for piety, and was so favoured by more of the priests. Gunya had a better military reputation, and was favoured by more, (though by no means all) of the other princes.

The succession question was ultimately settled on the battlefield, where Gunya triumphed. During the war, however, he faced ongoing problems with priests who interfered with his authority over those lands he ruled, sometimes overtly, sometimes just by inaction. Being by nature disinclined to tolerate opposition, Gunya had many of the local priests killed where they defied his authority, although the senior priests in the capital were spared.

With the war won, Gunya found that his priestly problems had not been resolved. He still needed new priests to administer the empire's planned economy. Quite simply, no alternative existed to the priest-bureaucrats for effective administration of the state. So while he had temporarily broken them during the civil war, the priests returned to power afterward. Worse, so did their discontent with his rule. Opposition was much less blatant now that he had been crowned Regent. Yet every plague, or outbreak of flood or fire, led to priestly murmurings about how the Regent had displeased the Neverborn with his lack of piety.

After trade relations with England opened in 1642, word gradually spread about the faith of the Raw Men. Details were scant at first; the English East India Company sent soldiers, not missionaries. But some people asked questions, and in time tales began to filter through to Kirunmara. Gunya Yadji heard about these tales mostly in the context of his senior priests' dissatisfaction with them; naturally, this meant that he looked more sympathetically upon the Raw Men's faith.

In time, war returned between Tjibarr and the Yadji Empire [3]. European mercenaries fought in that struggle, led by Prince Rupert of the Rhine. Gunya did not trouble himself to ask mercenaries about their religion; when he spoke to Prince Rupert, he had other matters on his mind, usually about stopping the prince from plundering conquered lands. But this war also brought Dutch raids onto Yadji territory, and other disputes over commerce that needed to be resolved. This meant that Gunya Yadji periodically had EIC representatives brought to Kirunmara to discuss these matters. While those representatives were present, he took the opportunity to ask occasional questions about their religion.

Gunya's religious questions did not, in fact, usually touch on matters of doctrine. In truth, those concerned him very little. He asked rather more about how the Church of England was administered, and its interactions with the monarchy. The cultural gap meant that Gunya did not fully appreciate much of what he was told, and the message he heard was often not one which the Christians to whom he spoke would have wanted him to conclude.

Gunya heard, and approved, of how Henry VIII had broken with Rome and created a new church when the Pope refused to sanction his view of faith. He heard how in earlier times no less a figure than the head of the Church of England (or so he understood it), the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas à Becket, had been murdered on the orders of the king. Gunya also heard how the King of England was Defender of the Faith, and he personally appointed all of the bishops of the Church of England; in contrast to Gunya's own religion, where in practice most religious appointments were carried out by the senior priests.

When he heard enough of these matters, Gunya decided to invite the English king to send a senior bishop to Kirunmara, so that he might hear for himself more about these matters of faith.

--

Extracts from the personal correspondence of William Sancroft, a Cambridge Fellow chosen to be among the clerical party sent to support Dr Ralph Brownrigg, Bishop of Exeter, on his mission to Durigal.

From a letter to the Dean of St. Paul's, after receiving word that his name was being considered among those for inclusion in the party to Aururia:

"I have lately offered up to God the first fruits of that calling which I intend: and if, through your prayers and God's blessing on my endeavours, I may become an instrument in any measure fitted to bear his name before his people, abroad in the Land of Gold or any most obscure corner of the world, or before his people in England, it shall be my joy and the crown of my rejoicing in the Lord. I am persuaded that for this end I was sent into the world; and therefore, if God lends me life and abilities, I shall be willing to spend myself and be spent upon the work.

If it not be done, I pray, Sir, think not of me before you determine, for that nobody knows of it, I weigh not; for I desire more a thousand times to approve myself to God and my own conscience than to all the world beside."

*

From a letter from Mr Sancroft to his father, inquiring after his previous letter's request for approval of his accepting a commission to Aururia:

"Sir,

I wrote to you by Rogers concerning a business of some moment. I doubt not that you have received my letter, and I expect every hour an answer. But having heard now something more concerning it, I thought it my duty to impart it. Mr. Boucher had before given me some intimations of the nature of the place, which I now understand more fully by a letter from himself. 'Tis a rich merchant in London, a friend of his, that would send his son over beyond sea; and Mr. B. hath recounted a tale of a land abundant in gold but deprived of God, ripe to be called to Christendom: a copy of this letter I enclose.

