- Location
- Illinois
Just curious, did you mean emu or moa?
And in regards to the latest post, I'm curious to how this contact with Australia will change the Moari's culture.
Lands of Red and Gold
- Thread starter Jared
- Start date
- Timeline
Just curious, did you mean emu or moa?
And in regards to the latest post, I'm curious to how this contact with Australia will change the Moari's culture.
Cetashwayo
Lord of Ten Thousand Years
- Location
- Across the Horizon
There is something wonderfully natural in the way the interactions play out. The careful way they begin to develop some understanding of each other, the half-speech they employ towards the end that's intelligible and understandable without being too coherent- it gives a real sense of first contact between the two peoples. You have a special knack, I would say, in making these peoples both fairly understandable to us, but also separated by gulfs of culture and time. It's as much the little things ("there are hundreds of hundreds") as the way the larger chapter fits together.
Assuming the Polynesians on New Zealand develop anything like they did in OTL societally, then the Europeans are going to find Maori who are familiar with metalworking and keep up much, much higher population densities.
In other words, European conquest of New Zealand is somewhere between laughably unrealistic optimism and actual clinical insanity.
EDIT - some questionable word choices about OTLMaori metalworking removed.
In other words, European conquest of New Zealand is somewhere between laughably unrealistic optimism and actual clinical insanity.
EDIT - some questionable word choices about OTLMaori metalworking removed.
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Cetashwayo
Lord of Ten Thousand Years
- Location
- Across the Horizon
Well, they may well be undermined by disease- but then so will the Europeans be once they make contact with Aururia and its particular maladies. New Zealand's remoteness will be a great boon in this respect.
I thought it was a really cool and fascinating piece, you handled the language differences and cultural introductions supremely well, the descriptions of life, the land and animals, even stuff like the stone roads and Kawiti and his fellows views on it all were incredibly intriguing. I love how things don't feel rushed and the interactions between everyone feel natural and very human, loved the exposition and realizations at the end great lead out.
Arthur Frayn
Fake God by Occupation, Magician by Inclination
- Location
- Land of Do As You Please
- Pronouns
- They/Him
For me, the really interesting development would be if the *Australian and Maori begin significant trading, and the *Australians adopt and improve the Maori/Polynesian shipbuilding and wayfinding practices. Imagine *Australian waka's making contact with Indonesia, Southeast Asia, or even China.
Emus will survive fine, though with a considerably reduced wild population when compared to OTL, because many of the prime agricultural areas will be taken over by... agriculture.
If you meant moas, then they will survive long enough for Europeans to see them. Whether they will survive until the present day is harder to say.
This will be explored in great detail later in the timeline. Not for a few dozen posts, though.
As a short version, though, as @Humerus pointed out, the spread of *Australian crops and metalworking will transform Maori population density.
In OTL the Maori had only a handful of domesticated crops which they brought with them, and only one which grew well on the majority of both main islands (sweet potato). They were, of course, able to manage the land and cultivate or otherwise foster the growth of some edible native plants, such as the cabbage tree (Cordyline australis) and various species of ferns. (Whether their use of those plants counts as domestication is a matter of definition.) These practices were able to sustain a human population but not a high population density. They were also all notably deficient in protein, which required the Maori to obtain protein from various animal sources (seafood, native birds, etc) which were not always readily available.
ATL, the Maori now have access to a variety of crops much more suited to the temperate climate of New Zealand, including several high-protein species. Plus they have access to at least some metalworking, which enhances their ability to cultivate the land. The result will be a much higher population, and as is common with such cases, the establishment of larger social entities (chiefdoms/states). They also have access to literacy.
Well, there's different kinds of conquest. Conquest and displacement of majority population of New Zealand by people of European descent, as happened in OTL, is going to be somewhere between very difficult and very impossible. Conquest in some kind of colonial overlordship in the same way as, say, India remains a possibility. India had a much higher population than anything which New Zealand can carry in any TL, and near-technological parity with Europeans, but still ended up colonised for a period.
Disease and distance are indeed the two biggest factors in promoting cultural survival of *New Zealand, and for that matter *Australia. The distance means that European diseases arrive spread over a longer period of time than nearly-simultaneously (in contrast to the Americas), allowing more time for populations and societies to recover in between epidemics. Indeed, a few diseases may not arrive at all due to the distance (in OTL, bubonic plague never entered Australia until the steamship era, and may not have ever reached New Zealand). Likewise, the distance means that power projection for Europeans is hard; in sailing terms Australia and New Zealand are one of the most remote parts of the world from Europe.
Plus, of course, the diseases waiting in Australia (and eventually NZ) which will kill Europeans in some numbers, albeit not at the same percentages as European diseases will kill the locals.
Thank'ee to both of you. I aim to use a variety of writing styles when conveying the world of Lands of Red and Gold. Some of it is straight narrative such as this, some of it is authorial infodumps, some of it is pseudo historical texts or other articles, and so on. The idea is to give a range of perspectives on the world. On the whole, the straight narratives are probably the most fun, though often also the hardest to write.
It's safe to say that there will be ongoing contact across the Tasman Sea between Australia and NZ. Crops, metalworking and literacy flow east to the Maori, sweet potato, New Zealand flax products, and Polynesian navigation and (sort of) shipbuilding flow west.
Further details will follow in the next series of posts. Chapter #11 is a very broad overview of how *Australia has developed (and to a lesser degree, *New Zealand), and then the next ten or so posts look at particular societies which have developed within *Australia. One of those is a society which has taken Polynesian navigation and sailmaking techniques and done a lot with them.
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That makes sense and sounds really cool, I really like the plans you have laid out so far, very intriguing and all the locales feel very distinct and different which adds life and realism to the story.
Lands of Red and Gold #11: On The Eve Of The Storm
Lands of Red and Gold #11: On The Eve Of The Storm
This instalment of Lands of Red and Gold gives an overview of Australasia as it developed over the millennia since the invention of agriculture, and then a broad overview of how things are in 1618, on the eve of first contact with Europeans. Some of the cultures mentioned in this overview will be explored in more detail in subsequent instalments.
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Sometime in the distant unrecorded allohistorical past, a wild yam growing along the River Murray in south-eastern Australia mutated into a new form. The result was a domesticable plant called the red yam, which grew wild along most of the central Murray. Red yams were just one plant among many until humans arrived in Australia. When they reached the Murray, red yams became a staple part of their diet, but there was no particular need to domesticate them (yet).
When the glaciers retreated and the climate entered the current interglacial period, humans around the world started down the road to domesticating plants. The red yam is a more difficult crop to domesticate than some other founder crops, but by around 4000 BC, the plant was fully domesticated. Other plant domestications followed this, most notably another root vegetable called murnong, and several species of wattles, fast-growing trees which bear edible seeds and have multitudinous other uses. These formed the core of an indigenous Australian agricultural package. These crops are largely perennial, drought-tolerant plants which are well-suited to regions of low or irregular rainfall. As perennials, they also need less labour to produce a useful harvest; the yield per worker for Australian crops is very high. This allows Australian societies to sustain a much higher percentage of their population in non-agricultural roles than other comparable early agricultural peoples.
The Gunnagal, Australia's first civilization, emerged along the Murray between 2500 and 1000 BC. Their ancestors were already using domesticated crops, but inspired by contact with eel-farming peoples further south, the Gunnagal developed a complex system of artificial lakes and wetlands. These wetlands gave them an excellent source of food from fishing, hunting water birds, and gathering water plants. The planning and organisation needed to build and maintain these wetlands resulted in the development of hierarchical societies and an organised form of government.
The early Gunnagal flourished for about sixteen centuries. They developed many of the fundamentals of civilization: pottery and other ceramics; weaving; metallurgy in copper, lead and arsenical bronze; complex oral law codes and an established government; an organised trade system; and some domesticated animals (ducks and dingos). They did not invent full writing, although they had a developing proto-writing system which used symbols to represent ownership, especially for trade goods, and to indicate container contents. Gunnagal culture spread along the length of the Murray. Religious preferences and reliance on artificial wetlands meant that their settlements were largely confined to the vicinity of the river.
The Gunnagal culture of this period (usually called the Formative era) collapsed after 900 BC, under the pressure of depleted soils and prolonged drought. Many of the displaced peoples expanded across Australia in a series of population movements which would be called the Great Migrations. Gunnagalic-speaking peoples spread their languages, culture, and agriculture across much of south-eastern Australia. The new farming communities spread almost as far north as the Tropic of Capricorn, and to the eastern and southern coastlines of Australia; their western border was the deserts of central Australia. Agriculture spread even further than the limit of the Gunnagal migrations; red yams and a few other crops spread across the deserts to the fertile south-western corner of Australia, which in time would develop its own civilization only loosely connected to peoples further east.
The farming communities formed in the Great Migrations began as isolated settlements, small villages and the like; they would take time to develop into larger political units. Along the Murray itself, the Gunnagal survivors developed better agricultural techniques and through trade contact received a new domesticated animal, the emu. In time, their urban civilization recovered into what would be termed the Classical era. In this time, the Gunnagal developed from small city-states into four kingdoms. They developed a full writing system, mostly used for inscriptions and clay tablets, and this became the basis of a developing government bureaucracy [1]. They perfected the use of tin-alloyed bronze, replacing the older arsenical bronzes, and this new metal became an integral part of their increasing technological expertise. They were particularly successful when working in stone; some of the buildings built in the early days of the Classical era would still be standing and in use two millennia later when first visited by Dutch explorers. The Classical Gunnagal kingdoms were at the heart of extensive trade networks which stretched across the eastern half of the continent, and which carried their culture and ideas far beyond their political borders.
Classical Gunnagal culture survived for centuries. It endured the rise of Australia's first major epidemic disease, blue-sleep fever, a variant of avian influenza which infected humans. The demise of the Classical Gunnagal eventually came from within. The kingdom of Garrkimang, centred on the eponymous city, was one of the four nations of the Classical Gunnagal. Unlike the others, it was located on a major tributary, the Murrumbidgee, not the Murray proper. The city had been founded during the Great Migrations, and its social structure was less faction-ridden than the older and more traditionalist cities along the main river. Under the determined and largely capable rule of a dynasty of prophet-kings, the kingdom of Garrkimang grew into the largest and wealthiest nation on the continent.
Garrkimang rose as a cultural and military power and eventually eclipsed the other Classical kingdoms. Trading wealth started its growth, but the kingdom's ultimate success was founded on a number of military innovations. They had greater access to bronze than any other Classical peoples, and created a system of well-armed heavy infantry which used long pikes and shields. Combined with better tactics and training, these soldiers transformed Garrkimang into an empire. Its armies first conquered the other Classical kingdoms, then expanded much further. After conquering the last surviving Classical rival in 556 AD, the nation took the name Watjubaga, the Five Rivers (the Murray, Murrumbidgee, Darling, Lachlan and Macquarie).
Watjubaga was Australia's first and largest indigenous empire. At its height, it claimed suzerainty over territory which stretched from the Darling Downs in the north to Bass Strait in the south, and to the deserts and the Spencer Gulf in the west. Its eastern border was mostly formed by the Great Dividing Range, apart from tributary city-states in the Hunter Valley. It reached its greatest territorial extent in 822 AD, but its primacy did not last long. Economic disruptions formed by the colonisation of Tasmania and increase in the bronze supply unravelled much of the economy, subject peoples learned how to counter imperial military tactics, and logistical difficulties meant that outlying regions grew independent of imperial control. Revolts and military disasters saw most of the outlying regions gain independence by the mid-tenth century. The imperial heartland around the Murray and Murrumbidgee gained independence more gradually, and the last vestiges of the Empire were overthrown in 1124 AD.
The Imperial period coincided with the colonisation of Tasmania. Seafaring techniques amongst Gunnagalic peoples were not an early specialty, but their technology slowly improved. In time, this led to the colonisation of the Bass Strait islands, then, in the ninth century AD, the settlement of Tasmania itself. Tasmania was colonised by two distinct groups of peoples, the Tjunini who entered via King Island in the northwest, and the Kurnawal first colonised Flinders Island in the northeast, then Tasmania itself. The Tjunini settled most of the northern coast. The Kurnawal were initially established along the north-eastern coast, but after the War of the Princess (which would become immortalised in song), were driven to the eastern coast. The central highlands and rugged western coast of Tasmania were initially left to the native hunter-gatherer inhabitants, the Palawa [2]. Tasmania has rich reserves of tin, which were quickly exploited. The Tjunini and Kurnawal made more extensive use of bronze than anywhere else in Australia, and they also exported considerable quantities of tin back to the mainland.
The collapse of the Empire did not mean the decline of agriculture or of the human population over its former lands. Indeed, the growing size of the subject populations was one of several factors which had weakened imperial control. This increasing population inevitably had its effects on Australia's natural environment. Increased farming meant some cases of local deforestation and habitat destruction. Fortunately for the Australian peoples, their perennial agriculture did not produce the same soil erosion which European farming practices would produce in another history. Still, the changing habitats meant that much of the local flora and fauna were being displaced. Large kangaroos and wild emus were usually hunted out near any settlements. Some trees and other plants became locally extinct, or even completely extinct if they had a limited geographical range. Other Australian wildlife was likewise displaced: possums, wombats, wallabies, bandicoots, and so forth became increasingly rare over the agricultural areas of the continent.
While politically fragmented, the cultures of the Murray basin and their southern neighbours flourished in the post-Imperial period. Australia's deadliest epidemic disease, the Waiting Death (Marnitja), emerged in the thirteenth century and caused widespread death, but the population recovered over time. These cultures were focused mostly on themselves, defining the Murray kingdoms and their Junditmara neighbours as the only people possessing true civilization. Save as sources of trade goods, they had little regard for the lands outside. They were vaguely aware of the Yuduwungu and related peoples in south-western Australia, but only occasional travellers visited those distant regions. The arid interior was a source of some metals, gems and salt, with a few mining colonies and trading contact with some local hunter-gatherers who adopted semi-sedentary lifestyles trading gems and salt for food. Otherwise, this region too was largely ignored.
The major urban areas of Australia also regarded the eastern seaboard of Australia as an uncivilized backwater. Separated from the older cultures of the west by the Great Dividing Range, the eastern seaboard was for a long time only thinly-populated. A few valuable spices grew there and were traded west of the mountains, but for the most part the rugged geography and lack of effective sea travel meant that the eastern coast consisted of scattered agricultural communities, with few large states. Two developing kingdoms were forming in the Hunter Valley and around Coffs Harbour, but most of the rest remained a backwater. Still, it was in these eastern lands that Australia's isolation came to an end.
In 1310, voyaging Maori from New Zealand landed in the Illawarra region on the coast of modern New South Wales. The initial contact was wary, but peaceful. An exchange of crops, animals and ideas followed over the next few decades. The Maori obtained Australian crops such as red yams, wattles and murnong, and animals such as the emu and the wood duck. The Maori also learned about new technologies such as metallurgy and ceramics. The Australian peoples gained new crops such as kumara (sweet potato) and taro. They also received new inspiration in sailing and navigation techniques, first from individual Maori who settled on the eastern coast, and then from diffusion of ideas. Sailing technology slowly spread up and down the east coast and eventually along the southern coast, leading to new trade routes and increased contact between Australian peoples. Contact between Australia and New Zealand continued until the time of European arrival, although the volume of trade was limited; only a few high-value, low-bulk items were worth trading at such distances, such as greenstone (jade), kauri amber, some high-quality textiles, raw tin and some worked metal tools and weapons.
With the advent of new sailing technology, much more effective long-range contact became possible between Australian cultures. Some societies were more open to these new technologies than others. In particular, the inhabitants of Kangaroo Island took the new sailing techniques and became the leading maritime trading power in Australia. Their voyagers plied the stormy waters of Australia's southern coast, bypassing the desert barriers between east and west. In time, they or their successors may well have made contact of their own with Australia's northern neighbours. However, their progress was cut short on 6 August 1619, when Dutch sailors under the command of Frederik de Houtman landed on the banks of the Swan River...
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Australasia in 1618 is a complex group of societies, ranging from literate Iron Age urbanites to desert-dwelling hunters whose ways of life have barely changed in the last ten thousand years. It is a region with much common heritage, and some vast cultural differences. It is a region where the inhabitants have learned to master the challenges of nature, of flood, fire and drought, but where a much greater storm will soon break on their shores.
The south-western corner of Australia is a small region of fertile land surrounded by hostile deserts. Some domesticated crops spread here in the sixth century BC, and a trickle of new ideas and technology has continued ever since, but the region developed largely in isolation. Lacking a reliable source of tin, the region had only very limited supplies of bronze, but in the last few centuries, they discovered the arts of working in iron. Iron tools and weapons here are the most advanced in Australia. The Atjuntja were the most successful people to adopt these new technologies, and created a dominion which stretches from Esperance in the east to the Indian Ocean, and with its most northerly outpost a salt-harvesting works and penal colony at Shark Bay. The Atjuntja rule over an empire of multiple ethnicities, who speak dialects which are sometimes different enough to be considered distinct languages. Under the watchful eye of their armies, a steady stream of tribute flows to their capital at the White City [Albany]. The Atjuntja pour this wealth into two of their main passions; they are masters of working in stone and arranging the natural world to suit their vision. The carefully shaped glories of the Garden of Ten Thousand Steps and the grandeur of the Walk of Kings would be considered amongst the wonders of the world, if the world knew of them.
Northward of the Atjuntja dominions to the north are lands which they consider barren and useless. For northern Australia, particularly the northwest, has been the least-changed part of the continent. Until very recently, the inhabitants did not possess any crops suitable for tropical agriculture. Separated by desert barriers, the hunter-gatherer peoples are the most isolated on the continent. They do have some sporadic trade contact, which has seen the spread of some copper tools and a very few of iron, occasional beads, pendants or other jewellery, and even rarer textiles and ceramics, but their life here is the least changed from what would be recognised in our own history.
Eastward of the Atjuntja lies a treeless, barren plain which until recently formed their only line of communication with other civilizations. Now that role has been filled by a people who call themselves the Nangu, but who are known to outsiders as Islanders. They are inhabitants of Kangaroo Island who have taken the Polynesian navigational package and adapted it to the conditions of the Southern Ocean. The Islanders regularly voyage from the Atjuntja dominions in the west to Tasmania in the east, and occasionally beyond; their trading ships sometimes reach the coastal cities of southern New South Wales. North of the Island lies the Eyre Peninsula, a small fertile patch of land bounded by sea and northern deserts. This land is occupied by several city-states who have a loose alliance to defend each other against the expansionistic powers further east.
The Yorke Peninsula and the eastern side of the Gulf St Vincent, including modern Adelaide, contain richly fertile land and an abundance of copper and other metals. This is a much-contested region between two of the great powers of Australia. One of these is the resurgent Post-Imperial kingdom of Tjibarr, which has its heartland along the central Murray but which seeks to control the wealth of the lower Murray and the lands beyond. Tjibarr is the most powerful kingdom to reemerge after the collapse of the old Watjubaga Empire, but it is only one of several. The Post-Imperial Murray basin is a seething sea of cultural discontent overlying a wealth born of trade routes which have grown stronger since the collapse of the Empire. Famously argumentative and faction-ridden, the heirs of the Gunnagal show no inclination to reunite into any new empire. Nor have they managed to re-establish any control over the rebellious peoples of the Monaro plateau. That high country is still occupied by the Nguril and Kaoma, non-Gunnagalic peoples who have learnt to fight in the mountains, and who sometimes raid into the low-lying regions of the Murray basin.
When fighting for control of the Murray Mouth and its environs, the Tjibarr kingdom is opposed by the most populous empire in Australia, that of the Yadji. Named for their ruling dynasty, the Yadji are the descendants of the old Junditmara. With relatively rain-drenched lands and fertile soils, the Yadji dominions stretch from south-eastern South Australia and almost all of modern Victoria south of the Great Dividing Range, as far as East Gippsland. The Yadji are a rigidly hierarchical society bound by conventions of religion and tradition, and their government is among the most organised in Australasia. Trade contact via the Islanders has recently acquainted them with the arts of working in iron. They are particularly adept at building roads to allow swift transport between the key regions of their empire. Only in the north and north-west do they face serious opposition from the kingdom of Tjibarr, which relies on riverine control of the Murray to fend off the military advances of the Yadji.