"I was this morning with my Lord of Exeter, and acquainted him with it, who hath enjoined me to attend upon him in the country. I shall have his counsel and direction, and, which is more, his prayers; I have already a promise from him often reiterated, that, if it can be in his power to do me a kindness, he will not forget me..."

*

From a letter to Dr Holdsworth, Bishop of Bath and Wells, expressing his frustration with his own and others' conduct in Aururia:

"Much honoured sir,

I have formerly troubled you with my desires, and they met acceptance from you. I hope I may now take leave to sigh out my griefs before you, and pour my sorrow into your bosom. You have not thought good, as yet, to give a check to my former impertinencies, and so I dare be confident, your goodness will be a sanctuary for this offence too, which yet, if it must be called so, is no other than an offence of love, or if that be too bold a word, of deepest regard and respect to you.

I live now in a realm in which to speak freely is dangerous, imó nec gemere tuto licet; faces are scanned, and looks are construed, and gestures are made to confess something which may undo the actor; and though the proclamation in this distant realm may be of the name liberty, as the heathens understand it, yet within there is nothing but perfect slavery, worse than Russian.

Woe worth a heart then oppressed with grief in such a conjuncture of time as this. Fears and complaints, you know, are the only kindly and gentle evaporations of burthened spirits, and if we must be bereaved of this sad comfort too, what else is left to us but either to whisper our griefs to one another, or else to sit down and sink under the burthen of them.

I live in times that have, of late, been fatal in abating of heads: the proud Yadji monarch honours the sanctity of those brought with my lord of Exeter, but beheads at a blow other Englishmen who have given offence; my lord's conduct to those under sanctity brings not beheading at a blow, but 'tis an experiment in the mastery of cruelty. Harsh affliction and punitive correction of error marks greater station amongst these heathens, and a small matter shall prevail in cruelty when it is marked by the Yadji and reported to my lord. Nor need we voluntarily act beyond our station, for to mark his own station is required of my lord to better bring the heathen monarch into the Lord's fold; to refuse his conduct could be to thwart the hand of God.

I can at least look up through this mist and see the hand of my God holding the scourge that lashes, and with this thought I am able to silence all of the mutinies of boisterous passions, and to charm them into perfect calm. Sir, you will pardon this disjointed piece, it is the production of a disquieted mind, and no wonder if the child resembles its parent; my sorrow, as yet, breaks forth only in abrupt sighs and broken sobs."

--

To Ralph Brownrigg, Bishop of Exeter, the invitation to the heathen Land of Gold offered what seemed a divine opportunity. Here was the chance to create a new Constantine, the prospect of a top-down conversion that would bring Christianity to an entire realm of heathens. Most of the clerics he brought with him to Aururia were of similar mind.

The reality, alas, proved to be far from their expectations. Gunya Yadji met with the Bishop personally, at least, and in what Gunya at least believed was a sign of great clemency, refrained from ordering the execution of another priest who tried to speak directly to the Regent. The Bishop tried to speak of Christ's sacrifice for all men, of the Gospel that carried his words, and of other articles of the Christian creed. He tried to show Gunya the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. Gunya listened politely, but his questions in answer were much more about bishops, appointments, and church hierarchies than the words of the Lord.

The Bishop persisted in his efforts, of course. He endeavoured to understand the Yadji mindset, seeking insights from his interpreters, and holding conversations with Yadji priests. He quickly realised the punitive Yadji approach to any social misdemeanours – which could often have fatal results if a higher-status Yadji felt offended. He gave an explanation to Gunya that he wanted to punish all transgressors personally, and Gunya gave appropriate instructions to his subjects to refer all grievances to the Bishop, and never take personal action. The Bishop adopted this approach to spare the lives of his fellow clerics, but to his disappointment many of them perceived him as having 'gone native' when he punished them on behalf of the offended Yadji.

Despite all the Bishop's careful efforts, he could not induce Gunya to anything resembling conversion. For Gunya's motivations were, in fact, much more pragmatic than the English clerics realised. He knew that any conversion could cause immense difficulties amongst his subjects, if not carried out correctly. For all of his apparent politeness when listening, Gunya quickly reached the conclusion that his most worthwhile endeavour would be to reform the Yadji religious hierarchy along English lines.

Gunya did allow some scope for a Christian presence in the Yadji Empire. He permitted a translation to be made of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. He allowed the permanent establishment of a small Church of England mission in Kirunmara, to advise the Regent and the royal family on spiritual matters. He forbade this mission from proselytising in the Empire, but sanctioned the English to practice Christianity within their own trading outposts. The Bishop and his fellow clerics thought this was a sign of genuine religious interest, when in truth Gunya simply wanted to keep options available if he ever decided to give more active support to Christianity.

From Gunya's perspective, however, the more promising outcome from the English clerical visit was his fuller understanding of their church structure. He proclaimed a major restructure of the Yadji priestly hierarchy. The core of this reform was the abolition of most senior priestly offices within Kirunmara itself, save only a handful of roles concerned with broad administrative planning and public religious rituals.

In their place, he established a new priestly rank, conveniently called bittop. Each bittop was responsible for a region of the Empire, and would oversee all of the planning and administrative functions for the communities within their regions. Thus, the centralised planning of the Yadji Empire was partially devolved into regional bittops, with only a much-streamlined central planning group kept within Kirunmara itself. Crucially, these bittops, and the four artbittops of the four provinces, were directly appointed by the monarch. In common with other regional priests, and unlike the previous senior priests of Kirunmara, the bittops were also rotated between regions every three to four years to prevent them building up any regional power base.

This reform was implemented over 1653-1658. It had scarcely been in place for two years before it faced the challenges of managing the Great Death.

--

Djargominda: "Sire, I protest. I cannot be removed from my office and turned into a wandering Bittop. Your predecessor appointed me First Watcher of the Dreams [a senior priestly role]. This post has always been held for life."
Gunya Yadji: "If you wish, that will become true."

--

[1] The rendition of the Yadji titles into English in this letter caused some translation difficulties, partly because the titles were not closely equivalent, but mostly because the translation was being done by a Yadji scribe translating terms into Nangu for a Nangu-speaking Englishman to then render into English. (Learning the Junditmara language was not usually attempted by Raw Men, because it was easy to make mistakes and a sword through the stomach often offends.)

The actual word translated "sovereign" – Pidjupuk – would be more accurately rendered as "emperor". However, in this era European monarchs reserved the term emperor for those who claimed it based on Roman origin, principally the Holy Roman Emperor, the Tsar of Russia, and the Ottoman Emperors. The translators used the more ambiguous word sovereign to avoid implying that the English monarch was inferior to the Yadji monarch.

The various land-related titles were also rendered somewhat inaccurately. The actual Yadji title is Pidjupuk nyu Durigal: Emperor of the Land of the Five Directions (Durigal). The Yadji divide their Land into four provinces: the Red Country (Wyelangta), the Lake Country (Wyelidja), the Golden Country (Wyenambul) and the White Country (Wyeyangeree) – see post #16. These are simply regions, with no separate kingly title for them. The Yadji scribe who translated the letter apparently used these terms to be seen as equivalent to what they understood as Charles II being king of several different lands – they had no concept of personal union, or that the King of France was simply a dormant claim.

[2] The Yadji use a form of the Gunnagal calendar, with years starting at the southern hemisphere's autumn equinox. The years themselves are named for the ruling Regent. Without a named Regent, therefore, they had to choose another name for the years of the civil war. They called it the Year of the Twisted Serpent, and it turned out to be longer than the average year.

[3] That is, the war variously called the Great Unpleasantness, Windi Bidwadjari (Bidwadjari's War), the Musket War, the Fever War, or Prince Rupert's War (1645-1650).

--

Thoughts?