To the north and east of the Yadji and the Murray basin dwell backward peoples, at least according to the standards of the city dwellers of those ancient lands. North of the Murray kingdoms lies the dry plains of modern New South Wales. A land of mostly flat ground and fading rains as one moves further west, this is not a region to support a large population in any one place. Food is not the limitation; even here, dryland Australian agriculture can supply a sufficient harvest to support a decent population. The limitation is water. Away from the permanent rivers, only limited amounts of water can be collected from wells, small dams, and rainwater cisterns. The open plains of central New South Wales are occupied by scattered agricultural communities and city-states, each of which defend larger areas of rangelands which they use for hunting and extraction of timber and other resources.
Bounded by the peaks of the Great Dividing Ranges and the Tasman Sea, the eastern coast of Australia is a narrow stretch of often rugged but well-watered land. By Australian standards, the rainfall here is high; sufficient to support a great variety of plants which do not grow west of the mountains. Several of these are spices which are traded further west; as far as the Murray kingdoms and the Yadji are concerned, this is the only feature of interest of the eastern seaboard. A few additional crops have been domesticated here, including additional species of wattles, and a few fruits, but these are mostly unknown further west. This region, stretching from East Gippsland in modern Victoria to southern Queensland, is inhabited by a variety of agricultural peoples. The rugged nature of the terrain and the limitations of transport technology has prevented the development of large political entities in most of this region. Most of the peoples here live in small farming communities which are usually separated into distinct valleys or coastal regions.
The introduction of better sailing technology from the Maori has seen the gradual development of seaborne trade routes linking these peoples, and while most of the peoples remain divided into small communities, a few reasonable sized kingdoms have emerged in some of the more open areas. The most significant of these is that of the Patjimunra in the Hunter Valley, where the former city-states were formed into an established kingdom after the collapse of the Empire. The Hunter Valley controls one of the best ways to cross the Great Dividing Range, and the Patjimunra have become wealthy through trade in spices. The Patjimunra are a Gunnagalic-speaking people, but their culture and religion has evolved along a distinct path from those further west. The kitjigal have developed into a rigid social hierarchy that defines all occupations and social contact. The other major nation along the eastern coast is the Daluming kingdom, formed by the Bungudjimay around modern Coffs Harbour. A non-Gunnagalic people who preserved their own language and way of life despite the Great Migrations, the Bungudjimay have religious beliefs and a social structure which is wholly alien to their neighbours, who consider them to be warlike, head-hunting savages.
Inland of the kingdom of Daluming lies the New England tablelands, an elevated region of high country with reasonably fertile soils and some of the best mineral wealth in Australia. This region is one of the two main sources of tin in Australia, and although it has elevated terrain, its climate is still mild enough that red yams and other crops can grow here. Politically, the New England tablelands are a confederation of several distinct peoples, who while they are sometimes wary of each other, are more concerned by the threat from Daluming to the east.
North of the New England tablelands, entering what is modern south-eastern Queensland, the agricultural population gradually diminishes. These regions are nearing the effective growing limit of the red yam, which was for so long the main staple crop of all farming peoples on the continent. Inland, the Darling Downs, a region of sweeping plains and open pastures, is covered by numerous small agricultural communities, but few large towns.
Around the coast, where drinking water is easier to obtain and seafood supplements the farming diet, the population density is higher. The modern regions of the Gold Coast, Moreton Bay and the Sunshine Coast are the home of the Kiyungu, another society born in the Great Migrations, and who have adapted to life in the northern sun. They are not very militaristic; the Empire never reached this far north, and they have no enemies worthy of the name. The Kiyungu are happy enough to squabble amongst themselves, while mostly living for trade. Their name for their own land translates as the Coral Coast. This is something of a misnomer, since most of the coral reefs are further north, but the Kiyungu had long learned to voyage north in small boats and dive to collect corals. This is a very valuable trade good which they exchange further south for tin and copper to supply them with bronze tools. The Coral Coast is home to several decent-sized cities, and the Kiyungu have picked up on Maori sailing techniques to extend their own trade network about halfway up the Queensland coast.
Beyond the Kiyungu lands and the Darling Downs, northern Australia was until recently almost the exclusive domain of hunter-gatherers. The Kiyungu maintained a few small fishing outposts and trading points along the coast, but otherwise farming and towns were non-existent. In the last century and a half, though, new tropical crops emerged. Kumara (sweet potato) and taro, brought across the seas by the strange Maori, first reached the Kiyungu around 1450 AD, and their cultivation has since spread inland.
Another new crop appeared in farmers' fields about half a century before that; a new kind of yam. It does not look quite like a regular red yam, it is smaller, and its roots are twisted. No-one is quite sure where it came from, and it does not always grow well on its own, but farmers learnt to cultivate it through cuttings, and then later through seed. This lesser yam does not yield as well as the common red yam, but it has one valuable quality; it can grow even in the northern fields where common yams wither [3]. The benefits are obvious, and farming has slowly spread further north. Central Queensland is in the midst of a process of transformation. Small agricultural communities have been established, but nomadic hunter-gatherer peoples have still not been completely displaced. The only decent-sized towns are on the coast, where offshoots of the Kiyungu are slowly spreading out. Farming peoples are on the advance once more, and absent outside influence, the northern migration will stop only at Cape York. As of 1618, though, the northernmost coastal outpost is at Mackay, and farming inland has not even spread that far.
Much further to the south, Tasmania in 1618 remains divided between the descendants of the Tjunini and the Kurnawal. Their long rivalry has divided much of the island between them, except for the spurned areas of the central highlands and south-western coast where the Palawa have developed a hunter-gardener lifestyle. The territorial and cultural conflicts between the Tjunini and the Kurnawal has produced two states with clearly-defined borders and patrolled frontiers. It has also meant that both peoples possess a strong sense of nationalism. In their language, their culture, their fashion, and their diet, the inhabitants of Tasmania define themselves as citizens of either the Tjunini confederation or the Kurnawal kingdom. It is often a mortal insult to suggest to a Tjunini that they act like or a Kurnawal, or vice versa. Their rivalry is not just cultural, but over land and trade. The best tin mines lie in the region of the disputed frontier, and the two nations have fought a seemingly endless series of wars over control of that region, and over other valuable agricultural land. Tasmanian tin and gum cider are held in high regard on the mainland, although neither of the two nations conducts much in the way of direct trade. The export of goods to and from the mainland is usually controlled by the Islanders.
In New Zealand, the Maori have benefitted immensely from the introduction of Australian domesticated crops and animals, although they also suffered from the arrival of blue-sleep and Marnitja, both of which have become endemic diseases. The Maori have been transformed from a hunter-gardener people into a culture of warrior-farmers. They have acquired knowledge of ceramics, writing, and metallurgy from Australia, and adapted them to suit their own culture. The Maori are unfortunately limited in their metallurgy, because New Zealand has virtually no native sources of tin; all of their bronze must be imported from Australia, and this is almost prohibitively expensive. Still, the fertile and well-watered lands of New Zealand support a much higher population density than virtually any part of Australia. The Maori population is more highly-concentrated in the North Island, but farming has spread throughout both of the main islands. The introduction of metal weapons and farming meant an increasing population and a long series of wars, which ended with consolidation into several major kingdoms in both of the main islands. The Maori are linked to Australia by small-scale but regular trade contact, and by much less frequent contact with their old homelands in Polynesia. Fortunately for the inhabitants of Polynesia, the travel time required, and the infrequency of those contacts, means that so far they have not been afflicted with Australian diseases.
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[1] Some things seem to be unavoidable, alas.
[2] The Palawa are essentially the historical Tasmanian Aborigines. The butterfly net has meant that their languages and cultures are effectively unchanged until first contact with the colonisers from the mainland.
[3] The lesser yam is the product of a hybridisation between the red yam (Dioscorea chelidonius) and one of its close relatives, the long yam (Dioscorea transversa). This hybridisation occurs occasionally whenever cultivated red yams are bred near wild long yams, which occurs in north-eastern New South Wales and southern Queensland. Like both of their parents, the hybrid yams have a perennial root system and their stems and leaves die back every year. The hybrid yams have tubers which are midway in size between the larger red yams and the smaller long yams, hence their name of "lesser yam." The first lesser yams are not interfertile with either of their parents, and since yams require both a male and female plant, were effectively sterile. Australian farmers have learned to propagate yams through using cuttings, though, and this allows them to propagate the lesser yams. Since hybrids show up on a fairly regular basis, this eventually means that they find strains of lesser yams which can fertilise each other and then be grown from seed. As a crop, the lesser yam offers a lower yield than red yams, and is somewhat less drought-tolerant, but one of the characteristics it has inherited from its long yam parent is the capacity to grow in the tropics.
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Thoughts?
This instalment of Lands of Red and Gold gives an overview of Australasia as it developed over the millennia since the invention of agriculture, and then a broad overview of how things are in 1618, on the eve of first contact with Europeans. Some of the cultures mentioned in this overview will be explored in more detail in subsequent instalments.
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Sometime in the distant unrecorded allohistorical past, a wild yam growing along the River Murray in south-eastern Australia mutated into a new form. The result was a domesticable plant called the red yam, which grew wild along most of the central Murray. Red yams were just one plant among many until humans arrived in Australia. When they reached the Murray, red yams became a staple part of their diet, but there was no particular need to domesticate them (yet).
When the glaciers retreated and the climate entered the current interglacial period, humans around the world started down the road to domesticating plants. The red yam is a more difficult crop to domesticate than some other founder crops, but by around 4000 BC, the plant was fully domesticated. Other plant domestications followed this, most notably another root vegetable called murnong, and several species of wattles, fast-growing trees which bear edible seeds and have multitudinous other uses. These formed the core of an indigenous Australian agricultural package. These crops are largely perennial, drought-tolerant plants which are well-suited to regions of low or irregular rainfall. As perennials, they also need less labour to produce a useful harvest; the yield per worker for Australian crops is very high. This allows Australian societies to sustain a much higher percentage of their population in non-agricultural roles than other comparable early agricultural peoples.
The Gunnagal, Australia's first civilization, emerged along the Murray between 2500 and 1000 BC. Their ancestors were already using domesticated crops, but inspired by contact with eel-farming peoples further south, the Gunnagal developed a complex system of artificial lakes and wetlands. These wetlands gave them an excellent source of food from fishing, hunting water birds, and gathering water plants. The planning and organisation needed to build and maintain these wetlands resulted in the development of hierarchical societies and an organised form of government.
The early Gunnagal flourished for about sixteen centuries. They developed many of the fundamentals of civilization: pottery and other ceramics; weaving; metallurgy in copper, lead and arsenical bronze; complex oral law codes and an established government; an organised trade system; and some domesticated animals (ducks and dingos). They did not invent full writing, although they had a developing proto-writing system which used symbols to represent ownership, especially for trade goods, and to indicate container contents. Gunnagal culture spread along the length of the Murray. Religious preferences and reliance on artificial wetlands meant that their settlements were largely confined to the vicinity of the river.
The Gunnagal culture of this period (usually called the Formative era) collapsed after 900 BC, under the pressure of depleted soils and prolonged drought. Many of the displaced peoples expanded across Australia in a series of population movements which would be called the Great Migrations. Gunnagalic-speaking peoples spread their languages, culture, and agriculture across much of south-eastern Australia. The new farming communities spread almost as far north as the Tropic of Capricorn, and to the eastern and southern coastlines of Australia; their western border was the deserts of central Australia. Agriculture spread even further than the limit of the Gunnagal migrations; red yams and a few other crops spread across the deserts to the fertile south-western corner of Australia, which in time would develop its own civilization only loosely connected to peoples further east.
The farming communities formed in the Great Migrations began as isolated settlements, small villages and the like; they would take time to develop into larger political units. Along the Murray itself, the Gunnagal survivors developed better agricultural techniques and through trade contact received a new domesticated animal, the emu. In time, their urban civilization recovered into what would be termed the Classical era. In this time, the Gunnagal developed from small city-states into four kingdoms. They developed a full writing system, mostly used for inscriptions and clay tablets, and this became the basis of a developing government bureaucracy [1]. They perfected the use of tin-alloyed bronze, replacing the older arsenical bronzes, and this new metal became an integral part of their increasing technological expertise. They were particularly successful when working in stone; some of the buildings built in the early days of the Classical era would still be standing and in use two millennia later when first visited by Dutch explorers. The Classical Gunnagal kingdoms were at the heart of extensive trade networks which stretched across the eastern half of the continent, and which carried their culture and ideas far beyond their political borders.
Classical Gunnagal culture survived for centuries. It endured the rise of Australia's first major epidemic disease, blue-sleep fever, a variant of avian influenza which infected humans. The demise of the Classical Gunnagal eventually came from within. The kingdom of Garrkimang, centred on the eponymous city, was one of the four nations of the Classical Gunnagal. Unlike the others, it was located on a major tributary, the Murrumbidgee, not the Murray proper. The city had been founded during the Great Migrations, and its social structure was less faction-ridden than the older and more traditionalist cities along the main river. Under the determined and largely capable rule of a dynasty of prophet-kings, the kingdom of Garrkimang grew into the largest and wealthiest nation on the continent.
Garrkimang rose as a cultural and military power and eventually eclipsed the other Classical kingdoms. Trading wealth started its growth, but the kingdom's ultimate success was founded on a number of military innovations. They had greater access to bronze than any other Classical peoples, and created a system of well-armed heavy infantry which used long pikes and shields. Combined with better tactics and training, these soldiers transformed Garrkimang into an empire. Its armies first conquered the other Classical kingdoms, then expanded much further. After conquering the last surviving Classical rival in 556 AD, the nation took the name Watjubaga, the Five Rivers (the Murray, Murrumbidgee, Darling, Lachlan and Macquarie).
Watjubaga was Australia's first and largest indigenous empire. At its height, it claimed suzerainty over territory which stretched from the Darling Downs in the north to Bass Strait in the south, and to the deserts and the Spencer Gulf in the west. Its eastern border was mostly formed by the Great Dividing Range, apart from tributary city-states in the Hunter Valley. It reached its greatest territorial extent in 822 AD, but its primacy did not last long. Economic disruptions formed by the colonisation of Tasmania and increase in the bronze supply unravelled much of the economy, subject peoples learned how to counter imperial military tactics, and logistical difficulties meant that outlying regions grew independent of imperial control. Revolts and military disasters saw most of the outlying regions gain independence by the mid-tenth century. The imperial heartland around the Murray and Murrumbidgee gained independence more gradually, and the last vestiges of the Empire were overthrown in 1124 AD.
The Imperial period coincided with the colonisation of Tasmania. Seafaring techniques amongst Gunnagalic peoples were not an early specialty, but their technology slowly improved. In time, this led to the colonisation of the Bass Strait islands, then, in the ninth century AD, the settlement of Tasmania itself. Tasmania was colonised by two distinct groups of peoples, the Tjunini who entered via King Island in the northwest, and the Kurnawal first colonised Flinders Island in the northeast, then Tasmania itself. The Tjunini settled most of the northern coast. The Kurnawal were initially established along the north-eastern coast, but after the War of the Princess (which would become immortalised in song), were driven to the eastern coast. The central highlands and rugged western coast of Tasmania were initially left to the native hunter-gatherer inhabitants, the Palawa [2]. Tasmania has rich reserves of tin, which were quickly exploited. The Tjunini and Kurnawal made more extensive use of bronze than anywhere else in Australia, and they also exported considerable quantities of tin back to the mainland.
The collapse of the Empire did not mean the decline of agriculture or of the human population over its former lands. Indeed, the growing size of the subject populations was one of several factors which had weakened imperial control. This increasing population inevitably had its effects on Australia's natural environment. Increased farming meant some cases of local deforestation and habitat destruction. Fortunately for the Australian peoples, their perennial agriculture did not produce the same soil erosion which European farming practices would produce in another history. Still, the changing habitats meant that much of the local flora and fauna were being displaced. Large kangaroos and wild emus were usually hunted out near any settlements. Some trees and other plants became locally extinct, or even completely extinct if they had a limited geographical range. Other Australian wildlife was likewise displaced: possums, wombats, wallabies, bandicoots, and so forth became increasingly rare over the agricultural areas of the continent.
While politically fragmented, the cultures of the Murray basin and their southern neighbours flourished in the post-Imperial period. Australia's deadliest epidemic disease, the Waiting Death (Marnitja), emerged in the thirteenth century and caused widespread death, but the population recovered over time. These cultures were focused mostly on themselves, defining the Murray kingdoms and their Junditmara neighbours as the only people possessing true civilization. Save as sources of trade goods, they had little regard for the lands outside. They were vaguely aware of the Yuduwungu and related peoples in south-western Australia, but only occasional travellers visited those distant regions. The arid interior was a source of some metals, gems and salt, with a few mining colonies and trading contact with some local hunter-gatherers who adopted semi-sedentary lifestyles trading gems and salt for food. Otherwise, this region too was largely ignored.
The major urban areas of Australia also regarded the eastern seaboard of Australia as an uncivilized backwater. Separated from the older cultures of the west by the Great Dividing Range, the eastern seaboard was for a long time only thinly-populated. A few valuable spices grew there and were traded west of the mountains, but for the most part the rugged geography and lack of effective sea travel meant that the eastern coast consisted of scattered agricultural communities, with few large states. Two developing kingdoms were forming in the Hunter Valley and around Coffs Harbour, but most of the rest remained a backwater. Still, it was in these eastern lands that Australia's isolation came to an end.
In 1310, voyaging Maori from New Zealand landed in the Illawarra region on the coast of modern New South Wales. The initial contact was wary, but peaceful. An exchange of crops, animals and ideas followed over the next few decades. The Maori obtained Australian crops such as red yams, wattles and murnong, and animals such as the emu and the wood duck. The Maori also learned about new technologies such as metallurgy and ceramics. The Australian peoples gained new crops such as kumara (sweet potato) and taro. They also received new inspiration in sailing and navigation techniques, first from individual Maori who settled on the eastern coast, and then from diffusion of ideas. Sailing technology slowly spread up and down the east coast and eventually along the southern coast, leading to new trade routes and increased contact between Australian peoples. Contact between Australia and New Zealand continued until the time of European arrival, although the volume of trade was limited; only a few high-value, low-bulk items were worth trading at such distances, such as greenstone (jade), kauri amber, some high-quality textiles, raw tin and some worked metal tools and weapons.
With the advent of new sailing technology, much more effective long-range contact became possible between Australian cultures. Some societies were more open to these new technologies than others. In particular, the inhabitants of Kangaroo Island took the new sailing techniques and became the leading maritime trading power in Australia. Their voyagers plied the stormy waters of Australia's southern coast, bypassing the desert barriers between east and west. In time, they or their successors may well have made contact of their own with Australia's northern neighbours. However, their progress was cut short on 6 August 1619, when Dutch sailors under the command of Frederik de Houtman landed on the banks of the Swan River...
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Australasia in 1618 is a complex group of societies, ranging from literate Iron Age urbanites to desert-dwelling hunters whose ways of life have barely changed in the last ten thousand years. It is a region with much common heritage, and some vast cultural differences. It is a region where the inhabitants have learned to master the challenges of nature, of flood, fire and drought, but where a much greater storm will soon break on their shores.
The south-western corner of Australia is a small region of fertile land surrounded by hostile deserts. Some domesticated crops spread here in the sixth century BC, and a trickle of new ideas and technology has continued ever since, but the region developed largely in isolation. Lacking a reliable source of tin, the region had only very limited supplies of bronze, but in the last few centuries, they discovered the arts of working in iron. Iron tools and weapons here are the most advanced in Australia. The Atjuntja were the most successful people to adopt these new technologies, and created a dominion which stretches from Esperance in the east to the Indian Ocean, and with its most northerly outpost a salt-harvesting works and penal colony at Shark Bay. The Atjuntja rule over an empire of multiple ethnicities, who speak dialects which are sometimes different enough to be considered distinct languages. Under the watchful eye of their armies, a steady stream of tribute flows to their capital at the White City [Albany]. The Atjuntja pour this wealth into two of their main passions; they are masters of working in stone and arranging the natural world to suit their vision. The carefully shaped glories of the Garden of Ten Thousand Steps and the grandeur of the Walk of Kings would be considered amongst the wonders of the world, if the world knew of them.
Northward of the Atjuntja dominions to the north are lands which they consider barren and useless. For northern Australia, particularly the northwest, has been the least-changed part of the continent. Until very recently, the inhabitants did not possess any crops suitable for tropical agriculture. Separated by desert barriers, the hunter-gatherer peoples are the most isolated on the continent. They do have some sporadic trade contact, which has seen the spread of some copper tools and a very few of iron, occasional beads, pendants or other jewellery, and even rarer textiles and ceramics, but their life here is the least changed from what would be recognised in our own history.