Zam · Aug 17, 2019

Jared said:
Gunya's religious questions did not, in fact, usually touch on matters of doctrine. In truth, those concerned him very little. He asked rather more about how the Church of England was administered, and its interactions with the monarchy. The cultural gap meant that Gunya did not fully appreciate much of what he was told, and the message he heard was often not one which the Christians to whom he spoke would have wanted him to conclude.

I adored this chapter, I was getting scarred in the first segment, worried he was basically gonna invite religious colonialism but it turns out he's just trying to play everyone for politics, Gunya is such a craft bastard, I like him XD

The opening letters were interesting, the flowery language is lovely to read and I found the politics really engaging. Honestly the entire set up with Gunya quizzing people on religions and later even priests on it but solely looking at it from a political "Ooh neat" perspective was incredibly entertaining. Also him having to stop the prince from looting sounds like a full time job XD

The priests frustration understandable and well conveyed even if I was rooting for them to fail, and so you did a good job humanizing them and making them feel alive, along with shorting the distinct understandings or lack there-of between all the factions involved, with some neat political details as well.

Jared said:
Gunya Yadji: "If you wish, that will become true."

That line was great XD

Also very ominous lead out, thanks for your work!

Jared · Aug 29, 2019

Lands of Red and Gold #92: A Tale Of Two Lands

"Incens'd with indignation Satan stood
Unterrify'd, and like a comet burn'd
That fires the length of Ophiuchus huge
In th' arctic sky, and from his horrid hair
Shakes pestilence and war."
- John Milton, Paradise Lost

--

In one way or another, European contact changed life for everyone in Aururia. The tale of those changes was particularly marked in south-eastern Aururia, in the ancient heartland of indigenous agriculture and aquaculture. In the three states of Tjibarr, Gutjanal and Yigutji (collectively called the Five Rivers), and the fourth state which its inhabitants called Durigal, the Land of the Five Directions, but which to outsiders was most commonly known as the Yadji, after the name of its royal family.

Between them, these four states held a pre-European contact population of about 5 million people; approximately half of the agricultural population of the continent. Their societies had generally proven resilient to earlier plagues and, in the case of the Yadji, the first would-be European invasion. They endured the plagues, and continued their ancient pastime of fighting each other.

However, the Great Death [measles] marked the most severe blow which these states had ever faced. More than a quarter of their population was consumed by the pestilence, disrupting their societies far worse than any previous epidemics. They found themselves tested more severely than ever before...

--

In the lead-up to the Great Death, the Yadji state saw both productive reforms and significant challenges. The Regency was ruled by a class of priest-bureaucrats who both oversaw the religious justification for the Regent's rule, and administered the planning and coordination of resources in their local communities; the Yadji economy functioned in a form of central planning and shared resources, and the priests played a significant administrative role.

Inspired in part by the example of the Church of England, the Regent Gunya Yadji significantly reformed the religious hierarchy. He moved many priests from central planning roles in the capital Kirunmara [Terang] to newly-created regional roles as bittops, where they oversaw the administration of broader regions, rather than the previous practice of priests looking after only individual communities.

The other productive reform which happened during the 1650s was a massive expansion of sweet pepper production. This spice had proven immensely valuable in both Asia and Europe, and so the Regency's English trading partners greatly desired it. The Yadji planned economy allowed them to greatly increase sweet pepper production over the course of the decade, trading in exchange for ever greater volumes of English firearms, steel tools, textiles, and other goods.

Despite these gains, the Regency faced some challenges during this decade. Rebellions had hardly been unknown in Yadji realm, particularly in the eastern provinces, but this decade proved more than usually troublesome. Some subjects were inspired to revolt by a combination of increasing religious dissent, anger over highlander raids, belief that the Regency's armies had been exhausted in Bidwadjari's War, and arms and agents provocateur from the Dutch East India Company seeking to undermine their English rival.

The Kurnawal, in the farthermost east province that the Yadji called the White Country [1], were the first to revolt in 1653, but this was quickly quelled. A more serious revolt broke out in 1656-7, when the Kurnawal revolted again and were joined by the neighbouring Giratji. Several towns had to be besieged, and some sacked, before this rebellion was crushed.

Still, for all of these problems, the time of the Great Death made the volatile 1650s seem like a time of paradise.

The Great Death struck hard in the Regency, claiming a toll of about 27% of the remaining population. The immediate problems were predictable: mass death, psychological trauma of the survivors, social disruption, and competition over remaining resources.

The nature of the Yadji economy made the longer-term effects severe. The temples were responsible for coordinating the activities of their entire community, both the allocation of labour and collection, storage and distribution of resources. With so many priests killed during the Great Death, the Yadji command economy nearly disintegrated due to lack of planning and administration, and unrest amongst the traumatised communities. The recent institution of bittops ameliorated this lack of planning slightly, since a priest could be allocated or support provided from a local bittop rather than needing to send all the way to the capital for assistance. However, the sheer scale of the death toll meant that even the most capable bittops were overwhelmed.

The devastation of the Great Death also led to religious unrest. Or, more precisely, the disillusionment of many subject peoples with the Yadji religion, both in its overall worldview and in its application by local priests who relied on religious authority as part of their management of the community and economy. This did not immediately lead to major rebellion; with the bloody end of the last rebellions so fresh in memory, further revolts were initially limited to local unrest over particularly egregious or incompetent priests. But the dissatisfaction with the Yadji ruling religion grew ever stronger.

As the first hard years passed, the Yadji did what they could to rebuild their economy. New priests were appointed, some more devastated communities were abandoned entirely and their people relocated into more thriving centres, more marginal aquaculture was dismantled as the priests focused their efforts on the most productive activities. Sweet pepper production was largely curtailed; unlike some other Aururian states (such as the Atjuntja), the Regency found European trade goods to be convenient rather than required, and so left the resumption of spice exports until other affairs had been put in order.

While these efforts had some benefits, they were far from universally successful. Many of the new priests were inexperienced, and in some cases simply less competent, but appointed because there was no-one else available. In many communities, the replacement priests mismanaged the economy, and more ominously, were less adept at identifying and quelling discontent.

Inevitably, this meant that further revolts were only a matter of time.

--

Despite suffering a similar death toll to Durigal, the Five Rivers societies on the whole coped much better with the consequences of the Great Death. They suffered much disruption, as did everywhere in Aururia, but their economies and social order were more quickly restored to something resembling stability.

In part, this was due to the relative form of their economies. Where the Yadji had the most centrally planned, command-style economy on the continent, the Five Rivers states were much more decentralised. Tjibarr had its factions who competed vigorously with each other for economic and political gain; Yigutji and Gutjanal had no such formal systems of competition, but their aristocrats and mercantile classes were independent economic actors with relatively little central control. The decentralised economies of the Five Rivers were much less vulnerable to the loss of individual planners (i.e. priest-bureaucrats) and the survivors were better positioned to react to the changed circumstances of post-Great Death Aururia.

In part, the Five Rivers also fared better than Durigal because of the relative lack of subject peoples interested in revolt. The Land of the Five Directions had nearly half of its population of subject ethnicities, and many of those were still sullen imperial subjects. In the Five Rivers, the different ethnicities were more closely integrated into the political system, and revolt was relatively rare. Highlanders raided the eastern fringes of Gutjanal and Yigutji territory, and a few hunter-gatherer peoples displaced by the Great Death crossed from the desert into the western and northern fringes of Tjibarr and Yigutji lands. But most of the remaining Tjibarri subject peoples on the Copper Coast [2] were more wary of Yadji than Tjibarri rule, and so did not revolt. The one significant exception was the Abunjay people of the northwest, near Tanderra [Port Germein, SA], who were most distant from Yadji lands and so least concerned by them, but even their revolt was suppressed relatively easily.

The immediate social disruption of the Great Death was inevitably, tragically huge. In Tjibarr, the death toll included many senior aristocrats and other leading figures, although the relatively-new monarch Lyungong IV survived. In the Year of the Great Dying (1661), the Tjibarri monarchy took the unprecedented step of cancelling the annual football tournament, due to the death of so many players and administrators (to say nothing of spectators). But the football tournament resumed the following year; not even the pestilence could long quell Tjibarri football-fever.