Eastward of the Atjuntja lies a treeless, barren plain which until recently formed their only line of communication with other civilizations. Now that role has been filled by a people who call themselves the Nangu, but who are known to outsiders as Islanders. They are inhabitants of Kangaroo Island who have taken the Polynesian navigational package and adapted it to the conditions of the Southern Ocean. The Islanders regularly voyage from the Atjuntja dominions in the west to Tasmania in the east, and occasionally beyond; their trading ships sometimes reach the coastal cities of southern New South Wales. North of the Island lies the Eyre Peninsula, a small fertile patch of land bounded by sea and northern deserts. This land is occupied by several city-states who have a loose alliance to defend each other against the expansionistic powers further east.
The Yorke Peninsula and the eastern side of the Gulf St Vincent, including modern Adelaide, contain richly fertile land and an abundance of copper and other metals. This is a much-contested region between two of the great powers of Australia. One of these is the resurgent Post-Imperial kingdom of Tjibarr, which has its heartland along the central Murray but which seeks to control the wealth of the lower Murray and the lands beyond. Tjibarr is the most powerful kingdom to reemerge after the collapse of the old Watjubaga Empire, but it is only one of several. The Post-Imperial Murray basin is a seething sea of cultural discontent overlying a wealth born of trade routes which have grown stronger since the collapse of the Empire. Famously argumentative and faction-ridden, the heirs of the Gunnagal show no inclination to reunite into any new empire. Nor have they managed to re-establish any control over the rebellious peoples of the Monaro plateau. That high country is still occupied by the Nguril and Kaoma, non-Gunnagalic peoples who have learnt to fight in the mountains, and who sometimes raid into the low-lying regions of the Murray basin.
When fighting for control of the Murray Mouth and its environs, the Tjibarr kingdom is opposed by the most populous empire in Australia, that of the Yadji. Named for their ruling dynasty, the Yadji are the descendants of the old Junditmara. With relatively rain-drenched lands and fertile soils, the Yadji dominions stretch from south-eastern South Australia and almost all of modern Victoria south of the Great Dividing Range, as far as East Gippsland. The Yadji are a rigidly hierarchical society bound by conventions of religion and tradition, and their government is among the most organised in Australasia. Trade contact via the Islanders has recently acquainted them with the arts of working in iron. They are particularly adept at building roads to allow swift transport between the key regions of their empire. Only in the north and north-west do they face serious opposition from the kingdom of Tjibarr, which relies on riverine control of the Murray to fend off the military advances of the Yadji.
To the north and east of the Yadji and the Murray basin dwell backward peoples, at least according to the standards of the city dwellers of those ancient lands. North of the Murray kingdoms lies the dry plains of modern New South Wales. A land of mostly flat ground and fading rains as one moves further west, this is not a region to support a large population in any one place. Food is not the limitation; even here, dryland Australian agriculture can supply a sufficient harvest to support a decent population. The limitation is water. Away from the permanent rivers, only limited amounts of water can be collected from wells, small dams, and rainwater cisterns. The open plains of central New South Wales are occupied by scattered agricultural communities and city-states, each of which defend larger areas of rangelands which they use for hunting and extraction of timber and other resources.
Bounded by the peaks of the Great Dividing Ranges and the Tasman Sea, the eastern coast of Australia is a narrow stretch of often rugged but well-watered land. By Australian standards, the rainfall here is high; sufficient to support a great variety of plants which do not grow west of the mountains. Several of these are spices which are traded further west; as far as the Murray kingdoms and the Yadji are concerned, this is the only feature of interest of the eastern seaboard. A few additional crops have been domesticated here, including additional species of wattles, and a few fruits, but these are mostly unknown further west. This region, stretching from East Gippsland in modern Victoria to southern Queensland, is inhabited by a variety of agricultural peoples. The rugged nature of the terrain and the limitations of transport technology has prevented the development of large political entities in most of this region. Most of the peoples here live in small farming communities which are usually separated into distinct valleys or coastal regions.
The introduction of better sailing technology from the Maori has seen the gradual development of seaborne trade routes linking these peoples, and while most of the peoples remain divided into small communities, a few reasonable sized kingdoms have emerged in some of the more open areas. The most significant of these is that of the Patjimunra in the Hunter Valley, where the former city-states were formed into an established kingdom after the collapse of the Empire. The Hunter Valley controls one of the best ways to cross the Great Dividing Range, and the Patjimunra have become wealthy through trade in spices. The Patjimunra are a Gunnagalic-speaking people, but their culture and religion has evolved along a distinct path from those further west. The kitjigal have developed into a rigid social hierarchy that defines all occupations and social contact. The other major nation along the eastern coast is the Daluming kingdom, formed by the Bungudjimay around modern Coffs Harbour. A non-Gunnagalic people who preserved their own language and way of life despite the Great Migrations, the Bungudjimay have religious beliefs and a social structure which is wholly alien to their neighbours, who consider them to be warlike, head-hunting savages.
Inland of the kingdom of Daluming lies the New England tablelands, an elevated region of high country with reasonably fertile soils and some of the best mineral wealth in Australia. This region is one of the two main sources of tin in Australia, and although it has elevated terrain, its climate is still mild enough that red yams and other crops can grow here. Politically, the New England tablelands are a confederation of several distinct peoples, who while they are sometimes wary of each other, are more concerned by the threat from Daluming to the east.
North of the New England tablelands, entering what is modern south-eastern Queensland, the agricultural population gradually diminishes. These regions are nearing the effective growing limit of the red yam, which was for so long the main staple crop of all farming peoples on the continent. Inland, the Darling Downs, a region of sweeping plains and open pastures, is covered by numerous small agricultural communities, but few large towns.
Around the coast, where drinking water is easier to obtain and seafood supplements the farming diet, the population density is higher. The modern regions of the Gold Coast, Moreton Bay and the Sunshine Coast are the home of the Kiyungu, another society born in the Great Migrations, and who have adapted to life in the northern sun. They are not very militaristic; the Empire never reached this far north, and they have no enemies worthy of the name. The Kiyungu are happy enough to squabble amongst themselves, while mostly living for trade. Their name for their own land translates as the Coral Coast. This is something of a misnomer, since most of the coral reefs are further north, but the Kiyungu had long learned to voyage north in small boats and dive to collect corals. This is a very valuable trade good which they exchange further south for tin and copper to supply them with bronze tools. The Coral Coast is home to several decent-sized cities, and the Kiyungu have picked up on Maori sailing techniques to extend their own trade network about halfway up the Queensland coast.
Beyond the Kiyungu lands and the Darling Downs, northern Australia was until recently almost the exclusive domain of hunter-gatherers. The Kiyungu maintained a few small fishing outposts and trading points along the coast, but otherwise farming and towns were non-existent. In the last century and a half, though, new tropical crops emerged. Kumara (sweet potato) and taro, brought across the seas by the strange Maori, first reached the Kiyungu around 1450 AD, and their cultivation has since spread inland.
Another new crop appeared in farmers' fields about half a century before that; a new kind of yam. It does not look quite like a regular red yam, it is smaller, and its roots are twisted. No-one is quite sure where it came from, and it does not always grow well on its own, but farmers learnt to cultivate it through cuttings, and then later through seed. This lesser yam does not yield as well as the common red yam, but it has one valuable quality; it can grow even in the northern fields where common yams wither [3]. The benefits are obvious, and farming has slowly spread further north. Central Queensland is in the midst of a process of transformation. Small agricultural communities have been established, but nomadic hunter-gatherer peoples have still not been completely displaced. The only decent-sized towns are on the coast, where offshoots of the Kiyungu are slowly spreading out. Farming peoples are on the advance once more, and absent outside influence, the northern migration will stop only at Cape York. As of 1618, though, the northernmost coastal outpost is at Mackay, and farming inland has not even spread that far.
Much further to the south, Tasmania in 1618 remains divided between the descendants of the Tjunini and the Kurnawal. Their long rivalry has divided much of the island between them, except for the spurned areas of the central highlands and south-western coast where the Palawa have developed a hunter-gardener lifestyle. The territorial and cultural conflicts between the Tjunini and the Kurnawal has produced two states with clearly-defined borders and patrolled frontiers. It has also meant that both peoples possess a strong sense of nationalism. In their language, their culture, their fashion, and their diet, the inhabitants of Tasmania define themselves as citizens of either the Tjunini confederation or the Kurnawal kingdom. It is often a mortal insult to suggest to a Tjunini that they act like or a Kurnawal, or vice versa. Their rivalry is not just cultural, but over land and trade. The best tin mines lie in the region of the disputed frontier, and the two nations have fought a seemingly endless series of wars over control of that region, and over other valuable agricultural land. Tasmanian tin and gum cider are held in high regard on the mainland, although neither of the two nations conducts much in the way of direct trade. The export of goods to and from the mainland is usually controlled by the Islanders.
In New Zealand, the Maori have benefitted immensely from the introduction of Australian domesticated crops and animals, although they also suffered from the arrival of blue-sleep and Marnitja, both of which have become endemic diseases. The Maori have been transformed from a hunter-gardener people into a culture of warrior-farmers. They have acquired knowledge of ceramics, writing, and metallurgy from Australia, and adapted them to suit their own culture. The Maori are unfortunately limited in their metallurgy, because New Zealand has virtually no native sources of tin; all of their bronze must be imported from Australia, and this is almost prohibitively expensive. Still, the fertile and well-watered lands of New Zealand support a much higher population density than virtually any part of Australia. The Maori population is more highly-concentrated in the North Island, but farming has spread throughout both of the main islands. The introduction of metal weapons and farming meant an increasing population and a long series of wars, which ended with consolidation into several major kingdoms in both of the main islands. The Maori are linked to Australia by small-scale but regular trade contact, and by much less frequent contact with their old homelands in Polynesia. Fortunately for the inhabitants of Polynesia, the travel time required, and the infrequency of those contacts, means that so far they have not been afflicted with Australian diseases.
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[1] Some things seem to be unavoidable, alas.
[2] The Palawa are essentially the historical Tasmanian Aborigines. The butterfly net has meant that their languages and cultures are effectively unchanged until first contact with the colonisers from the mainland.
[3] The lesser yam is the product of a hybridisation between the red yam (Dioscorea chelidonius) and one of its close relatives, the long yam (Dioscorea transversa). This hybridisation occurs occasionally whenever cultivated red yams are bred near wild long yams, which occurs in north-eastern New South Wales and southern Queensland. Like both of their parents, the hybrid yams have a perennial root system and their stems and leaves die back every year. The hybrid yams have tubers which are midway in size between the larger red yams and the smaller long yams, hence their name of "lesser yam." The first lesser yams are not interfertile with either of their parents, and since yams require both a male and female plant, were effectively sterile. Australian farmers have learned to propagate yams through using cuttings, though, and this allows them to propagate the lesser yams. Since hybrids show up on a fairly regular basis, this eventually means that they find strains of lesser yams which can fertilise each other and then be grown from seed. As a crop, the lesser yam offers a lower yield than red yams, and is somewhat less drought-tolerant, but one of the characteristics it has inherited from its long yam parent is the capacity to grow in the tropics.
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Thoughts?
Radek
Promethean
- Location
- A Cryptum, somewhere
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Absolutely fascinating stuff. War of the Princess? Am I to assume the name is apt and the whole mess started over a political marriage not working as intented? And what are the newcomers to make of this strange yet quite developed land?
Baron Steakpuncher
Hopeful Idealist
- Location
- Australia
Mmm, do any of these groups have access to longbows?
- Location
- Staring into the void
Minor nit-pic: OTL Kangaroo Island was known as Karta or "Island of the Dead" for all the mainland tribes who were in that area, with no settlements there from at lest 0CE, and there are no tribal claims on that area to this day.
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The War of the Princess is kind of like... well, it will be explained more fully in two more chapters. In short, think of an *Australian equivalent to the Iliad, started over what was meant to be a political marriage to bring about peace between the two peoples of Tjunini and Kurnawal, but it, well, didn't.
Europeans will find this quite a puzzling land, on the whole. Though in the short term they will mostly think of it as the Land of Gold, since Australia has a lot of that metal around, and the *Australians have been mining it for centuries.
The Palawa, aka native Tasmanians, use an equivalent of longbows. Other cultures don't have the right combination of the right socio-cultural environment and access to the right kind of timber.
These Islanders from Kangaroo Island are the descendants of Gunnagalic migrants who came over during the Great Migrations, not the original hunter-gatherer inhabitants.
Or at least mostly the descendants of Gunnagalic migrants. The mainlanders moved over about 750 BCE. I've seen estimates for about 3000-200 BCE for when the original remnant Kangaroo Island population died/abandoned the island for the mainland. So in this TL there may have been a few hunter-gatherer inhabitants left at the time the agriculturalists moved in. If so, they would have been largely absorbed by the more numerous farming peoples.
- Location
- Staring into the void
I only mentioned it because I grew up in the area, and was informed by indigenous locals that going to K.I. was taboo, because that's where the dead went. Which is why it was never resettled, till Europeans did.
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
This is the point at which shit gets real, and the Dutch presence begins to breach the rest of the butterfly net, yes?
Oh, it's certainly interesting how long the tradition must have lasted, because the inhabitants died out at least 2000 years ago, but the tradition was preserved so well.
Another example of how impressive the tradition preservation was is in parts of northern Queensland, where the locals had detailed descriptions of the lands which were submerged at the end of the last Ice Age, including places such as where water could be found in them and so forth. And those lands were submerged ten thousand years ago, but the descriptions were preserved so well for all of that time.
Merci. This is fun to write, albeit time-consuming too.
This is the date when things will change, yes. In terms of how I tell the story, the next 10 chapters are given over to describing some of the main indigenous societies as they are in 1619. Then the story moves on to the tale of European contact and its consequences.
Lands of Red and Gold #12: Men of Blood and Iron
Lands of Red and Gold #12: Men of Blood and Iron
The south-western corner of Australia is a complex mixture of fertile coastal land gradually melding into an arid interior. Around the coast, frequent rains fall, creating what is by Australian standards a well-watered climate. Before European arrival, this land sustained forests of towering 90-metre karri trees, among the tallest trees in the world, and abundant jarrah trees, whose timber was so reminiscent of New World mahogany trees that European colonists would call it Swan River Mahogany. Moving inland, the climate becomes gradually drier, although there is enough fertile land to produce half of modern Australia's wheat harvest. Moving even further inland, the wheat-producing regions gradually fade into more arid desert, although the dry interior contains abundant mineral resources, including large deposits of iron and nickel and a third of the world's known gold reserves. Although possessed of abundant resources, this region is extremely isolated from the rest of Australia; the state capital Perth is closer to Indonesia's capital Jakarta than it is to the Australian national capital in Canberra.
In allohistorical Australia, the fertile south-western corner was for long isolated from the rest of the continent. Although the climate was suitable for growing the native crop package, the separation of desert barriers meant that it took millennia for crops to be transported further west. Fortunately for the peoples of the south-west, the isolation was not complete. Traders and travellers sometimes crossed the deserts, and they brought food back with them. Since any careful desert-crosser brings more food than they need, this sometimes meant that samples of domesticated crops reached south-western Australia.
From this source, farming slowly developed in the west. Small-scale growing of red yams started around 550 BC, and other crops followed. The Yuduwungu people around modern Esperance became the first farmers of the south-west, adopting red yams, bramble wattles, and native flax from the east. Their isolation from the east remained quite substantial, enough that murnong, one of the key staple crops in eastern Australia, was not grown in the south-west until carried by Islander ships in the fifteenth century [1]. However, the Yuduwungu farmers developed some new crops of their own, such as the tooth-bearing wattle, manna wattle, warran yam, and bush potato [2].
Pre-farming south-western Australia was occupied by a group of eleven peoples who spoke related dialects and shared a common cultural heritage. The Yuduwungu were just one of these peoples; collectively the eleven groups referred to themselves as the Yaora [3]. Eight of these peoples lived along the coast. Moving clockwise, these were the Yuduwungu, the Wadjureb, the Pitelming, the Atjuntja, the Madujal, the Djarwari, the Inayaki and the Binyin. Three other related peoples occupied the inland "wheat belt" regions: the Nyunjari, the Wurama and the Baiyurama. Unlike in the east, where farmers displaced hunter-gatherers, amongst the Yaora, farming spread quickly enough that the individual peoples adopted crops and technologies rather than being displaced. By about 300 AD, the eleven Yaora peoples had all taken up farming and sedentary lifestyles.
The Yaora peoples occupied an area which in terms of modern Australia comprises everything west of a line roughly from Geraldton to Esperance. They called their home country Tiayal, meaning "the Middle Country." In their early religion and worldview, their homelands were the only important fertile country in the universe; to the south and west were endless seas and to the north and east were hostile desert wastelands. They were only vaguely aware of any peoples beyond the Middle Country; trade routes to the north brought pearl shells from the northern coastline of Australia, while trade routes to the east had brought a few crops and decorative items, but with only very sporadic contact.
The isolation of the Middle Country meant that many of the fundamental elements of Gunnagalic civilization further east were only slowly transmitted to the western outlier. Ceramics were spread relatively early, since storage jars and other containers were among the goods transported across the desert. Domesticated ducks were brought directly across by a returning traveller (and cross-bred with their wild relatives), and this became inspiration for an independent domestication of the emu. However, many other ideas and technologies did not spread until much later. Sometimes this was to the detriment of the Yaora; knowledge of writing took a long time to spread across the desert. Sometimes the slow transmission of knowledge would turn out to be to their advantage. Nowhere would this be clearer than in metallurgy.
The basics of metallurgy were known to the Yuduwungu and other early Yaora peoples, but only in limited form. They were broadly aware of the process of smelting metal, enough to create copper tools of their own. Yet while they received a few bronze tools and weapons, these came through very long trade routes; the source of tin was not just across the desert, but at the other end of Gunnagalia. This meant that the early Yaora peoples never learnt to recognise tin ore, and in any case they had only one possible source of tin (near modern Bunbury). The developing Yaora civilizations knew how to smelt and work copper, but their only other metal tools were made from a metal which fell from the sky: meteoric iron.
In the end, this would be an inspiration.
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In the traditional chronology of prehistory, technology progressed from the Stone Age (Neolithic) to a Copper Age (Chalcolithic), to a Bronze Age, and then finally to an Iron Age. Each of these developments provided some advantages over the preceding age. Copper tools gave more flexibility without replacing stone tools. Bonze was a stronger and more useful metal than unalloyed copper, although it required higher smelting temperatures and a functioning trade network to supply tin. Early ironworking techniques did not provide a stronger metal than bronze, but allowed for much more widespread use of metal; iron ore is much more abundant than the components of bronze, especially tin.
However, the historical record is more complex than a simple progression between ages. Some cultures never went through a copper age, and some cultures did not go through a bronze-working period before they started working with iron (such as in West Africa). It is still an open question as to whether a civilization needs to progress through bronze working before it develops ironworking techniques. Sub-Saharan Africa may well have developed ironworking independently without ever having a bronze-working period; sources disagree as to whether the West African ironsmiths learnt ironworking on their own or whether they were inspired directly or indirectly from ironworking in the region of present-day Sudan. Ironworking in western Eurasia came later than bronze-working, but the techniques involved in Western ironworking (in bloomeries) are quite distinct from those used in bronze-working [4]. It seems that rather than being based on previous knowledge of bronze-working, early western Eurasian ironworking was an independent development. Or, at the very least, it was based on indirect inspiration; the earliest west Eurasian blacksmiths may well have known that their neighbours heated and worked bronze, but did their own experimentation with iron and produced the first wrought iron [5].
The metalworkers in the Middle Country were in a similar situation with respect to the main metallurgists further east. They knew enough about metal to know how to smelt it, but they did not know the full bronze-working techniques, and were forced to develop other methods. Apart from copper, they had much rarer meteoric iron, which they could work into useful tools. The techniques needed to work meteoric iron are exactly the same as those used to work iron once it has been created in a bloomery. Meteoric iron was available in the Middle Country, but so were earthly forms of iron ore. In particular, magnetite ore is abundant in several sources near Albany. Magnetite ore is easily recognisable as being related to meteoric iron; lumps of magnetite have a close enough resemblance to meteorites that they can mislead meteorite hunters. In time, smiths around Albany started to experiment with magnetite, and discovered techniques of burning it with charcoal, which gave them an abundant source of iron which they could work using already familiar techniques. The Middle Country had entered the Iron Age.
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With the spread of farming, the Yaora peoples developed into a distinctive cultural zone. While they had some differences in speech – not all of their dialects were mutually intelligible – they remained in close contact with each other. They shared the same broad religious beliefs, including a few concepts which were transmitted from the older Gunnagalic cultures further to the east. These concepts had been changed considerably through travellers' misunderstandings, the difficulties of translation, and the tyranny of distance.
To the Yaora, the universe comprises three "substances," which can be broadly translated as solid, liquid, and gas. All solid objects are only separate flavours of the underlying substance, and all liquids and gases are similarly flavours of separate underlying substances. Each of these substances is mutable into each of the other forms, but through the actions of the universal symbol of eternity: water. To the Yaora, water is the driver of the cycles of eternity, the physical manifestation of time. They acquired the old Gunnagalic belief of the universe being eternal, but they adapted it into their observations of the properties of water. The Yaora know that water can transform from solid to liquid to gas, even though their knowledge of solid water is limited to a few rare instances of snow and frost, and they think that clouds are formed of gaseous water, not liquid water drops. The Yaora believe that the transformation of water between its three forms is what drives the movement of time and eternity.
The Yaora religion is based in part on their understanding of the role of water as an agent of erosion. Living in a flood-prone land, they know how the actions of water can remove soil and stone. They recognise sand as rocks which have been worn away from solid hills, and believe that this sand is in the process of being transformed into liquid over a very long time. In their cosmology, the sun is viewed as the Source which drives the actions of water through evaporation from the oceans and precipitation when rain falls onto the land. They also believe that the Source acts on solid rock, heating the water within it and causing it to expand, which means that hills gradually rise from the earth over time. These hills are then eroded away by water, turned into part of the oceans, and then eventually solidify beneath the waves to be carried back to join the land. All of this is viewed as part of the same underlying cycle of eternity; they believe that the world has always been and will always be.
The Yaora as a whole do not have a concept of a creator deity, although some of the individual peoples will later develop such views. Instead, the Yaora believe in beings called kuru, a word which originally meant "reflection," since kuru were thought of as reflections in the ever-ocean. Kuru are not considered to be eternal beings in themselves; it is believed that they will eventually dissolve back into the ever-ocean. Still, some of them have lifespans long enough that they may as well be immortal, from a human point of view.
Kuru are perceived as varying greatly in power; some are powerful and can be worshipped or appeased, whereas others are weak or mischievous and simply cause trouble for people. Phenomena such as thunder and lightning are thought to be the actions of particularly transient kuru which are soon going to dissolve back into the ever-ocean. Some kuru are associated with particular concepts such as growth, fertility or courage, and are called on for blessings or favours for people who are in need. One quality which all kuru have in common is that they cannot stand directly in the light of the Source without being slowly weakened. Greater kuru might be able to withstand sunlight for hours, while lesser kuru would be dissolved in seconds. This means that all worship is conducted out of direct sunlight, whether indoors or just under trees or some other covering.
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For centuries after the adoption of farming, the Yaora lived in small communities, and had no larger political entities than city-states. Over time, a few of these developed into small kingdoms. While they occasionally went conquering over large areas, none of them successfully held onto their conquests.
Things changed with the discovery of ironworking in the twelfth century. Ironworking spread rapidly, with the new technology allowing much greater access to metal tools than anything in previous Australian history, even more than the abundant bronze of the Cider Isle. Iron tools allowed more clearing of land and more effective farming techniques. Iron weapons could be cheaply supplied to armies in a way which had never before been seen in the Middle Country. The result was a rapid social and political transformation, particularly amongst the Atjuntja, the first people to work iron, and the ones who would put it to the greatest use.
Writing was unknown to the Atjuntja at the time when iron was discovered, so the early history of the Atjuntja conquerors was preserved only in oral form, and would not be transcribed until many years later, when memory had faded and exaggerations and distortions became commonplace. It is known that the Atjuntja had long dwelt in the country around historical Albany, around the shores of King Georges Sound, which formed the largest deepwater harbour in the Middle Country. They were divided into three main city-states: the White City [Albany], Warneang [Denmark] and Fog City [Walpole], along with several smaller towns and settlements.
The Atjuntja drew much of their food from fishing, while inland much of their country was covered in trees which were difficult to clear with copper and stone tools. The Atjuntja were less numerous than many of their neighbours, until they discovered how to work the magnetite iron in their territory. With iron tools, they started to clear the forests and plant yams and wattles to feed a burgeoning population. Disputes over this land led to wars between the three main Atjuntja city-states, which were ended when King Banyar of the White City defeated both of his rivals and proclaimed himself the Kaat-kaat (King of Kings) of the Atjuntja. His heirs would go on to conquer much further.
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In 1618, the Atjuntja rule an empire which controls all of the Middle Country. The Kings of Kings have even expanded further than the old Yaora lands. The region around Geraldton is the northernmost area where large-scale agriculture is sustainable, but the rule of the Kings of Kings stretches further; they have a penal colony and salt-harvesting works on the shores of Shark Bay. In the eastern frontier of their territory, they have pushed into the semi-arid region around Kalgoorlie. The land there is poorly watered, but it holds something of great value: gold. The Atjuntja esteem gold; they call it 'sun's blood' and view it as the solid form of the Source. The harsh environment of the desert does not make for long life amongst the miners, but the Kings of Kings care little for that.
Within this vast expanse of territory, the Atjuntja rule over everything, but not always directly. The Atjuntja are only one people amongst many in their empire, by now the largest single ethnicity, but still a minority of the overall population. The nature of their rule varies from region to region, reflecting both the duration of their rule in each region, and the form of its conquest. The Atjuntja began their expansion in the thirteenth century, acquiring writing only when they conquered the Wadjureb people around Ravensthorpe in the mid-fourteenth century, and completing their expansion with the conquest of Geraldton in 1512. There is no longer any need for armies of conquest; the remaining military forces are used as garrisons to preserve the peace.
Rebellions are hardly an unknown occurrence, although they have been growing less frequent in the last half-century. Their empire includes a patchwork of individual regions, some with explicit privileges established as part of their conquest, and some peoples who have been displaced entirely from their original homeland. The general practice of the Kings of Kings has been to leave local institutions in place unless threatened by revolt. Some peoples have been more accepting of Atjuntja rule than others. The Pitelming rebelled one time too often and were forcibly deported from their homelands and resettled in small groups across the empire, except for those who were sent to the mines. In some regions, the non-Atjuntja populations are gradually assimilating to the dominant culture; the prestige attached to the Atjuntja dialect means that many of the related dialects are being abandoned. In other regions, the other Yaora peoples still remain attached to their own culture and heritage even if they are quiescent under Atjuntja rule.
Imperial administration is based on a combination of Atjuntja aristocrats and local potentates who have been integrated into the ruling class. They have established a number of garrison-cities which serve both as bastions of imperial military power, and as centres of trade and administration. Most of these garrison-cities have turned into local metropolises, with attached towns developing outside the walls of the main garrison. Among the largest garrison-cities are Lobster Waters [Jurien Bay], Spear Mountain [Merredin] – where an ingeniously-built dam collects most of the water that falls on the mountain – Corram Yibbal [Bunbury], Archers Nest [Redcliffe, a suburb of Perth], and Red Eye [Ravensthorpe]. Trade focuses on these centres, and travels along the well-maintained roads which the Atjuntja have built between the garrison-cities. This is the most extensive road network anywhere in allohistorical Australia, thanks to the use of iron tools which makes construction much easier.
From the garrison-cities, the imperial administrators oversee the collection of the yearly tribute from the subject peoples. This is rigorously gathered, in a variety of forms depending on the region, imperial requirements, and the preferences of the subject peoples. Some tribute is collected in local produce, such as dyes, timber, oils, incense, lorikeet and cockatoo feathers, copper, or iron. Sometimes the tribute is collected in staple crops and foods, particularly to feed the garrison-cities and the imperial workforce. Sometimes the tribute is collected in labour drafts.
The Atjuntja have developed a methodical system for managing labour and the workforce throughout their empire. Most of this labour is used in public works and major engineering projects, such as roads, buildings, earthworks, and the like. Most of the labourers are required to work only at certain times of the year. This is usually in the winter and early spring, which coincides both with the least wearying part of the year for heavy labour, and with the timings of harvests. After the yams have been harvested and the wattles pruned, and before it is time to replant them or collect the first wattle seeds, the imperial administrators demand the labour of tens of thousands of people for a fixed period of time. These labour drafts are widespread, but permanent slavery is much rarer, used mostly for the gold mines in the interior. For regular subjects, the labour draft is a wearying but predictable part of their yearly life. While they may serve on a variety of projects, the single largest use of drafted labour is working in the imperial capital, the White City.
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The White City, some call it, or the City Between The Waters, or the Place of Twin Peaks, or the Centre of Time. Another history would call it Albany, the first deepwater port in Western Australia, located on a large mostly sheltered harbour called King Georges Sound, which contains two completely sheltered harbours inside, Princess Royal Harbour and Oyster Harbour. To the Atjuntja who live in the White City, the Sound is simply the Sea Lake, and they call the two interior harbours West Water [Princess Royal] and North Water [Oyster]. It is the centre of their universe, the largest city in the known world, the dwelling place of the King of Kings. Most of its residents would prefer never to live anywhere else; those who are appointed elsewhere as governors or soldiers treat it as an exile, no matter how important the duty.
The oldest part of the White City was founded between two mountains, the Twins, Un Koit [Mt Clarence] and Un Bennan [Mt Melville]. Strong walls once protected this city, but the walls have long since been torn down, their stone going to new buildings. No foreign army has threatened the White City in over two centuries, and the inhabitants have many uses for building material.
The core of the White City is still in the land between the mountains, including most of the public buildings. Many drafted labourers have worked over long years to produce the great monuments and public buildings of the White City, and their work continues. Here, in the old heart of the White City is the Palace of a Thousand Rooms, for the private use of the King of Kings, his many wives, administrators, and honoured guests. Here is the grandeur of the Walk of Kings, the great avenue which runs between the two mountains. Most of the other public buildings adjoin the Walk of Kings: the Garden of Ten Thousand Steps is halfway along; the public temples to the Lord and the Lady are here, along with smaller shrines to a dozen well-known kuru; the public arena of the House of Pain is at the western end, with the private rooms built into the mountain; the House of the Songs adjoins the Walk, where the greatest of musicians in the Middle Country come to study their craft; and so does the Mammang, the great school where the sons of Atjuntja nobility come to receive military and religious schooling.
Everything about the heart of the White City is built to impress. The Walk of Kings runs in a straight line between the two mountains, with fountains every hundred steps, towering jarrah trees planted to shade the walkers, and columns and statues to depict imperial accomplishments and religious figures. The Garden of Ten Thousand Steps is where the Atjuntja indulge their love of the natural world. It is said that with every step there is a new marvel to see, a new flower or tree [6], or a new arrangement of stones and trees, artificial waterfalls, or flocks of sacred ducks bred for bright colours. Disturbing the ducks is punishable by eventual death. Everywhere in the Garden is the sound of water, flowing, bubbling, or cascading down rocks.
At the eastern end of the Walk is the Palace. Most of it is private, but at the appropriate season visitors can walk up the limestone steps, past statues of cockatoos, lorikeets, and goannas carved so that they appear to be about to jump into the air. At the top, there is a large covered balcony where the King of Kings sits to watch public events. He sits on the Petal Throne, symbolic of the Atjuntja veneration of all flowering plants, which has been carved in a shape of forty petals opening as if part of a very large flower.
The grandeur of the public buildings is what most visitors to the White City remember, but this is a much larger city. The outlying districts extend much further than the old heartland, filled with houses and markets, storehouses, smaller shrines, and the three schools for common Atjuntja men, women, and foreigners. Two hundred thousand people live here at the busiest times of the year, although many of those are drafted labourers who return to their homes outside of draft times. The storehouses are full of the wattleseeds and yams needed to feed the burgeoning population, and the main imperial roads are always busy with traffic bringing in food, other tribute, and trade goods. The people, the gardens and the fountains are watered by several aqueducts which come from the mountain ranges to the north [7].
The White City includes a foreign quarter, built on the eastern side of North Water, to keep outlanders and their influences away from the royal city. This is where Islander ships and merchants visit in regular fleets, and a few of them have settled permanently. They have their own small temples where they complete the rituals of the Sevenfold Path in accordance with the teachings of the Good Man, but strictly-enforced imperial law forbids them from proselytising within the White City.
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As a ruling class, the Atjuntja are divided into noble families and commoners, although even common Atjuntja are believed to outrank all but the most favoured of subject peoples. Governors and military commanders are chosen exclusively from the Atjuntja aristocracy, although there are protocols whereby high-status nobility from the subject peoples can be adopted into the Atjuntja ruling class. This adoption is subject to acceptance of Atjuntja ways, including learning their dialect and adopting a proper mode of dress and appearance. The most visible mark of this acceptance is the full beard which all Atjuntja men are expected to wear; a man's beard is regarded as a sign of strength and virility.
The Atjuntja system of nobility includes a variety of ranks and offices, the highest of which can be roughly translated as "king." In keeping with long-standing tradition, the heads of the thirteen greatest noble families are accorded that title. Each of them is officially a king of a particular place, such as the other ancient Atjuntja city-states of Warneang and Fog City, or the newer garrison-cities. The link of these titles to geographic locations has long since been broken; the leading members of the nobility prefer to live in civilization in the White City and let lesser family members deal with the bothersome business of administration. In any case, governors to the garrison-cities are appointed by the reigning emperor without any regard to which noble family claims the royal title for that city.
Overseeing the whole empire is the emperor, the King of Kings, the Voice of Divinity. The emperor is chosen from among the members of the imperial family, and in theory each King of Kings is confirmed (elected) by the kings of the noble families. In practice most emperors have appointed their own successor from amongst their sons or other kin, and the kings have simply acclaimed the new monarch. In a few cases of disputed succession, or where the King of Kings has died without an appointed heir, the decision of the kings has mattered.
The protocol surrounding the King of Kings is elaborate, based on his divine status. The title of Voice of Divinity is no mere formality, but given in recognition of this status. Only those who are "blessed" are permitted to hear the Voice speak; this naturally includes the nobility of all ranks, and palace servants and the like, but otherwise is a rare honour bestowed on those who have performed exceptional service to the empire. Apart from this, people may come in audience before the Voice, or the army may march past his balcony while he sits on the Petal Throne, but they do not hear his voice. The Voice uses a range of gestures to indicate his intent, with meanings such as "tell me more," "you have done well," and "you may leave me." A few Voices have developed their own forms of sign language and use an interpreter to convey more precise meanings, although most Voices have thought that commoners have little to say that is worth hearing.
In 1618, the imperial dignity is held by a man named Kepiuc Tjaanuc. He is the Voice of Divinity, but to be honest, the blessed often wish that they did not have that status, so that they would not have to hear him speak. He can talk, can the Voice. Too many bright ideas, too many questions, and too many whims for the nobles to feel comfortable hearing him speak. Not to mention too many wives. There is no restriction on the number of wives which a man of noble blood can take – commoners are permitted a maximum of three, of course, and then only if they can pay for a separate house for each wife – but the Voice married his 101st wife last winter solstice, far more than any other nobleman in living memory. Some less charitable gossip, carefully repeated out of the ears of any untrustworthy listeners, is that the Voice can no longer remember how to do anything with his wives other than talk to them; certainly, he has not fathered as many sons as would be expected for a man with so many wives. Perhaps he only married them so that they have to listen to him.
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Writing is not a native concept for the Atjuntja, but something which they acquired in the process of expanding their dominions. The first people in the Middle Country to develop writing were the Yuduwungu, who acquired it by stimulus-diffusion from across the desert. While direct contact with the east was limited, some trade flowed across the desert. This included a variety of decorative objects such as pendants and bracelets which were inscribed with messages. Some of the containers for trade goods had labels of their contents. Travellers to the east rarely learned writing themselves; literacy in the Gunnagalic script took years to acquire, due to its complexity. Still, they were aware of the existence of writing, and their tales percolated throughout the Yuduwungu lands.
In the eleventh century, a Yuduwungu artisan named Nuneloc developed a writing system based on what he had heard of the system to the east, and using examples which he had available. Many of the symbols which he used were borrowed from the Gunnagalic script, but used for completely different sounds, and some of the symbols were invented outright [8]. The script was fundamentally syllabic, although also proto-alphabetic because related signs were used for syllables with the same initial consonants but different vowels. Nuneloc had his name immortalised, since it became the root of the Yuduwungu word for writing, and which in time would be passed on to the Atjuntja.
By the time the Atjuntja started conquering, writing had spread as far as the neighbouring Wadjureb people. The Atjuntja adopted the system of writing, finding it extremely useful in maintaining their empire, but its use is limited to preferred purposes. They keep some religious texts and have some of their epic poems and songs written down. They keep detailed records to support their administration of the empire, included lists of tribute collected from each region, the number of people present, and so on. The last Atjuntja census revealed just over 1.75 million people live under the rule of the King of Kings. They have public inscriptions announcing the glory of their rulers, but even then they rely as much on the carvings and sculpture as on the content of the inscriptions. For the Atjuntja like everything to be a spectacle or festival. Ideally both. Sports, military parades and triumphs, and celebrations of the harvests are all conducted in the most ostentatious manner possible.
As are religious experiences.
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The Atjuntja share the same ancestral religion as all the Yaora peoples, but their beliefs have evolved into an overarching dualism. They believe in the same kuru and water-cycles as their kin, but they also worship two divine beings, whose names translate roughly as the Lord and the Lady. Theological interpretations differ (sometimes violently) as to the underlying nature of these beings. One school of thought can be approximately translated as literalists; its adherents consider the Lord and the Lady to be literal beings which have a tangible existence, personalities and so forth. The other main school of religious thought can be roughly translated as abstractionists; they hold that that the designations Lord and Lady are merely a convenient shorthand for what are underlying principles and basic nature of the universe itself.
Regardless of which theological viewpoint individual Atjuntja hold – and the last four Kings of Kings have been careful never to take an official position on the matter – the consequences of these beliefs are similar. The Lady is given a number of titles to represent her essential nature: She Who Creates, the Lady of Goodness, the Patron of Beauty, the Giver of Wisdom, the Incarnator. The Lord is given a corresponding set of titles: He Who Destroys, the Lord of Evil, the Unmaker, the Bringer of Pain, the Harvester of Souls. The Atjuntja believe that the two deities (or principles) act in dynamic unison over the course of eternity. Both are necessary; goodness cannot exist without evil to define it. All that is created will eventually be destroyed; from the shards of what has been destroyed, new things will be remade.
Worship of the Lord and Lady takes many forms, most of them public and ostentatious. Yet the rituals which make the most vivid impression on outside visitors are those associated with some of the more negative aspects of the Lord. Visiting Islanders and other occasional eastern guests are disgusted by them; later European visitors will be similarly appalled.
In Atjuntja theology, a certain amount of misery, pain and death are demanded by the Lord. It is unavoidable, either as part of His wishes (according to literalists) or a fundamental aspect of the universe (according to abstractionists). Since misery, pain and death cannot be prevented, it is best to arrange for them to happen in a form which minimises the effects on the world. Better to inflict pain in a carefully-controlled manner than to leave it to run wild throughout the Middle Country; better to appease the Lord with appropriate ritual torture and bloodletting rather than to allow death to strike where it wishes.
The rituals involved with these aspects of the worship of the Lord are conducted in a building whose formal name translates as the House of Absolution, but which is colloquially and more widely known as the House of Pain. Its priests are titled Appeasers. The House includes both public and private sections, including one large public arena where the major rituals are conducted. The arena can seat over twenty thousand, and it is regularly filled by people who have come to bear witness.
The House hosts two main kinds of rituals, the sacrifices conducted by the Appeasers themselves, and blood bouts performed entirely by guests. The sacrifices are conducted using a variety of techniques which are best not described too closely, but which fall into two basic classes: "to the pain" or "to the death." In either case, the Appeasers work as slowly as possible, gradually increasing the intensity of their efforts. When a person is sacrificed to the pain, the ritual will continue until they signal for it to stop; a sacrifice to the death is self-explanatory.