The death toll and general disruption meant that the Five Rivers' production of kunduri was severely reduced for a handful of years. This supply shock had economic consequences that were felt around much of the world; the Dutch, English and French East India Companies had been supplying increasing amounts of the drug into both Europe and Asia. This led to a rise in tobacco prices elsewhere in the world, as the nearest substitute available. The most significant long-term consequence, though, came when the chaos cause by the pestilence, and the additional motivation from supply shortages, meant that the Dutch East India Company successfully smuggled out seedlings of kunduri trees from the Five Rivers, and began cultivation of them around the Cape, in what was the beginning of kunduri plantations in Africa. The Aururian monopoly on kunduri production was broken.

Economically, the collapse in population led to a severe restructure of what remained of their internal trade networks. The Five Rivers economies had long maintained trade links with broader Aururia, but the fundamental strength of their economies had always been internal trade. This trade relied on their reasonably extensive natural waterborne transportation net, with a few supplemental canals, primarily small-scale ones built as part of their aquaculture and that allowed connection to the main rivers. Bulk commodities were not usually transported long distances outside of the Five Rivers, but were important to their local economy.

Of course, the Five Rivers did import and export some goods. They imported gum cider from the Cider Isle (via Jugara), gold from the Cider Isle and the Atjuntja lands (both also via Jugara), spices from the east coast and (to a lesser degree) the highlands. For exports, their main products were kunduri, silver, incense, dyes, resins and perfumes, together with smaller quantities of other commodities and some fine manufactures such as jewellery.

Much of this import and export trade was destroyed by the Great Death, because of both supply problems outside the Five Rivers (such as for gum cider production) and because of the much smaller number of consumers. Overall internal trade also significantly reduced in most areas, although in practice the drop in production was usually balanced by the drop in demand.

The post-Great Death period saw the Five Rivers reorient much of its remaining economic activity on an expansion of kunduri cultivation. The effects of the Great Death had cost the Five Rivers its monopoly on production, but for a long time the region remained the world's premier supplier. Their existing production, wide variety of cultivars, ideal climate, experienced workforce even after plague deaths, and natural transport network meant that they were much better-placed to ramp up production than any other location in the globe. The collapse of so much other trade meant that the remaining aristocrats reoriented much of their resources and capital to supplying the ever-increasing global market.

The consequences of this economic restructuring could best be summed up by this statistic: despite losing a quarter of their workforce to the Great Death in 1660-1661, by 1671 the Five Rivers were exporting twice the amount of kunduri which they had provided in 1659. Part of this increased export volume was due to lower domestic consumption, but most of it was due to increased production.

However, unlike some other Aururian societies, such as the Atjuntja and (to a lesser degree) the Yadji, the Five Rivers peoples had long learned the advantages of diversified production. In part this was because of their longer history of perennial agriculture and cash crop production, and thus having learned the consequences of relying too much on one crop, in case of drought, flood, fire, overproduction or other calamity. In part this was due to the longstanding commercial and knowledge-based competition between the factions; there was a very strong incentive to adopt any new crop, manufacture or other approach which might enhance one faction's position over its rivals.

The knowledge-based competition between the factions contributed to the other aspect of the Five Rivers economy that increased after the Great Death: the use of domesticated animals. Horses and cattle, and to a lesser degree donkeys, had been present in the Five Rivers before the Great Death, but their use increased greatly in the aftermath. The abandonment of marginal agricultural lands meant that there were now suitable lands for grazing horses and cattle closer to their riverine transportation network.

The main early uses for domesticated animals were general transportation (both cattle and horses), additional fertiliser (also both cattle and horses), and meat (cattle), but the ever-curious Tjibarri soon found other uses for them. It did not take long for them to learn about cattle-powered gristmills which Europeans used to grind grain, and soon Tjibarri worked with European specialists to develop similar mills to grind wattleseeds.

The other significant use for domesticated animals was in the establishment of a horse-using postal system. Road construction had not historically been a strong practice in the Five Rivers. This gradually changed after contact with Europeans saw trade build up through Jugara from the 1630s onward. Aside from the immediate commercial benefits, this eventually gave access to European weapons and gunpowder.