Sacrificial victims are all volunteers. In theory, at least. The Atjuntja hold that a sacrifice from a person of noble blood is far more effective at appeasing the Lord than that of a commoner. A certain number of members of each noble family are sacrificed to the pain every year. The longer the sacrifice continues without the victim calling it to a halt, the more efficacious it is judged to be. Human nature being what it is, the noble families compete with each other to win the greatest spiritual rewards – to say nothing of public acclaim and honour – by how long their children can last in the sacrifice. Stoic endurance is deemed a major virtue, since there is no better method to appease the Lord. The Appeasers are rarely short of volunteers, both from noble and common stock.
Sacrifices to the death are rarer; in a normal year the standard number is thirteen. In bad years, such as those afflicted by diseases or extended droughts, it is common for the King of Kings to request more volunteers. Such requests are usually honoured; a large part of a region's annual tribute can be in the form of people to be sacrificed to the death. However, this is one instance where the imperial administrators will never demand tribute in this form; such offers must always come from the individuals concerned. This is not out of any sense of squeamishness or even out of any fear of alienating their subjects, but simply a result of their religious beliefs. A forced sacrifice will not appease the Lord; if anything, it will simply invite His attention and risk Him taking a more direct hand in worldly affairs.
Or so commoners and subject peoples believe, at any rate. Many of the upper classes have fewer scruples when it comes to their own kin. It is not unknown for less favoured members of a noble family to volunteer to take the ultimate sacrifice. Even the royal family are not above such requests; being a surplus prince is not an indicator of a long life expectancy.
The other form of religious ritual in the House of Pain is the blood bout. This is a contest between (usually) two volunteers, fought with the objective of inflicting pain, loss of blood, and eventual death. Volunteers for these bouts are usually from the lower classes; most noble families prefer to win honour through sacrifices instead. Blood bouts are usually held only once a year, as part of broader religious ceremonies involved with the start of the new year. Blood bouts are fought using a number of stylised weapons, or (rarely) bare-fisted. Armour is not permitted, beyond basic clothing for modesty. Weapons are designed to make it difficult to inflict a single killing blow. The blood battlers are expected to kill slowly; the most favoured contest is one where the loser dies from slowly bleeding through a large number of small cuts. It is quite common for both contestants to die in a blood bout, although some particularly gifted duellists have survived bouts for several successive years.
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The House of Pain will attract most early attention when Europeans first discover about Atjuntja religion. Still, the Atjuntja beliefs are far more complex than this, a combination of their own special interests and older traditions which have been subsumed into their theology. One older belief which has become integral to Atjuntja religion is their study of the heavens. Several Yaora peoples interpreted the constellations and other heavenly bodies in terms of movements in the great water-cycles, and believed that a proper study of celestial events would yield detailed knowledge of signs and omens to guide the decisions of men. Of the various groups who held these beliefs, none would take them further than the Yuduwungu.
Before the invention of writing, Yuduwungu astrologers established an observation point far inland. They chose a plateau which they called the Heights of Heaven, although it would later come to be called Star Hill [Boorabin]. From this inland vantage, they had much clearer skies to watch the heavens and study the signs and omens. They established a tradition of picking the keenest-sighted people in the land and sending them to Star Hill to become apprentices to study the craft of astrology. The astrologers of Star Hill became dedicated to studying the heavens, and built up a detailed oral system which described the known constellations, stars, planets, and some records of meteors and comets. The sect became known as the Watchers, and the Yuduwungu gave them the same veneration which classical Greeks would give the Oracle of Delphi.
When Nuneloc developed his script, it did not take long for the practice to spread to the Watchers. They added their own system of signs for numbers, and transferred their oral knowledge into written form. The Watchers began to keep a very detailed record of constellations, stellar movements, and new celestial bodies such as comets, novas, and the like. Living in a plateau in the desert, with clear skies and no distractions, they became very good at watching. With much time for contemplation, they discovered a variety of astronomical truths, although these were wrapped up in astrological terms and incorporated into their system of predictions. When the Atjuntja conquerors came, they did not interfere with the Watchers; indeed, several of the Kings of Kings have allocated labour to construct expanded buildings for the Watchers.
Over the centuries, the Watchers have accumulated a detailed body of astronomical knowledge. They have very thorough records of the constellations and individual stars, and their observers are astute enough to have recognised the precession of the equinoxes over the five and a half centuries in which they have been keeping records. They have a detailed record of every comet, solar and lunar eclipse which has been visible above the Middle Country since 1076, except for a twenty-year gap between 1148-1168 where several records were lost due to flooding. They keep a calendar of meteor showers, and have recognised most (but not all) novae which have been visible since their records began.
In common with European and other astronomers, they know of the supernova which occurred in 1604; brighter than any other celestial body apart from the Moon and Venus [9]. The Watchers are still arguing over exactly what that new star meant, although most of them agree that it was ominous. On their advice, the then-King of Kings requested fifty volunteers to be sacrificed to the death in 1605, to appease the threat contained in this new sign in the heavens. They are aware that the world is round, although they have no particular interest in calculating its size. Their star catalogues and their dedicated observations have allowed them to recognise Uranus, which they include in their list of wandering stars (i.e. planets).
In short, if European astronomers gain access to the Watchers' records, they will find much to interest them.
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[1] The crops which are brought overland across the desert are only those which travellers would bring with them, and which would survive replanting. Red yam tubers were often taken back by traders, since they were a large and valuable source of food. Red yams are also useful since they do not need to be planted intact; like other Australian yam species, only the top part of the tuber needs to be planted in the soil to regrow. Western Australian peoples already knew how to harvest and replant a local yam species (the warran yam), although they had not fully domesticated it. Travellers who brought red yams back with them to the west would cut slices off a yam tuber as they travelled, using it as food. If the top part of the yam tuber survived the trip, they would sometimes replant it. With their familiarity with harvesting warran yams, this meant that they could apply those techniques to a new crop which was more suitable for full domestication.
The other crops which were brought over were seed crops (wattle seeds, flax seeds), which traders also brought with them as food. Seed crops were ground into flour and cooked as seedcakes, much as Aboriginal peoples did in historical Australia. Since the seeds were not ground until they were used, this mean that surplus seeds were also available for replanting if they were brought back west. Some other eastern crops were not suitable for transport in this manner; the tubers of murnong are too small to be useful to bring back intact, and the seeds of nettles were not harvested.
[2] The tooth-bearing wattle (Acacia dentifera) is a small shrub which provides a large seed yield for its size, and manna wattle (A. microbotrya) produces abundant quantities of wattle gum. The warran yam (Dioscorea hastifolia) is a real yam species which was historically used by the Noongar and other peoples of south-western Australia. Warran yams were harvested with the upper part of the tuber being replanted to allow it to regrow and collect a fresh tuber the next year. Warran yams are not quite as well-suited to arid conditions as red yams, and do not provide as large yields per acre, although their taste will be preferred by some Yaora peoples. Australia includes a large number of plants which have been called "bush potatoes"; the species described here is Platysace deflexa, whose potential as a domesticable crop is being explored in recent plantings. The main role of the warran yam and bush potato is as secondary staple crops which do not yield as heavily in nutritional terms as red yams, but add variety to the diet, and offer some security for food supply if disease or other misfortune affects the red yam harvest.
[3] Historically, most of the fertile regions of south-western Australia were similarly occupied by a group of thirteen related peoples who broadly considered themselves part of the same culture. They collectively called themselves the Noongar (although the name is transliterated into English in a variety of other spellings), and spoke related dialects (or related languages, depending on who you ask). The Noongar did not occupy an area quite as large as the allohistorical Yaora; the borders of their country were roughly everything south and west of a line from Jurien Bay to Ravensthorpe, Western Australia.
[4] Early bronze-working involved smelting of copper and tin, alloying those metals, and then casting them into tools or weapons. Early ironworking in bloomeries did not involve melting iron ore. Instead, it involved burning iron ore with charcoal so that the iron ore was reduced to iron without ever reaching its melting temperature, and then working the iron while it was heated, but still solid.
[5] Chinese ironworking techniques were quite distinct; they developed the blast furnace much earlier than in western Eurasia, and melted iron ore until it formed into cast iron.
[6] South-western Australia is a region of substantial biodiversity, with over seven thousand species of vascular plants. The Atjuntja don't have every one of those kinds of plants in the Garden, but they give it their best shot.
[7] Two mountain ranges, the Stirling Range and Porongurup Range, north of modern Albany, are the source of the water for these aqueducts.
[8] There are historical instances of writing being developed in a similar method. The Cherokee writing system was invented by a similar method, and it appears that Scandinavian runes were similarly inspired by contact with the Latin alphabet.
[9] Northern hemisphere astronomers also recorded another supernova a generation before in 1572, but this was in the northern hemisphere constellation of Cassiopeia and could not be seen from where the Watchers operate.
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Thoughts?
The south-western corner of Australia is a complex mixture of fertile coastal land gradually melding into an arid interior. Around the coast, frequent rains fall, creating what is by Australian standards a well-watered climate. Before European arrival, this land sustained forests of towering 90-metre karri trees, among the tallest trees in the world, and abundant jarrah trees, whose timber was so reminiscent of New World mahogany trees that European colonists would call it Swan River Mahogany. Moving inland, the climate becomes gradually drier, although there is enough fertile land to produce half of modern Australia's wheat harvest. Moving even further inland, the wheat-producing regions gradually fade into more arid desert, although the dry interior contains abundant mineral resources, including large deposits of iron and nickel and a third of the world's known gold reserves. Although possessed of abundant resources, this region is extremely isolated from the rest of Australia; the state capital Perth is closer to Indonesia's capital Jakarta than it is to the Australian national capital in Canberra.
In allohistorical Australia, the fertile south-western corner was for long isolated from the rest of the continent. Although the climate was suitable for growing the native crop package, the separation of desert barriers meant that it took millennia for crops to be transported further west. Fortunately for the peoples of the south-west, the isolation was not complete. Traders and travellers sometimes crossed the deserts, and they brought food back with them. Since any careful desert-crosser brings more food than they need, this sometimes meant that samples of domesticated crops reached south-western Australia.
From this source, farming slowly developed in the west. Small-scale growing of red yams started around 550 BC, and other crops followed. The Yuduwungu people around modern Esperance became the first farmers of the south-west, adopting red yams, bramble wattles, and native flax from the east. Their isolation from the east remained quite substantial, enough that murnong, one of the key staple crops in eastern Australia, was not grown in the south-west until carried by Islander ships in the fifteenth century [1]. However, the Yuduwungu farmers developed some new crops of their own, such as the tooth-bearing wattle, manna wattle, warran yam, and bush potato [2].
Pre-farming south-western Australia was occupied by a group of eleven peoples who spoke related dialects and shared a common cultural heritage. The Yuduwungu were just one of these peoples; collectively the eleven groups referred to themselves as the Yaora [3]. Eight of these peoples lived along the coast. Moving clockwise, these were the Yuduwungu, the Wadjureb, the Pitelming, the Atjuntja, the Madujal, the Djarwari, the Inayaki and the Binyin. Three other related peoples occupied the inland "wheat belt" regions: the Nyunjari, the Wurama and the Baiyurama. Unlike in the east, where farmers displaced hunter-gatherers, amongst the Yaora, farming spread quickly enough that the individual peoples adopted crops and technologies rather than being displaced. By about 300 AD, the eleven Yaora peoples had all taken up farming and sedentary lifestyles.
The Yaora peoples occupied an area which in terms of modern Australia comprises everything west of a line roughly from Geraldton to Esperance. They called their home country Tiayal, meaning "the Middle Country." In their early religion and worldview, their homelands were the only important fertile country in the universe; to the south and west were endless seas and to the north and east were hostile desert wastelands. They were only vaguely aware of any peoples beyond the Middle Country; trade routes to the north brought pearl shells from the northern coastline of Australia, while trade routes to the east had brought a few crops and decorative items, but with only very sporadic contact.
The isolation of the Middle Country meant that many of the fundamental elements of Gunnagalic civilization further east were only slowly transmitted to the western outlier. Ceramics were spread relatively early, since storage jars and other containers were among the goods transported across the desert. Domesticated ducks were brought directly across by a returning traveller (and cross-bred with their wild relatives), and this became inspiration for an independent domestication of the emu. However, many other ideas and technologies did not spread until much later. Sometimes this was to the detriment of the Yaora; knowledge of writing took a long time to spread across the desert. Sometimes the slow transmission of knowledge would turn out to be to their advantage. Nowhere would this be clearer than in metallurgy.
The basics of metallurgy were known to the Yuduwungu and other early Yaora peoples, but only in limited form. They were broadly aware of the process of smelting metal, enough to create copper tools of their own. Yet while they received a few bronze tools and weapons, these came through very long trade routes; the source of tin was not just across the desert, but at the other end of Gunnagalia. This meant that the early Yaora peoples never learnt to recognise tin ore, and in any case they had only one possible source of tin (near modern Bunbury). The developing Yaora civilizations knew how to smelt and work copper, but their only other metal tools were made from a metal which fell from the sky: meteoric iron.
In the end, this would be an inspiration.
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In the traditional chronology of prehistory, technology progressed from the Stone Age (Neolithic) to a Copper Age (Chalcolithic), to a Bronze Age, and then finally to an Iron Age. Each of these developments provided some advantages over the preceding age. Copper tools gave more flexibility without replacing stone tools. Bonze was a stronger and more useful metal than unalloyed copper, although it required higher smelting temperatures and a functioning trade network to supply tin. Early ironworking techniques did not provide a stronger metal than bronze, but allowed for much more widespread use of metal; iron ore is much more abundant than the components of bronze, especially tin.
However, the historical record is more complex than a simple progression between ages. Some cultures never went through a copper age, and some cultures did not go through a bronze-working period before they started working with iron (such as in West Africa). It is still an open question as to whether a civilization needs to progress through bronze working before it develops ironworking techniques. Sub-Saharan Africa may well have developed ironworking independently without ever having a bronze-working period; sources disagree as to whether the West African ironsmiths learnt ironworking on their own or whether they were inspired directly or indirectly from ironworking in the region of present-day Sudan. Ironworking in western Eurasia came later than bronze-working, but the techniques involved in Western ironworking (in bloomeries) are quite distinct from those used in bronze-working [4]. It seems that rather than being based on previous knowledge of bronze-working, early western Eurasian ironworking was an independent development. Or, at the very least, it was based on indirect inspiration; the earliest west Eurasian blacksmiths may well have known that their neighbours heated and worked bronze, but did their own experimentation with iron and produced the first wrought iron [5].
The metalworkers in the Middle Country were in a similar situation with respect to the main metallurgists further east. They knew enough about metal to know how to smelt it, but they did not know the full bronze-working techniques, and were forced to develop other methods. Apart from copper, they had much rarer meteoric iron, which they could work into useful tools. The techniques needed to work meteoric iron are exactly the same as those used to work iron once it has been created in a bloomery. Meteoric iron was available in the Middle Country, but so were earthly forms of iron ore. In particular, magnetite ore is abundant in several sources near Albany. Magnetite ore is easily recognisable as being related to meteoric iron; lumps of magnetite have a close enough resemblance to meteorites that they can mislead meteorite hunters. In time, smiths around Albany started to experiment with magnetite, and discovered techniques of burning it with charcoal, which gave them an abundant source of iron which they could work using already familiar techniques. The Middle Country had entered the Iron Age.
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With the spread of farming, the Yaora peoples developed into a distinctive cultural zone. While they had some differences in speech – not all of their dialects were mutually intelligible – they remained in close contact with each other. They shared the same broad religious beliefs, including a few concepts which were transmitted from the older Gunnagalic cultures further to the east. These concepts had been changed considerably through travellers' misunderstandings, the difficulties of translation, and the tyranny of distance.
To the Yaora, the universe comprises three "substances," which can be broadly translated as solid, liquid, and gas. All solid objects are only separate flavours of the underlying substance, and all liquids and gases are similarly flavours of separate underlying substances. Each of these substances is mutable into each of the other forms, but through the actions of the universal symbol of eternity: water. To the Yaora, water is the driver of the cycles of eternity, the physical manifestation of time. They acquired the old Gunnagalic belief of the universe being eternal, but they adapted it into their observations of the properties of water. The Yaora know that water can transform from solid to liquid to gas, even though their knowledge of solid water is limited to a few rare instances of snow and frost, and they think that clouds are formed of gaseous water, not liquid water drops. The Yaora believe that the transformation of water between its three forms is what drives the movement of time and eternity.
The Yaora religion is based in part on their understanding of the role of water as an agent of erosion. Living in a flood-prone land, they know how the actions of water can remove soil and stone. They recognise sand as rocks which have been worn away from solid hills, and believe that this sand is in the process of being transformed into liquid over a very long time. In their cosmology, the sun is viewed as the Source which drives the actions of water through evaporation from the oceans and precipitation when rain falls onto the land. They also believe that the Source acts on solid rock, heating the water within it and causing it to expand, which means that hills gradually rise from the earth over time. These hills are then eroded away by water, turned into part of the oceans, and then eventually solidify beneath the waves to be carried back to join the land. All of this is viewed as part of the same underlying cycle of eternity; they believe that the world has always been and will always be.
The Yaora as a whole do not have a concept of a creator deity, although some of the individual peoples will later develop such views. Instead, the Yaora believe in beings called kuru, a word which originally meant "reflection," since kuru were thought of as reflections in the ever-ocean. Kuru are not considered to be eternal beings in themselves; it is believed that they will eventually dissolve back into the ever-ocean. Still, some of them have lifespans long enough that they may as well be immortal, from a human point of view.
Kuru are perceived as varying greatly in power; some are powerful and can be worshipped or appeased, whereas others are weak or mischievous and simply cause trouble for people. Phenomena such as thunder and lightning are thought to be the actions of particularly transient kuru which are soon going to dissolve back into the ever-ocean. Some kuru are associated with particular concepts such as growth, fertility or courage, and are called on for blessings or favours for people who are in need. One quality which all kuru have in common is that they cannot stand directly in the light of the Source without being slowly weakened. Greater kuru might be able to withstand sunlight for hours, while lesser kuru would be dissolved in seconds. This means that all worship is conducted out of direct sunlight, whether indoors or just under trees or some other covering.
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For centuries after the adoption of farming, the Yaora lived in small communities, and had no larger political entities than city-states. Over time, a few of these developed into small kingdoms. While they occasionally went conquering over large areas, none of them successfully held onto their conquests.
Things changed with the discovery of ironworking in the twelfth century. Ironworking spread rapidly, with the new technology allowing much greater access to metal tools than anything in previous Australian history, even more than the abundant bronze of the Cider Isle. Iron tools allowed more clearing of land and more effective farming techniques. Iron weapons could be cheaply supplied to armies in a way which had never before been seen in the Middle Country. The result was a rapid social and political transformation, particularly amongst the Atjuntja, the first people to work iron, and the ones who would put it to the greatest use.
Writing was unknown to the Atjuntja at the time when iron was discovered, so the early history of the Atjuntja conquerors was preserved only in oral form, and would not be transcribed until many years later, when memory had faded and exaggerations and distortions became commonplace. It is known that the Atjuntja had long dwelt in the country around historical Albany, around the shores of King Georges Sound, which formed the largest deepwater harbour in the Middle Country. They were divided into three main city-states: the White City [Albany], Warneang [Denmark] and Fog City [Walpole], along with several smaller towns and settlements.
The Atjuntja drew much of their food from fishing, while inland much of their country was covered in trees which were difficult to clear with copper and stone tools. The Atjuntja were less numerous than many of their neighbours, until they discovered how to work the magnetite iron in their territory. With iron tools, they started to clear the forests and plant yams and wattles to feed a burgeoning population. Disputes over this land led to wars between the three main Atjuntja city-states, which were ended when King Banyar of the White City defeated both of his rivals and proclaimed himself the Kaat-kaat (King of Kings) of the Atjuntja. His heirs would go on to conquer much further.
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In 1618, the Atjuntja rule an empire which controls all of the Middle Country. The Kings of Kings have even expanded further than the old Yaora lands. The region around Geraldton is the northernmost area where large-scale agriculture is sustainable, but the rule of the Kings of Kings stretches further; they have a penal colony and salt-harvesting works on the shores of Shark Bay. In the eastern frontier of their territory, they have pushed into the semi-arid region around Kalgoorlie. The land there is poorly watered, but it holds something of great value: gold. The Atjuntja esteem gold; they call it 'sun's blood' and view it as the solid form of the Source. The harsh environment of the desert does not make for long life amongst the miners, but the Kings of Kings care little for that.
Within this vast expanse of territory, the Atjuntja rule over everything, but not always directly. The Atjuntja are only one people amongst many in their empire, by now the largest single ethnicity, but still a minority of the overall population. The nature of their rule varies from region to region, reflecting both the duration of their rule in each region, and the form of its conquest. The Atjuntja began their expansion in the thirteenth century, acquiring writing only when they conquered the Wadjureb people around Ravensthorpe in the mid-fourteenth century, and completing their expansion with the conquest of Geraldton in 1512. There is no longer any need for armies of conquest; the remaining military forces are used as garrisons to preserve the peace.
Rebellions are hardly an unknown occurrence, although they have been growing less frequent in the last half-century. Their empire includes a patchwork of individual regions, some with explicit privileges established as part of their conquest, and some peoples who have been displaced entirely from their original homeland. The general practice of the Kings of Kings has been to leave local institutions in place unless threatened by revolt. Some peoples have been more accepting of Atjuntja rule than others. The Pitelming rebelled one time too often and were forcibly deported from their homelands and resettled in small groups across the empire, except for those who were sent to the mines. In some regions, the non-Atjuntja populations are gradually assimilating to the dominant culture; the prestige attached to the Atjuntja dialect means that many of the related dialects are being abandoned. In other regions, the other Yaora peoples still remain attached to their own culture and heritage even if they are quiescent under Atjuntja rule.
Imperial administration is based on a combination of Atjuntja aristocrats and local potentates who have been integrated into the ruling class. They have established a number of garrison-cities which serve both as bastions of imperial military power, and as centres of trade and administration. Most of these garrison-cities have turned into local metropolises, with attached towns developing outside the walls of the main garrison. Among the largest garrison-cities are Lobster Waters [Jurien Bay], Spear Mountain [Merredin] – where an ingeniously-built dam collects most of the water that falls on the mountain – Corram Yibbal [Bunbury], Archers Nest [Redcliffe, a suburb of Perth], and Red Eye [Ravensthorpe]. Trade focuses on these centres, and travels along the well-maintained roads which the Atjuntja have built between the garrison-cities. This is the most extensive road network anywhere in allohistorical Australia, thanks to the use of iron tools which makes construction much easier.
From the garrison-cities, the imperial administrators oversee the collection of the yearly tribute from the subject peoples. This is rigorously gathered, in a variety of forms depending on the region, imperial requirements, and the preferences of the subject peoples. Some tribute is collected in local produce, such as dyes, timber, oils, incense, lorikeet and cockatoo feathers, copper, or iron. Sometimes the tribute is collected in staple crops and foods, particularly to feed the garrison-cities and the imperial workforce. Sometimes the tribute is collected in labour drafts.
The Atjuntja have developed a methodical system for managing labour and the workforce throughout their empire. Most of this labour is used in public works and major engineering projects, such as roads, buildings, earthworks, and the like. Most of the labourers are required to work only at certain times of the year. This is usually in the winter and early spring, which coincides both with the least wearying part of the year for heavy labour, and with the timings of harvests. After the yams have been harvested and the wattles pruned, and before it is time to replant them or collect the first wattle seeds, the imperial administrators demand the labour of tens of thousands of people for a fixed period of time. These labour drafts are widespread, but permanent slavery is much rarer, used mostly for the gold mines in the interior. For regular subjects, the labour draft is a wearying but predictable part of their yearly life. While they may serve on a variety of projects, the single largest use of drafted labour is working in the imperial capital, the White City.
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The White City, some call it, or the City Between The Waters, or the Place of Twin Peaks, or the Centre of Time. Another history would call it Albany, the first deepwater port in Western Australia, located on a large mostly sheltered harbour called King Georges Sound, which contains two completely sheltered harbours inside, Princess Royal Harbour and Oyster Harbour. To the Atjuntja who live in the White City, the Sound is simply the Sea Lake, and they call the two interior harbours West Water [Princess Royal] and North Water [Oyster]. It is the centre of their universe, the largest city in the known world, the dwelling place of the King of Kings. Most of its residents would prefer never to live anywhere else; those who are appointed elsewhere as governors or soldiers treat it as an exile, no matter how important the duty.
The oldest part of the White City was founded between two mountains, the Twins, Un Koit [Mt Clarence] and Un Bennan [Mt Melville]. Strong walls once protected this city, but the walls have long since been torn down, their stone going to new buildings. No foreign army has threatened the White City in over two centuries, and the inhabitants have many uses for building material.
The core of the White City is still in the land between the mountains, including most of the public buildings. Many drafted labourers have worked over long years to produce the great monuments and public buildings of the White City, and their work continues. Here, in the old heart of the White City is the Palace of a Thousand Rooms, for the private use of the King of Kings, his many wives, administrators, and honoured guests. Here is the grandeur of the Walk of Kings, the great avenue which runs between the two mountains. Most of the other public buildings adjoin the Walk of Kings: the Garden of Ten Thousand Steps is halfway along; the public temples to the Lord and the Lady are here, along with smaller shrines to a dozen well-known kuru; the public arena of the House of Pain is at the western end, with the private rooms built into the mountain; the House of the Songs adjoins the Walk, where the greatest of musicians in the Middle Country come to study their craft; and so does the Mammang, the great school where the sons of Atjuntja nobility come to receive military and religious schooling.
Everything about the heart of the White City is built to impress. The Walk of Kings runs in a straight line between the two mountains, with fountains every hundred steps, towering jarrah trees planted to shade the walkers, and columns and statues to depict imperial accomplishments and religious figures. The Garden of Ten Thousand Steps is where the Atjuntja indulge their love of the natural world. It is said that with every step there is a new marvel to see, a new flower or tree [6], or a new arrangement of stones and trees, artificial waterfalls, or flocks of sacred ducks bred for bright colours. Disturbing the ducks is punishable by eventual death. Everywhere in the Garden is the sound of water, flowing, bubbling, or cascading down rocks.
At the eastern end of the Walk is the Palace. Most of it is private, but at the appropriate season visitors can walk up the limestone steps, past statues of cockatoos, lorikeets, and goannas carved so that they appear to be about to jump into the air. At the top, there is a large covered balcony where the King of Kings sits to watch public events. He sits on the Petal Throne, symbolic of the Atjuntja veneration of all flowering plants, which has been carved in a shape of forty petals opening as if part of a very large flower.
The grandeur of the public buildings is what most visitors to the White City remember, but this is a much larger city. The outlying districts extend much further than the old heartland, filled with houses and markets, storehouses, smaller shrines, and the three schools for common Atjuntja men, women, and foreigners. Two hundred thousand people live here at the busiest times of the year, although many of those are drafted labourers who return to their homes outside of draft times. The storehouses are full of the wattleseeds and yams needed to feed the burgeoning population, and the main imperial roads are always busy with traffic bringing in food, other tribute, and trade goods. The people, the gardens and the fountains are watered by several aqueducts which come from the mountain ranges to the north [7].
The White City includes a foreign quarter, built on the eastern side of North Water, to keep outlanders and their influences away from the royal city. This is where Islander ships and merchants visit in regular fleets, and a few of them have settled permanently. They have their own small temples where they complete the rituals of the Sevenfold Path in accordance with the teachings of the Good Man, but strictly-enforced imperial law forbids them from proselytising within the White City.
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As a ruling class, the Atjuntja are divided into noble families and commoners, although even common Atjuntja are believed to outrank all but the most favoured of subject peoples. Governors and military commanders are chosen exclusively from the Atjuntja aristocracy, although there are protocols whereby high-status nobility from the subject peoples can be adopted into the Atjuntja ruling class. This adoption is subject to acceptance of Atjuntja ways, including learning their dialect and adopting a proper mode of dress and appearance. The most visible mark of this acceptance is the full beard which all Atjuntja men are expected to wear; a man's beard is regarded as a sign of strength and virility.
The Atjuntja system of nobility includes a variety of ranks and offices, the highest of which can be roughly translated as "king." In keeping with long-standing tradition, the heads of the thirteen greatest noble families are accorded that title. Each of them is officially a king of a particular place, such as the other ancient Atjuntja city-states of Warneang and Fog City, or the newer garrison-cities. The link of these titles to geographic locations has long since been broken; the leading members of the nobility prefer to live in civilization in the White City and let lesser family members deal with the bothersome business of administration. In any case, governors to the garrison-cities are appointed by the reigning emperor without any regard to which noble family claims the royal title for that city.
Overseeing the whole empire is the emperor, the King of Kings, the Voice of Divinity. The emperor is chosen from among the members of the imperial family, and in theory each King of Kings is confirmed (elected) by the kings of the noble families. In practice most emperors have appointed their own successor from amongst their sons or other kin, and the kings have simply acclaimed the new monarch. In a few cases of disputed succession, or where the King of Kings has died without an appointed heir, the decision of the kings has mattered.
The protocol surrounding the King of Kings is elaborate, based on his divine status. The title of Voice of Divinity is no mere formality, but given in recognition of this status. Only those who are "blessed" are permitted to hear the Voice speak; this naturally includes the nobility of all ranks, and palace servants and the like, but otherwise is a rare honour bestowed on those who have performed exceptional service to the empire. Apart from this, people may come in audience before the Voice, or the army may march past his balcony while he sits on the Petal Throne, but they do not hear his voice. The Voice uses a range of gestures to indicate his intent, with meanings such as "tell me more," "you have done well," and "you may leave me." A few Voices have developed their own forms of sign language and use an interpreter to convey more precise meanings, although most Voices have thought that commoners have little to say that is worth hearing.
In 1618, the imperial dignity is held by a man named Kepiuc Tjaanuc. He is the Voice of Divinity, but to be honest, the blessed often wish that they did not have that status, so that they would not have to hear him speak. He can talk, can the Voice. Too many bright ideas, too many questions, and too many whims for the nobles to feel comfortable hearing him speak. Not to mention too many wives. There is no restriction on the number of wives which a man of noble blood can take – commoners are permitted a maximum of three, of course, and then only if they can pay for a separate house for each wife – but the Voice married his 101st wife last winter solstice, far more than any other nobleman in living memory. Some less charitable gossip, carefully repeated out of the ears of any untrustworthy listeners, is that the Voice can no longer remember how to do anything with his wives other than talk to them; certainly, he has not fathered as many sons as would be expected for a man with so many wives. Perhaps he only married them so that they have to listen to him.
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Writing is not a native concept for the Atjuntja, but something which they acquired in the process of expanding their dominions. The first people in the Middle Country to develop writing were the Yuduwungu, who acquired it by stimulus-diffusion from across the desert. While direct contact with the east was limited, some trade flowed across the desert. This included a variety of decorative objects such as pendants and bracelets which were inscribed with messages. Some of the containers for trade goods had labels of their contents. Travellers to the east rarely learned writing themselves; literacy in the Gunnagalic script took years to acquire, due to its complexity. Still, they were aware of the existence of writing, and their tales percolated throughout the Yuduwungu lands.
In the eleventh century, a Yuduwungu artisan named Nuneloc developed a writing system based on what he had heard of the system to the east, and using examples which he had available. Many of the symbols which he used were borrowed from the Gunnagalic script, but used for completely different sounds, and some of the symbols were invented outright [8]. The script was fundamentally syllabic, although also proto-alphabetic because related signs were used for syllables with the same initial consonants but different vowels. Nuneloc had his name immortalised, since it became the root of the Yuduwungu word for writing, and which in time would be passed on to the Atjuntja.
By the time the Atjuntja started conquering, writing had spread as far as the neighbouring Wadjureb people. The Atjuntja adopted the system of writing, finding it extremely useful in maintaining their empire, but its use is limited to preferred purposes. They keep some religious texts and have some of their epic poems and songs written down. They keep detailed records to support their administration of the empire, included lists of tribute collected from each region, the number of people present, and so on. The last Atjuntja census revealed just over 1.75 million people live under the rule of the King of Kings. They have public inscriptions announcing the glory of their rulers, but even then they rely as much on the carvings and sculpture as on the content of the inscriptions. For the Atjuntja like everything to be a spectacle or festival. Ideally both. Sports, military parades and triumphs, and celebrations of the harvests are all conducted in the most ostentatious manner possible.
As are religious experiences.
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The Atjuntja share the same ancestral religion as all the Yaora peoples, but their beliefs have evolved into an overarching dualism. They believe in the same kuru and water-cycles as their kin, but they also worship two divine beings, whose names translate roughly as the Lord and the Lady. Theological interpretations differ (sometimes violently) as to the underlying nature of these beings. One school of thought can be approximately translated as literalists; its adherents consider the Lord and the Lady to be literal beings which have a tangible existence, personalities and so forth. The other main school of religious thought can be roughly translated as abstractionists; they hold that that the designations Lord and Lady are merely a convenient shorthand for what are underlying principles and basic nature of the universe itself.
Regardless of which theological viewpoint individual Atjuntja hold – and the last four Kings of Kings have been careful never to take an official position on the matter – the consequences of these beliefs are similar. The Lady is given a number of titles to represent her essential nature: She Who Creates, the Lady of Goodness, the Patron of Beauty, the Giver of Wisdom, the Incarnator. The Lord is given a corresponding set of titles: He Who Destroys, the Lord of Evil, the Unmaker, the Bringer of Pain, the Harvester of Souls. The Atjuntja believe that the two deities (or principles) act in dynamic unison over the course of eternity. Both are necessary; goodness cannot exist without evil to define it. All that is created will eventually be destroyed; from the shards of what has been destroyed, new things will be remade.
Worship of the Lord and Lady takes many forms, most of them public and ostentatious. Yet the rituals which make the most vivid impression on outside visitors are those associated with some of the more negative aspects of the Lord. Visiting Islanders and other occasional eastern guests are disgusted by them; later European visitors will be similarly appalled.
In Atjuntja theology, a certain amount of misery, pain and death are demanded by the Lord. It is unavoidable, either as part of His wishes (according to literalists) or a fundamental aspect of the universe (according to abstractionists). Since misery, pain and death cannot be prevented, it is best to arrange for them to happen in a form which minimises the effects on the world. Better to inflict pain in a carefully-controlled manner than to leave it to run wild throughout the Middle Country; better to appease the Lord with appropriate ritual torture and bloodletting rather than to allow death to strike where it wishes.
The rituals involved with these aspects of the worship of the Lord are conducted in a building whose formal name translates as the House of Absolution, but which is colloquially and more widely known as the House of Pain. Its priests are titled Appeasers. The House includes both public and private sections, including one large public arena where the major rituals are conducted. The arena can seat over twenty thousand, and it is regularly filled by people who have come to bear witness.
The House hosts two main kinds of rituals, the sacrifices conducted by the Appeasers themselves, and blood bouts performed entirely by guests. The sacrifices are conducted using a variety of techniques which are best not described too closely, but which fall into two basic classes: "to the pain" or "to the death." In either case, the Appeasers work as slowly as possible, gradually increasing the intensity of their efforts. When a person is sacrificed to the pain, the ritual will continue until they signal for it to stop; a sacrifice to the death is self-explanatory.
Sacrificial victims are all volunteers. In theory, at least. The Atjuntja hold that a sacrifice from a person of noble blood is far more effective at appeasing the Lord than that of a commoner. A certain number of members of each noble family are sacrificed to the pain every year. The longer the sacrifice continues without the victim calling it to a halt, the more efficacious it is judged to be. Human nature being what it is, the noble families compete with each other to win the greatest spiritual rewards – to say nothing of public acclaim and honour – by how long their children can last in the sacrifice. Stoic endurance is deemed a major virtue, since there is no better method to appease the Lord. The Appeasers are rarely short of volunteers, both from noble and common stock.
Sacrifices to the death are rarer; in a normal year the standard number is thirteen. In bad years, such as those afflicted by diseases or extended droughts, it is common for the King of Kings to request more volunteers. Such requests are usually honoured; a large part of a region's annual tribute can be in the form of people to be sacrificed to the death. However, this is one instance where the imperial administrators will never demand tribute in this form; such offers must always come from the individuals concerned. This is not out of any sense of squeamishness or even out of any fear of alienating their subjects, but simply a result of their religious beliefs. A forced sacrifice will not appease the Lord; if anything, it will simply invite His attention and risk Him taking a more direct hand in worldly affairs.
Or so commoners and subject peoples believe, at any rate. Many of the upper classes have fewer scruples when it comes to their own kin. It is not unknown for less favoured members of a noble family to volunteer to take the ultimate sacrifice. Even the royal family are not above such requests; being a surplus prince is not an indicator of a long life expectancy.
The other form of religious ritual in the House of Pain is the blood bout. This is a contest between (usually) two volunteers, fought with the objective of inflicting pain, loss of blood, and eventual death. Volunteers for these bouts are usually from the lower classes; most noble families prefer to win honour through sacrifices instead. Blood bouts are usually held only once a year, as part of broader religious ceremonies involved with the start of the new year. Blood bouts are fought using a number of stylised weapons, or (rarely) bare-fisted. Armour is not permitted, beyond basic clothing for modesty. Weapons are designed to make it difficult to inflict a single killing blow. The blood battlers are expected to kill slowly; the most favoured contest is one where the loser dies from slowly bleeding through a large number of small cuts. It is quite common for both contestants to die in a blood bout, although some particularly gifted duellists have survived bouts for several successive years.
--
The House of Pain will attract most early attention when Europeans first discover about Atjuntja religion. Still, the Atjuntja beliefs are far more complex than this, a combination of their own special interests and older traditions which have been subsumed into their theology. One older belief which has become integral to Atjuntja religion is their study of the heavens. Several Yaora peoples interpreted the constellations and other heavenly bodies in terms of movements in the great water-cycles, and believed that a proper study of celestial events would yield detailed knowledge of signs and omens to guide the decisions of men. Of the various groups who held these beliefs, none would take them further than the Yuduwungu.
Before the invention of writing, Yuduwungu astrologers established an observation point far inland. They chose a plateau which they called the Heights of Heaven, although it would later come to be called Star Hill [Boorabin]. From this inland vantage, they had much clearer skies to watch the heavens and study the signs and omens. They established a tradition of picking the keenest-sighted people in the land and sending them to Star Hill to become apprentices to study the craft of astrology. The astrologers of Star Hill became dedicated to studying the heavens, and built up a detailed oral system which described the known constellations, stars, planets, and some records of meteors and comets. The sect became known as the Watchers, and the Yuduwungu gave them the same veneration which classical Greeks would give the Oracle of Delphi.
When Nuneloc developed his script, it did not take long for the practice to spread to the Watchers. They added their own system of signs for numbers, and transferred their oral knowledge into written form. The Watchers began to keep a very detailed record of constellations, stellar movements, and new celestial bodies such as comets, novas, and the like. Living in a plateau in the desert, with clear skies and no distractions, they became very good at watching. With much time for contemplation, they discovered a variety of astronomical truths, although these were wrapped up in astrological terms and incorporated into their system of predictions. When the Atjuntja conquerors came, they did not interfere with the Watchers; indeed, several of the Kings of Kings have allocated labour to construct expanded buildings for the Watchers.
Over the centuries, the Watchers have accumulated a detailed body of astronomical knowledge. They have very thorough records of the constellations and individual stars, and their observers are astute enough to have recognised the precession of the equinoxes over the five and a half centuries in which they have been keeping records. They have a detailed record of every comet, solar and lunar eclipse which has been visible above the Middle Country since 1076, except for a twenty-year gap between 1148-1168 where several records were lost due to flooding. They keep a calendar of meteor showers, and have recognised most (but not all) novae which have been visible since their records began.
In common with European and other astronomers, they know of the supernova which occurred in 1604; brighter than any other celestial body apart from the Moon and Venus [9]. The Watchers are still arguing over exactly what that new star meant, although most of them agree that it was ominous. On their advice, the then-King of Kings requested fifty volunteers to be sacrificed to the death in 1605, to appease the threat contained in this new sign in the heavens. They are aware that the world is round, although they have no particular interest in calculating its size. Their star catalogues and their dedicated observations have allowed them to recognise Uranus, which they include in their list of wandering stars (i.e. planets).
In short, if European astronomers gain access to the Watchers' records, they will find much to interest them.
--
[1] The crops which are brought overland across the desert are only those which travellers would bring with them, and which would survive replanting. Red yam tubers were often taken back by traders, since they were a large and valuable source of food. Red yams are also useful since they do not need to be planted intact; like other Australian yam species, only the top part of the tuber needs to be planted in the soil to regrow. Western Australian peoples already knew how to harvest and replant a local yam species (the warran yam), although they had not fully domesticated it. Travellers who brought red yams back with them to the west would cut slices off a yam tuber as they travelled, using it as food. If the top part of the yam tuber survived the trip, they would sometimes replant it. With their familiarity with harvesting warran yams, this meant that they could apply those techniques to a new crop which was more suitable for full domestication.