Being acutely aware that Jugara would be on the frontlines in case of the war, Tjibarr set about building roads to the alternative ports of Taparee [Port Pirie] and Nookoonoo [Port Broughton]; this allowed trade to bypass Jugara, when needed. The original purpose of these roads was to ensure access to imported firearms, not to replace trade with the main port of Jugara. Bulk trade was still largely intended to flow via Jugara, albeit at slightly reduced prices for Tjibarri sellers; long-distance travel of goods across roads was much more expensive.

Once the roads were established, however, the endlessly-competing factions found more uses for them, in the eternal struggle of the Endless Dance. On good roads, horses could be used to bring information much more quickly than previous foot-based travel; this even applied to water-based travel in many circumstances, particularly when going upriver. Knowledge was power, as far as the Tjibarri were concerned. Knowledge mattered both for commerce (prices, relative demand, and other market information) and in competition between the factions.

So factions started establishing their own postal systems, that allowed regular changes of horses. Initially these were just between the new ocean ports and the Great Bend, the location where the Nyalananga [River Murray] turned south, and which had become the hub for ongoing trade with the Europeans. The advantages of the system were obvious, however, and gradually a postal system expanded to link all of the major towns and cities of Tjibarr. The other Five Rivers states also adopted such systems, following the Tjibarri example.

--

With the high death toll from the plagues, the economic chaos, and general exhaustion of the 1660s, neither the Yadji nor the Five Rivers states were truly interested in resuming warfare with each other. Some individual factions in Tjibarr were more sanguine, while a couple of religiously-motivated Yadji warmasters believed that the Great Dying marked the end of times, and tried to celebrate this by provoking war with Tjibarr and Gutjanal.

This meant that after 1665, border raids and skirmishes started increasing between Durigal and the Five Rivers. For several years, these did not lead to war between the two lands. The aging but still-astute Gunya Yadji negotiated peace and compensation, where required, to resolve these short of all-out war. On the Tjibarri side, the majority of the factions likewise favoured peace, and King Millewa of Gutjanal was not about to start a war against Durigal on his own.

The primary reason Gunya Yadji was so reluctant to get involved in further warfare with the Five Rivers was because he faced other problems. Some of these threats were external. In 1666, the Pakanga raids took on a worrying new direction when a group of Maori raiders conquered Mahratta [Mallacoota, Victoria]. Previously, Pakanga raids had been for wealth and glory only (in Aururia, that is). Now, a group of invaders had occupied land that was nominally part of the Yadji Empire. In truth, Mahratta was an isolated coastal village where the Regency had not exercised practical control in over one hundred years – and only sporadically even before then. But this attack, combined with ever-bolder raids by restive highlanders, led to a sense of the Regency being incapable of defending its own borders.

Further Pakanga raids followed; the most visible was a great raid by two Maori iwi at Mambara [Lakes Entrance, Victoria] that succeeded in breaking into the local temple and carrying off a wealth of golden tapestries and other treasures. These raids only exacerbated the internal discontent over priestly mismanagement.

The problems came to a head in November 1671. The Bittop of Gwandalan [Bairnsdale, VIC], in the eastern reaches of the White Country, had proven even more incapable than the average new priest, and was blamed for unjust decisions, unfair allocation of labour, and other problems throughout his region. He was assassinated by unknown people who stabbed him while he slept, then escaped into the night. Rather than accept that the murderers were unknown, some local Kurnawal were judged guilty and executed for the murder, on the orders of the remaining senior-most priest in Gwandalan.

The result was a rebellion, the worst which had been seen in within the Regency during living memory. The rebels in Gwandalan started by massacring all remaining priests within the city, driving out the small garrison, and then encouraging their neighbours to join them. The rebels soon found firearms to aid in their rebellion – presumed to be Dutch-supplied, although the VOC denied any knowledge – and began to march on other towns. The rebellion spread quickly, with the ruling elite of priests and soldiers being killed or driven out of the eastern half of the White Country.

The first army sent to defeat the rebels was ambushed and routed when travelling along the Royal Road near Yuralba [Moe, VIC] in February 1672. This marked the worst defeat which a Yadji army had suffered at rebel hands in nearly a century, and it only encouraged further rebellion throughout the White Country. Quelling the rebellion clearly required much larger armies than had been anticipated, and the Yadji needed time to mobilise them. The diphtheria epidemic which swept through the Regency in 1672 did not help these preparations.