The other crops which were brought over were seed crops (wattle seeds, flax seeds), which traders also brought with them as food. Seed crops were ground into flour and cooked as seedcakes, much as Aboriginal peoples did in historical Australia. Since the seeds were not ground until they were used, this mean that surplus seeds were also available for replanting if they were brought back west. Some other eastern crops were not suitable for transport in this manner; the tubers of murnong are too small to be useful to bring back intact, and the seeds of nettles were not harvested.
[2] The tooth-bearing wattle (Acacia dentifera) is a small shrub which provides a large seed yield for its size, and manna wattle (A. microbotrya) produces abundant quantities of wattle gum. The warran yam (Dioscorea hastifolia) is a real yam species which was historically used by the Noongar and other peoples of south-western Australia. Warran yams were harvested with the upper part of the tuber being replanted to allow it to regrow and collect a fresh tuber the next year. Warran yams are not quite as well-suited to arid conditions as red yams, and do not provide as large yields per acre, although their taste will be preferred by some Yaora peoples. Australia includes a large number of plants which have been called "bush potatoes"; the species described here is Platysace deflexa, whose potential as a domesticable crop is being explored in recent plantings. The main role of the warran yam and bush potato is as secondary staple crops which do not yield as heavily in nutritional terms as red yams, but add variety to the diet, and offer some security for food supply if disease or other misfortune affects the red yam harvest.
[3] Historically, most of the fertile regions of south-western Australia were similarly occupied by a group of thirteen related peoples who broadly considered themselves part of the same culture. They collectively called themselves the Noongar (although the name is transliterated into English in a variety of other spellings), and spoke related dialects (or related languages, depending on who you ask). The Noongar did not occupy an area quite as large as the allohistorical Yaora; the borders of their country were roughly everything south and west of a line from Jurien Bay to Ravensthorpe, Western Australia.
[4] Early bronze-working involved smelting of copper and tin, alloying those metals, and then casting them into tools or weapons. Early ironworking in bloomeries did not involve melting iron ore. Instead, it involved burning iron ore with charcoal so that the iron ore was reduced to iron without ever reaching its melting temperature, and then working the iron while it was heated, but still solid.
[5] Chinese ironworking techniques were quite distinct; they developed the blast furnace much earlier than in western Eurasia, and melted iron ore until it formed into cast iron.
[6] South-western Australia is a region of substantial biodiversity, with over seven thousand species of vascular plants. The Atjuntja don't have every one of those kinds of plants in the Garden, but they give it their best shot.
[7] Two mountain ranges, the Stirling Range and Porongurup Range, north of modern Albany, are the source of the water for these aqueducts.
[8] There are historical instances of writing being developed in a similar method. The Cherokee writing system was invented by a similar method, and it appears that Scandinavian runes were similarly inspired by contact with the Latin alphabet.
[9] Northern hemisphere astronomers also recorded another supernova a generation before in 1572, but this was in the northern hemisphere constellation of Cassiopeia and could not be seen from where the Watchers operate.
--
Thoughts?
Map: Atjuntja Realm
I love the map, it is super cool and informative, kudos!
I really liked this segment, the Kuru as a faith was fascinating and well described, Ever-Ocean is a beautiful term and I loved the take on lightning.
To the pain, Princess Bride reference?
Regardless, the King of Kings and associated world and empire building was fascinating!
I really liked this segment, the Kuru as a faith was fascinating and well described, Ever-Ocean is a beautiful term and I loved the take on lightning.
To the pain, Princess Bride reference?
Regardless, the King of Kings and associated world and empire building was fascinating!
- Location
- Known
- Pronouns
- She/He/They
LoRaG is one of the few timelines that's really piqued my interest, so when I saw excited to read it when I saw it on here! I got caught up with what's been posted so far a couple of days ago and can't wait to see how things continue, especially after contact with Europe. Great job so far, @Jared! 
I should clarify, all LoRaG maps have been drawn by various AH.com contributors, not myself. I do of course review and provide input, but I have not designed the actual maps. This is because when it comes to graphic design, I have less ability than a one-armed, colour-blind orangutan. With the map posts here, I'm linking to the relevant maps which were posted on AH.com.
To the pain was indeed a Princess Bride reference. One of my allusions which I make throughout the timeline, some more obvious than others.
Glad you like it. Posting this timeline on SV gives me an opportunity both to re-edit and update it, and gives others a chance to read it at a steady pace rather than having all 500,000 words of it dropped at once.LoRaG is one of the few timelines that's really piqued my interest, so when I saw excited to read it when I saw it on here! I got caught up with what's been posted so far a couple of days ago and can't wait to see how things continue, especially after contact with Europe. Great job so far, @Jared!
That's fair, please pass my compliments onto the artist
Haha, fair enough XDTo the pain was indeed a Princess Bride reference. One of my allusions which I make throughout the timeline, some more obvious than others.
Lands of Red and Gold #13: Tales Of The Cider Isle
Lands of Red and Gold #13: Tales Of The Cider Isle
There is a land, the land of bronze, the land of mist, the land of courage, where valiant Tjunini soldiers battle endlessly with crafty Kurnawal warriors, where the wild men still lurk in the highlands, raiding where they may, and where in the long winter evenings honourable men gather to feast around roaring fireplaces, drink endless goblets of gum cider, and hear the bards recite the endless verses of the Song of the Princess, and even the smallest boy can recite the names of every captain who led men into that war, while in the courts of cunning kings, poets compete with each other to create ever more complex verses packed with allusions and circumlocutions which only the most learned of listeners can fully grasp...
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The island which another history would call Tasmania held what was for a very long time the most isolated human society on the globe. First settled tens of thousands of years ago when the seas were lower, the inhabitants of that distant land easily walked there. When the ice melted, sea levels rose and flooded what would now never be called Bass Strait, and the inhabitants of this southerly island were trapped in isolation. Although their distant ancestors had used boats or rafts to cross the seas and reach Australia, the inhabitants of Tasmania had lost those skills. For ten millennia these people, who called themselves the Palawa, lived in complete isolation from the rest of humanity.
The island which the Palawa call home is a cold and wet land, by the standards of mainland Australia. Much of it is rugged and covered in forests, although there are substantial flat and fertile areas, mostly on the northern and eastern coasts. Lying in the midst of the Roaring Forties, the island is often wind-swept, particularly the western coast. The rugged terrain conceals a wealth of mineral resources for those who have the knowledge to exploit them: gold, tin, copper, zinc, and iron. The few thousand Palawa [1] who live on the island do not have that knowledge; with a small population and no suitable plants to develop indigenous agriculture, they remain in a hunter-gatherer existence.
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The waters of Bass Strait are shallow and treacherous, filled with reefs and submerged rocks which hinder navigation. Strong currents move both east and west, and the fury of the Roaring Forties creates frequent storms and wind-driven waves. In a different history, Bass Strait would be notorious for the hundreds of shipwrecks on its islands or along its shores.
For the Gunnagalic peoples who lived along the northern shores of the Strait, the island beyond the wild waters for so long might as well have been on the far side of the moon. The various peoples who lived along the northern shores – Tjunini around the Otways, Giratji around Port Philip Bay, and Kurnawal to the east – did know how to build some ships, but their techniques were primitive. Their seagoing boats were mostly small, single-masted vessels built from wooden planks and held together with dowels. In these boats, they carefully fished the coastal waters, always wary for any potential storms, and rarely venturing out of sight of land. At times these vessels would be blown out to sea, where the sailors were often wrecked or drowned. On a few rare occasions a ship would land on Tasmania itself, where the crew would be killed by the local Palawa, sometimes be accepted into a local band, or otherwise starve to death in a land where they no longer knew how to hunt.
The long isolation of Tasmania might have continued until contact with the outside world, if not for the islands which lie in the midst of the Strait. The shallow waters of the Strait contain a great many small islands and semi-submerged rocks which are hazardous to shipping, but they also contain some larger islands which can sustain human habitation. The largest of these are King Island off the northwest coast of Tasmania, and Flinders Island off the northeast coast. Both of these islands had held human populations in the distant past, but these had died out.
In the late eighth century, a pair of Kurnawal fishing boats were swept out to sea, as so many had before them. Unlike so many of their predecessors, these boats were not sunk or wrecked on the shores, but made a safe landing on the eastern side of Flinders Island. Here they found an empty land with no signs of human habitation, but which abounded with natural resources. In particular, they found large breeding populations of fur seals and elephant seals. Seal colonies had been largely hunted out on the mainland, for they offered an attractive source of meat, pelts, fur, and seal oil. The crews of these fishing boats killed a few seals, collected their pelts and meat, and tried to sail home. Again, unlike many of their predecessors, they successfully returned to the mainland, with news of islands and seals.
News of the seal-filled island to the south caused a considerable stir amongst the Gunnagalic peoples. Their navigation techniques were not advanced, and the waters of the Strait were always risky. Still, they could recognise general directions from the movement of the sun, and seal hunting offered a considerable source of wealth for those who braved the waters. Over the next few decades, Kurnawal sealers colonised Flinders Island, while further west Tjunini sealers did the same on King Island.
With their colonies so close, and with several smaller seal-filled islands in between to encourage exploration, sealers did not take long to discover Tasmania itself. The long rivalry between Tjunini and Kurnawal means that both of them claim that they were the first to discover the Big Island. As such, no date can be firmly established, and the margins of error of radiometric dating meant that later archaeologists would never definitively settle the question. Still, it is certain that sometime in the early ninth century AD, Tjunini and Kurnawal both made landfall on Tasmania itself. The Palawa's ten millennia of isolation had come to an end.
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The Tjunini established their first permanent settlement on Tasmania at historical Stanley, on the north-west coast. Here, they found an imposing natural feature: a flat-topped circular headland which seemed to grow straight out of the sea, seemingly defying the power of wind and wave [2]. On the sheltered southern side of the headland lies a useful port. The first Tjunini sailors to see this head called it Hope Hill, and built their first mainland town just to the south.
From their base at Hope Hill, Tjunini sealers started to explore both Tasmania's shores. Going west, they found only rugged coastline along Tasmania's western coast; good for harvesting seals, sometimes, but not for much else. To the east, they found Tasmania's northern coast to be relatively flat and fertile. To them this was bountiful empty land, only thinly-populated by hunter-gatherer Palawa.
To the Tjunini, the northern coast of Tasmania was an attractive target for colonisation. It was only slightly colder than their homeland, and its apparent emptiness was a welcome feature. Yet the most appealling feature of Tasmania was its distance from the mainland and the Empire who ruled there. The Tjunini homeland had been recently conquered by Watjubaga's armies, and many amongst the Tjunini resented imperial rule. For those brave enough to sail across the Strait, they could build new lives in a land untouched by imperial influence.
The lure of new lands proved to be a strong one. Over the course of the ninth and early tenth centuries, more than twenty thousand Tjunini crossed the Strait to permanently settle in Tasmania. The migration was substantial enough that the Tjunini on the mainland would disappear as a separate people over the next few centuries, having become few enough in number that they were absorbed into their neighbours.
On the Big Island, though, the Tjunini flourished. Most of their early settlements were on the coast, where they could rely on fishing or sealing for part of their food. Some of these early settlements would grow into significant cities; the largest of these were Kwamania [Smithton], Mulaka Nayri [Wynyard], and Mukanuyina [Devonport].
From these early cities, the Tjunini started to settle inland, and push further east. They did not encounter any significant opposition from the indigenous peoples; outnumbered almost from the beginning, some Palawa were assimilated into the Tjunini, and the rest pushed back into the rugged interior. Nor did the Empire ever offer a credible threat to the Tjunini expansion. The first real threat to the Tjunini came when they pushed far enough east to encounter the Kurnawal.
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The Kurnawal settlement of Tasmania began near-simultaneously with that of the Tjunini. Like their western neighbours, the Kurnawal had first settled an offshore island, then found a convenient port on the mainland of Tasmania which was first used as a sealing base. For the Kurnawal, this was Dawn Dunes [Bridport]. From here, Kurnawal sealers charted the coast of northern and eastern Tasmania. They established another early settlement at Orange Rock [St Helens]. Unlike the Tjunini, the Kurnawal moved inland relatively quickly. Inland from Dawn Dunes, they found a place where the soils were so rich that yams grew larger than anywhere they had heard of. This place they called Bountiful [Scottsdale], and it quickly grew into the largest Kurnawal town in Tasmania [3].
However, while the Tjunini had crossed the Strait in their thousands to flee imperial expansion, the mainland Kurnawal were not yet under threat. The apparent emptiness of Tasmania did attract some settlers, but it was not the main driver for Kurnawal migrations. It would take another discovery to lure large numbers of Kurnawal settlers across the Strait.
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The north-east of Tasmania contains many ancient granite mountains, worn down by rain and wind into rugged terrain. Many of the rocks worn down by ages of rain have been carried into river beds, which over the aeons have formed immensely thick alluvial deposits. Kurnawal explorers who travelled along the north-eastern rivers recognised several minerals in the beds, including one which would prove an irresistible lure: tin.
Although the early Kurnawal did not know it, the granite in the mountains they climbed over had rich concentrations of cassiterite (tin ore). Mining the granite itself would have been difficult, but millions of years of erosion had broken down the granite and washed large concentrations of cassiterite into the river beds. The Kurnawal easily recognised cassiterite; similar ores had been carried to their mainland homes from the trade routes.
To the Kurnawal, the alluvial cassiterite deposits offered a source of wealth which made seal-hunting seem trivial. Although essential for forming bronze, tin was a rare metal. At the time, the only significant source for Gunnagalic peoples came from far-off New England, in northern New South Wales. Some of it did come south along the trade routes, but it was very expensive. The promise of tin-based wealth brought several thousand Kurnawal across the Strait to settle in Tasmania. Unlike the Tjunini, though, the mainland Kurnawal did not migrate en masse to the Big Island; the majority of them remained in their home country.
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The early history of the Tjunini and Kurnawal settlers on Tasmania is shrouded in mystery. In large part, this is because it is prehistory, not history. Writing was unknown in the Kurnawal homeland at the time that the first settlers crossed the Strait, and it was only barely known amongst the Tjunini, who regarded it as a tool of imperial conquest and bureaucracy, and wanted no part of it. Archaeology can reveal only glimpses of those early days, and oral history has been overlaid by many embellishments and biases.
From what truth can be sifted from myths and legends, it seems that Tjunini and Kurnawal settlers on Tasmania had some clashes with each other even during the early days of colonisation, but these did not develop into full-scale war for more than a century. In the early days, both peoples lacked the population to support a major war, and considerable distance separated their main settlements. The two peoples were never fond of each other, but they appear to have tolerated each other's existence for a time.
By the mid-eleventh century, the Tjunini and Kurnawal had both grown considerably in population. The Tjunini were the more numerous people, and were well-established along the north-west coast; later archaeologists will excavate quite a few large settlements. They were a people without political unity; each of their cities had its own king. Mukanuyina was the most populous city, with Kwamania and Mulaka Nayri roughly equal second, while six other cities also had monarchs who claimed descent from the Rainbow Serpent.
The Kurnawal had never received the same number of immigrants from the mainland, but they still had a substantial presence in the north-east coast. By far their most important city was Bountiful. The rich soils supported its large population, and the city marked one end of the Tin Trail which ran through the mountains to Orange Rock on the east coast [4]. Orange Rock was their second most populous city, with ancient Dawn Dunes a distant third, and there were a few other small towns further south along the east coast.
The boundary line between the two peoples was for a long time the Tamar River, which is in fact a 70 kilometre estuary. Later Kurnawal sagas claim that the Tjunini kept crossing the river to steal their land for farming; Tjunini songs speak of furtive Kurnawal sneaking across the Tamar on winter nights to raid and steal what they could. While the truth of these accounts is open to dispute, it is clear that the two peoples were becoming more hostile. The stage was set for a series of events which would be immortalised in song.
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What happened in Tasmania in the turbulent decades of 1060-1080? The short and unhelpful answer is: a war. The long-enduring tensions between Tjunini and Kurnawal came to crisis point during this time, and led to a war which the Tjunini won and the Kurnawal lost. That much can be known, at least with as much certainty as anything is known about history. Beyond that, well...
About a century after the events of that troubled time, a bard named Tjiganeng took the existing tales and verses and wove them into song. Into a very long song. If written out (which it later would be), it ran to over 25,000 lines in the alternating twelve and ten syllable patterns of Tjunini verse. As far as is known, Tjiganeng gave his song no title, referring to it simply as "My Song." Some later Tjunini would give it that name, but it was most popularly called the Song of the Princess. It told the tale of the War of the Princess, a war which raged for twelve years, and which rearranged the political and cultural borders of the Big Island.
The War of the Princess was undoubtedly a real war; archaeology has confirmed the destruction of Bountiful which was the central event depicted in the Song. Still, for all that memorising the Song became fundamental for the training of all later bards, the historical accuracy of the events it depicts are open to considerable dispute. Some historians think that the gist is accurate, but many details were invented. Some think that only the names of the central characters are accurate, and that almost everything else was artistic licence.
Still, with all the appropriate caveats, the Song records a reasonably credible account of a war. It describes how the Tjunini kings had long fought amongst themselves as much as they fought the Kurnawal, until King Tiyuratina of Mukanuyina established a loose confederation. All the other kings became vassals who could not make war except with his permission. Tiyuratina took the title of Nine-Fold King.
According to the Song, Tiyuratina sought peace with the raiding Kurnawal, and so offered a pact of eternal friendship. This was to be sealed by a dual marriage, with Tiyuratina's son Mulaka to marry the daughter of the Kurnawal monarch, while in turn the Kurnawal monarch's son married Tiyuratina's daughter, Lutana. The Kurnawal king, Anguma, agreed with the peace pact, until the appearance of a brilliant comet the night before the dual wedding, which he interpreted as an unfavourable omen [5]. Haunted by this omen, Anguma betrayed the pact by dressing a servant Palawa girl as his daughter during the double wedding. The subterfuge was not discovered until after the dual marriage was completed. Anguma insisted that despite the deception, Lutana was now his son's lawful wife. Tiyuratina refused to break the oaths of safe-conduct which he had sworn, and so watched his only daughter carried off to Bountiful where she would be both wife and hostage.
When he returned home, Tiyuratina had the fake princess killed then dismembered, sending parts of her body to each vassal city, calling on them to avenge the honour of the Tjunini. Each king brought their armies, and they began a campaign to release the princess and drive the Kurnawal from the Big Island. The Song lists each of the captains of the army, and names several heroes who were to play leading parts in the war. After several battles which are mostly glossed over in the Song, the Tjunini armies reached Bountiful and besieged it. The granite walls held off every attack from the Tjunini armies for seven years, with many clashes of heroes along the way, while the besieged Kurnawal waited for help from their mainland cousins which never came.
Bountiful eventually fell when a Tjunini hero known only by his nickname of the Wombat dug beneath the granite walls and made a section collapse at a well-timed moment. The besiegers on the surface were already attacking, and used the breach in the walls to capture the city. Many heroes on both sides died during this final battle, which ended with the burning of Bountiful and the massacre of most of its inhabitants. Princess Lutana was returned to her father, but Anguma escaped. Tiyuratina vowed that the war should continue until the Kurnawal king was dead and his people driven into the sea. His vassal kings refused to honour his vow, saying that they had come at his calling to ensure that his daughter was returned, and that had been accomplished.
Tiyuratina continued the war with only his own forces and those of a few captains who remained loyal. He divided his armies in half, taking personal command of the forces sent to Dawn Dunes in case Anguma had fled there. The Wombat led the other half east through the mountains until they reached Orange Rock. In Dawn Dunes, Tiyuratina fought his way into the city and met Anguma's son, where they fought a duel where both of them slew the other. On the same day, the Wombat dug under the walls of Orange Rock in a raid, since he lacked the troops to besiege the city. There he found Anguma in a tower overlooking the eastern sea. They fought their own duel, which ended with each wounding the other, then wrestling and trying to push each other out of the tower. The Song ends with the description of the Wombat and Anguma each dragging the other out of the tower window, where they fall to their deaths in the eastern sea.