Worse followed. In 1673, with a large part of the Yadji armies committed to fighting the rebellion – and mostly bogged down in sieges – the much-feared external threat reappeared. Not from Pakanga raids, but from the Five Rivers. For in that year, all three Five Rivers states declared war on the Regency.

The Yadji Empire had never been so hard-pressed; they needed to fight on multiple fronts. The Regency had no time to obtain support from its English allies, and in any event England was busy with warfare elsewhere. While its forces gave a good account of themselves, and some of their fortified towns took time to fall, inevitably the Regency was forced to concede territory.

Tjibarr essentially reversed the result of the Fever War, recapturing the lower Copper Coast and the vital port of Jugara. Gutjanal seized the gold mines around Djawrit [Bendigo], and agreed to provide a share of their gold to Yigutji, in recompense for that kingdom's support during the war. For the Kurnawal in the east, they achieved half of what they wanted: de facto independence, but not de jure. With his army and economy in disarray from defeats and plagues, in 1674 Gunya Yadji agreed to a seven-year truce with the Kurnawal rebels. This provided no formal recognition of peace, but the Kurnawal were essentially left to themselves in most of the White Country, except for a few border regions where the Yadji retained control.

When it came time to set up their own government, the Kurnawal rebels nearly managed to turn victory into last-minute defeat. The near-annihilation of the previous governing class left a vacuum, and they did not have an aristocracy or other clear successor to rule them. Instead, they had a number of rebel leaders who had attained their rank through force of arms during the rebellion, with half a dozen of them believing that they were the natural choice to rule their new would-be state.

Small-scale skirmishes broke out between the rebels, and could have escalated quickly. Adept diplomacy from Tjibarr and Gutjanal settled the dispute, with the rebels being persuaded to accept a younger prince from the other Kurnawal state, the kingdom on the Cider Isle [Tasmania], to become their king. The new king still faced a difficult task trying to build a kingdom from former rebel leaders who were united only by their hatred of the Yadji, and who had accepted him only because he was seen as less bad as letting one of their rivals take control.

In the Five Rivers, Tjibarr resumed trade through Jugara even before peace had been formally concluded. As part of maintaining their alliance, Tjibarr permitted Gutjanal and Yigutji merchants to ship agreed quantities of kunduri through Tjibarri waterways to Jugara for foreign trade, in exchange for specified tolls, rather than requiring them to onsell the kunduri to Tjibarri buyers. Tjibarr also concluded a trade treaty which permitted some commerce with English merchants. The ostensible reason they provided to their Dutch partners was that the Dutch and English were still at war, and Tjibarr did not want Jugara to become a target of war, since that would disrupt their own commerce. Later, they developed other excuses for maintaining English trade, such as that they were honouring existing agreements. Tjibarr continued to sell the majority of its kunduri and spice production to the Dutch, but they also maintained trade with the English and French.

--

"If you shake hands with a Tjibarri merchant, count your fingers afterwards."
- Pieter de la Court, quoting an anonymous Dutch merchant who had traded at Jugara, 1675

--

[1] The White Country corresponds approximately to the historical region of Gippsland, or, very roughly, all the parts of Victoria east of Melbourne and south of the Great Dividing Range.

[2] The fertile stretch of coastal land between Dogport [Port Augusta] and the Bitter Lake [Lake Alexandrina], long contested between Tjibarr and Durigal.

--

Thoughts?

Zam · Aug 29, 2019

Excellently laid out, you covered so much and on so many groups and points, showing the int connected by-play of the nations, the impacts of the diseases and the heavy hitting impact not just in terms of life, but the ensuing political instability and how it happened not quickly or just by an absence but by an massive confluence of factors, be it outsiders or internal incompetence, kudos!

A shame the rebels weren't able to pull together to make their own group, but given their limited reasons for unity it is not wholly surprised, kudos to them though, also interesting external political influence and or avoidance, very intriguing!

Lands of Red and Gold

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