--
Whatever the historical truth of the Song, it is clear from the archaeological record that the Kurnawal were pushed out of most of the north-east during this period. Excavations of Dawn Dunes and Bountiful show a layer of destruction which can be dated to sometime between 1060 to 1080. Below this the record shows Kurnawal pottery and artefacts, above it they are entirely replaced by Tjunini pottery.
Of the major Kurnawal cities, only Orange Rock survived the wars of this period. Still, it appears that much of the population from the defeated cities survived and fled south. A number of new Kurnawal towns can be dated to this period. Of these, the most important were Narnac [Woodbury], Dabuni [Hobart] and Gamoma [Orford]. Here, the Kurnawal would thrive. Despite later attempts by various Tjunini warleaders, the Kurnawal would never be completely dislodged from their new homes.
The main legacy of the War of the Princess was long-lasting enmity between Tjunini and Kurnawal. The Tjunini took control of the rest of the northern coast; Bountiful and Three Waters [Launceston] became major cities under new kings. The Kurnawal were pushed into the eastern coast; Orange Rock became their northernmost bastion on the main island. For a time it was the capital, but the Kurnawal monarchs would eventually establish their royal city at Dabuni, far from the Tjunini threat.
In the immediate aftermath of the War, the border between the two peoples ran roughly from Orange Rock to Lake Sorrell, although it was never fixed in one place for long. Friction over the border became a regular inspiration for wars, particularly disputes over the tin mines in the north-east. The long-term trend has been for the Tjunini to push the Kurnawal further south, although there have been several temporary reversals. The most significant long-term conquest has been Flinders Island, which for long held a Kurnawal hold-out population, but which was permanently conquered by the Tjunini in 1554.
The unending war between the two peoples would produce something unusual in Australasia: a very strong sense of nationalism and a view of particular lands as being the inalienable heritage of a particular people. Even though both peoples fought amongst themselves from time to time, cooperation with anyone from the other people was regarded as the worst sort of treachery. They also viewed their own lands as being part of their inalienable heritage, and a call to war to liberate any enemy-occupied lands would always be well-received amongst both the Tjunini and the Kurnawal.
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In 1618, the whole of Tasmania is divided into three parts. On the north coast dwell the Tjunini, the most numerous people. Warriors, singers, feasters, and bronze-smiths par excellence, the Tjunini live according to their own code of honour. Memories of the past guide how they think they should live in the present. Writing is known to them, a necessary tool of government, but for their folk memory they rely on the ideals depicted by their bards.
Bards are their most honoured profession, requiring a combination of memory, musical talent, and dramatic flair. The foundation of any bard's skills is the memorisation and appropriate recitation of the many verses of the Song of the Princess. Any bard who cannot remember the entirety of the Song is not considered a bard, but at best a student and at worst an imposter. Tjunini bards know a variety of other epic songs, and compose many more topical and light-hearted songs which they recite when appropriate, but it is a rare winter's evening when a bard does not recite a few verses of the Song.
As a people, the Tjunini have done their best to forget that they ever dwelt on the mainland. They see themselves as the heroes of the world, descendants of those who answered the call of Tiyuratina and fought in the great war. What happened before that war means little to them. They adhere to what they see as the standards of behaviour and conduct laid down by the captains who fought in the war. While the bards are the repositories of the full knowledge of the war, even a small child can recite the names of each of the great captains.
In truth, the Tjunini are much changed from their mainland forebears. While they are a Gunnagalic people, like so many others in Australasia, their ancestors mingled their blood with the Palawa who lived on the Big Island before them. About ten percent of the words in the Tjunini language are of Palawa origin, and an even higher percentage of place names and personal names. Even the name of their greatest king, Tiyuratina, was originally a Palawa name, as were the names of his son and daughter. Still, the Tjunini have forgotten this truth; they have pushed the Palawa off the north coast and into the less fertile highland regions of central and western Tasmania. They trade with them from time to time, but consider them wild barbarians who lack honour.
Politically, the Tjunini have not much changed from the old system of petty kings which existed in the days of the War. Or what they believe existed during the war, at any rate. The Tjunini lands are divided into a number of feuding city-states, each ruled by a king who claims divine descent from the Rainbow Serpent. The rank of the Nine-Fold King still exists as titular head of the Tjunini confederation, although there are now more than nine subject kings. There has not been a continuous line of Nine-Fold Kings; there have been periods when no-one has held the crown, and several wars have been fought amongst the Tjunini to determine which head shall wear the crown. Internecine warfare is an integral part of the Tjunini way of life; the vassal kings fiercely guard their individual rights, and fighting each other is as much a part of their tradition as the list of the great captains. The Tjunini fight, in essence, because they have always been fighting.
On the east coast dwell the Kurnawal. Like the Tjunini, these are a Gunnagalic-speaking people, but otherwise they have little in common. Where the Tjunini are numerous, fractious and tradition-bound, the Kurnawal are less populous, but more united and less interested in the mores of the past. The Kurnawal are a people who inherited a tradition of survival from the massacres and defeats of the War. To them, cunning and resourcefulness are a way of life, both in war and in peace. A Tjunini merchant will always name his price and expect it to be honoured, while a Kurnawal merchant would think that anyone who accepted the first price was a fool. In war, the Kurnawal place much more emphasis on deviousness, feints, manoeuvres, and surprise attacks.
Where the Tjunini are politically divided, the Kurnawal have been forced by necessity to adopt a united monarchy, except for a renegade outpost at Jangani [Cockle Creek]. Their kings claim descent not from any divine beings, but from the daughter of Anguma, who survived the War. They do not have a bardic tradition, but they inherited some of the old forms of poetry and storytelling which their ancestors used on the mainland. The mainland Kurnawal used a form of alliterative verse to describe the deeds of their ancestors and of modern heroes. The Kurnawal who live on the Big Island have kept up this tradition, but have developed it much further.
Where the Tjunini have bards who speak in song, the Kurnawal emphasise the use of the spoken word alone. Their word for such speakers is wusaka, which can be broadly translated as poet, but which encompasses much more. The wusaka recite not just alliterative verse, but also sagas and other epic tales, which often include many poetic stanzas as part of the tales. When writing spread from the mainland, the Kurnawal enthusiastically adopted it to record the sagas, although they still emphasised oral recitation.
Most Kurnawal poets recite epics and poems in language which is meant to be easy to understand, since their audiences are usually the general populace. However, there is another kind of poetry, which specialises in using metaphorical language, allusions, and other poetic devices. These poets evolved out of an old Kurnawal tradition which was an equivalent to a court jester. The early Kurnawal kings appointed an individual poet who was given exclusive permission to "scold" or chastise the king without fear of retribution. While speaking rudely to a Kurnawal monarch could mean death for anyone else who was so foolish, the "scold" had free license to criticise the king's action. As part of the same tradition, any scolding had to be done in poetic speech rather than plain speech; the ambiguous language of the criticism made it more difficult for the common man to understand, while the kings had to be adept at understanding the literary language and allusions to understand the nature of the criticism.
The function of this class of poets has evolved considerably, but they are still remembered by their old name, the scolds. Now they create poems and panegyrics praising the kings as often as criticising them. They also create poems on a diverse range of topics, from religious to historical to mythical. The best scolds are kept around the king's court, but they also find audiences elsewhere, amongst the nobility or wealthy commoners. Scolds speak in a poetic language which is intricate almost to the point of opaqueness; to the Kurnawal, who esteem cunning and cleverness, the more obscure the poetic language, the more it is appreciated. The scolds pile allusion upon pun upon double meaning in an elliptical, inverted style of language which makes their meaning almost impossible for the casual listener to follow.
In the central uplands and the rugged lands of Tasmania's south and west, the Palawa still dwell. Once they lived all over the Big Island, but the Gunnagalic invaders have pushed them out of the flatter, more fertile lands on the north and east coasts. What they have left is the more rugged terrain, where the elevation and cool westerly winds means that it is less suitable for agriculture. Both the Tjunini and Kurnawal usually treat them with hostility, calling them wild men, barbarians, uncouth speakers of an incomprehensible language, ignorant of farming and city-building. The Palawa, for their part, often raid the fringes of Tjunini and Kurnawal territory, sometimes for food, sometimes for tools and weapons. The Palawa also have some contact with the Islanders, who have mastered the difficult sailing route into Macquarie Harbour, and built a few timber-harvesting camps and trading outposts along its shores.
For while the Palawa were hunter-gatherers when the Gunnagalic peoples arrived, they have learned much since that time. The Palawa have not taken up full-time farming, but they have acquired some domesticated crops from their neighbours. They plant these crops in suitable areas, and at the right time of the year, they move to harvest them, and they store much of this food for later use. The Palawa are not yet full farmers, but they are hunter-gardeners, and lead a semi-nomadic lifestyle. With these gardened crops to feed them, the Palawa are more numerous than at any time in the last ten millennia, despite having lost much of their ancestral lands. They are still much fewer than the Tjunini or even the Kurnawal, but they are thriving in their way.
For the Palawa have learned much from their neighbours, not just about farming. The Palawa conduct only limited mining, but trade and raids have given them metal tools, and they have a few smiths who have learned how to melt and reforge bronze. They have learned how to make textiles and ceramics. Above all, they have learned how to make weapons, especially ranged weapons. In some cases, ingenious Palawa have developed weapons beyond anything which the city-dwellers can match. The most significant of these is a kind of longbow, which the Palawa lovingly craft from the wood of the Tasmanian myrtle [6]. All Palawa men learn to use this longbow, since it is very useful both for hunting and for piercing even the strongest of bronze armour. Even the boldest Tjunini soldiers hesitate to chase Palawa into the hills when they might receive a barrage of arrows if they get too close to their targets.
Relations between the Palawa and their neighbours are often hostile, but not always; there is intermittent trade contact, for instance. The Palawa lifestyle requires that they become expert hunters, and they are experts at moving without being noticed. This ability makes them very useful as scouts, and both Tjunini and Kurnawal have been known to recruit Palawa auxiliaries during times of war. The Palawa are too few to supply significant numbers of longbowmen, even if they were interested in doing so, but they excel at finding the enemy without being spotted themselves.
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For all that Tjunini, Kurnawal and Palawa have so much hostility toward each other, there are three things which they all agree on. Every person on the Big Island knows the merits of bronze, the good taste of a goose, and the worth of the cider gum.
For without a doubt, Tasmania is the island of bronze. For a long time, the name which mainlanders called it meant "the place of tin." Tasmania has abundant reserves of tin and copper, and the peoples here have a wealth of bronze by the standards of mainlanders. Bronze weapons are abundant; both Tjunini and Kurnawal make bronze swords, daggers, axes, spears, and maces. Bronze tools are extremely common, far more than on the mainland: knives, hammers, chisels, wedges, saws and many other tools. Bronze-based jewellery is popular and widespread, and some people can afford to use bronze nails, screws, horns and other musical instruments, to say nothing of cooking utensils and dishware. Both Tjunini and Kurnawal can afford to protect their common soldiers with full bronze armour which would be considered extravagant even for elite officers in mainland armies.
The Tasmanians are aware of iron as a metal, since the Islanders have traded a few iron artefacts. However, they regard iron as inferior to bronze. Wrought iron from the mainland is less versatile than cast bronze, and much more prone to corrosion along the coast. With ample quantities of bronze, both Tjunini and Kurnawal regard iron as little more than a curiosity. The spread of ironworking on the mainland has reduced the importance of the tin trade, but on the Big Island itself, bronze remains the metal of choice.
Of course, while it is a useful metal, man cannot live by bronze alone. The Tasmanian peoples have all become acquainted with agriculture to some degree, even the Palawa, and many of the mainland crops are quite suitable to growing on the Big Island. Still, all of these peoples prefer meat, when they can get it. They are fortunate in that regard, for they have another species of domesticated bird which is still uncommon on the mainland.
The Cape Barren goose (Cereopsis novaehollandiae) is a gregarious bird which breeds mostly on offshore islands; it is abundant on several of the Bass Strait islands. Kurnawal sealers were the first to start it on the road to domestication, keeping semi-wild flocks on some of their sealing islands as a source of food while they were hunting seals. Some Kurnawal brought these geese with them to the Big Island, since they had discovered that these birds could be easily bred and reared in captivity, since they are grazers that could be left to feed themselves on pasture. Domesticated Cape Barren geese have become widespread across the Big Island; even the Palawa keep a few semi-wild flocks around as handy sources of meat and eggs. Tasmanian cuisine features a variety of dishes based on geese, from simple roasted goose at feasts, to goose fat used as an equivalent to butter, to goose meat sprinkled with herbs and then slowly left to cook in its own fat (which also acts as a preservative).
The third thing which unites the peoples of Tasmania is the cider gum. While the Big Island did not provide many new plants suitable for domestication, the cider gum would transform the culture of the Tjunini and Kurnawal settlers. The Palawa had long learned to tap the cider gum for its sweet sap, which is similar to maple syrup. While this was often used as a flavouring, the Palawa also discovered that if the syrup was sealed in a container and left to wild ferment, it would produce a mildly alcoholic beverage [7].
When the Tjunini and Kurnawal landed on the Big Island, they were quick to appreciate the virtues of the cider gum. They brought their own tradition of brewing with them, which was mostly done with various kinds of yam wine. The Tjunini and Kurnawal used ceramic containers which were much more easily sealed for suitable periods to allow fermentation, and they had discovered controlled use of yeast to make fermentation more reliable. With these techniques, they could now brew much stronger ciders than the old wild-fermented Palawa versions (up to about 9% alcohol).
Gum cider has become one of the Big Island's most valued products, supported by the cultivation of large numbers of cider gums. All three of the Tasmanian peoples drink it to some degree. The Tjunini, in particular, like nothing better than to feast away the long winter evenings, drinking gum cider while bards sing of the heroes of the War. Gum cider is also a valued trade good. The Islanders who regularly visit the northern coast trade it over a wide area. Since the rise of ironworking on the mainland has reduced the value of the tin trade, gum cider has become the most well-known product of Tasmania. No longer do people on the mainland speak of the Big Island or the Place of Tin; now, they call it the Cider Isle.
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[1] Estimates of the Palawa population before European contact vary considerably, but most conclude that it was no more than ten thousand. The Palawa as depicted here essentially are the historical Tasmanian Aborigines; the butterfly net has meant that their languages and cultures are effectively unchanged until first contact with the colonisers from the mainland.
[2] Historically, this headland was named Circular Head by the first Europeans to see it (Bass and Flinders in 1798), although it is informally called the Nut.
[3] Historically, the first European surveyor who explored the Scottsdale region considered that it had the best soil in all Tasmania. The inhabitants of the region seem to have liked that claim, since they named the town after him. The modern region of Scottsdale is a major agricultural centre, especially for potato farming.
[4] The Tin Trail starts roughly at the modern town of Scottsdale (western end), runs through the rich tin mines around Derby, Moorina, Weldborough, and Blue Tier, and ends in the modern town of St Helens (eastern end). This is the same trail used by tin miners during the Tasmanian tin rush of the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries; there were hundreds of tin mines along the trail, including the Briseis Mine which was for a while the world's richest tin mine.
[5] Historians who view the Song as essentially accurate believe that this was the appearance of Halley's Comet in 1066, and so use this to date the beginning of the war.
[6] The Tasmanian myrtle (Nothofagus cunninghamii) is not actually related to the myrtle family, but is a member of the beech family. It is quite common in the wetter areas of Tasmania, and produces a timber which is used to make some modern longbows.
[7] The Palawa use of the cider gum (Eucalyptus gunnii) for syrup and gum cider is exactly what they did, historically. The cider gum is endemic to Tasmania, growing in both lowland and some highland areas. It grows easily in cultivation, and is established as an ornamental plant in some parts of Europe. Unlike most eucalypts, it can tolerate frosts and subzero temperatures. Its potential for commercial cultivation is currently being explored. In allohistorical Tasmania, the cider gum will become their most valuable crop.
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Thoughts?
There is a land, the land of bronze, the land of mist, the land of courage, where valiant Tjunini soldiers battle endlessly with crafty Kurnawal warriors, where the wild men still lurk in the highlands, raiding where they may, and where in the long winter evenings honourable men gather to feast around roaring fireplaces, drink endless goblets of gum cider, and hear the bards recite the endless verses of the Song of the Princess, and even the smallest boy can recite the names of every captain who led men into that war, while in the courts of cunning kings, poets compete with each other to create ever more complex verses packed with allusions and circumlocutions which only the most learned of listeners can fully grasp...
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The island which another history would call Tasmania held what was for a very long time the most isolated human society on the globe. First settled tens of thousands of years ago when the seas were lower, the inhabitants of that distant land easily walked there. When the ice melted, sea levels rose and flooded what would now never be called Bass Strait, and the inhabitants of this southerly island were trapped in isolation. Although their distant ancestors had used boats or rafts to cross the seas and reach Australia, the inhabitants of Tasmania had lost those skills. For ten millennia these people, who called themselves the Palawa, lived in complete isolation from the rest of humanity.
The island which the Palawa call home is a cold and wet land, by the standards of mainland Australia. Much of it is rugged and covered in forests, although there are substantial flat and fertile areas, mostly on the northern and eastern coasts. Lying in the midst of the Roaring Forties, the island is often wind-swept, particularly the western coast. The rugged terrain conceals a wealth of mineral resources for those who have the knowledge to exploit them: gold, tin, copper, zinc, and iron. The few thousand Palawa [1] who live on the island do not have that knowledge; with a small population and no suitable plants to develop indigenous agriculture, they remain in a hunter-gatherer existence.
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The waters of Bass Strait are shallow and treacherous, filled with reefs and submerged rocks which hinder navigation. Strong currents move both east and west, and the fury of the Roaring Forties creates frequent storms and wind-driven waves. In a different history, Bass Strait would be notorious for the hundreds of shipwrecks on its islands or along its shores.
For the Gunnagalic peoples who lived along the northern shores of the Strait, the island beyond the wild waters for so long might as well have been on the far side of the moon. The various peoples who lived along the northern shores – Tjunini around the Otways, Giratji around Port Philip Bay, and Kurnawal to the east – did know how to build some ships, but their techniques were primitive. Their seagoing boats were mostly small, single-masted vessels built from wooden planks and held together with dowels. In these boats, they carefully fished the coastal waters, always wary for any potential storms, and rarely venturing out of sight of land. At times these vessels would be blown out to sea, where the sailors were often wrecked or drowned. On a few rare occasions a ship would land on Tasmania itself, where the crew would be killed by the local Palawa, sometimes be accepted into a local band, or otherwise starve to death in a land where they no longer knew how to hunt.
The long isolation of Tasmania might have continued until contact with the outside world, if not for the islands which lie in the midst of the Strait. The shallow waters of the Strait contain a great many small islands and semi-submerged rocks which are hazardous to shipping, but they also contain some larger islands which can sustain human habitation. The largest of these are King Island off the northwest coast of Tasmania, and Flinders Island off the northeast coast. Both of these islands had held human populations in the distant past, but these had died out.
In the late eighth century, a pair of Kurnawal fishing boats were swept out to sea, as so many had before them. Unlike so many of their predecessors, these boats were not sunk or wrecked on the shores, but made a safe landing on the eastern side of Flinders Island. Here they found an empty land with no signs of human habitation, but which abounded with natural resources. In particular, they found large breeding populations of fur seals and elephant seals. Seal colonies had been largely hunted out on the mainland, for they offered an attractive source of meat, pelts, fur, and seal oil. The crews of these fishing boats killed a few seals, collected their pelts and meat, and tried to sail home. Again, unlike many of their predecessors, they successfully returned to the mainland, with news of islands and seals.
News of the seal-filled island to the south caused a considerable stir amongst the Gunnagalic peoples. Their navigation techniques were not advanced, and the waters of the Strait were always risky. Still, they could recognise general directions from the movement of the sun, and seal hunting offered a considerable source of wealth for those who braved the waters. Over the next few decades, Kurnawal sealers colonised Flinders Island, while further west Tjunini sealers did the same on King Island.
With their colonies so close, and with several smaller seal-filled islands in between to encourage exploration, sealers did not take long to discover Tasmania itself. The long rivalry between Tjunini and Kurnawal means that both of them claim that they were the first to discover the Big Island. As such, no date can be firmly established, and the margins of error of radiometric dating meant that later archaeologists would never definitively settle the question. Still, it is certain that sometime in the early ninth century AD, Tjunini and Kurnawal both made landfall on Tasmania itself. The Palawa's ten millennia of isolation had come to an end.
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The Tjunini established their first permanent settlement on Tasmania at historical Stanley, on the north-west coast. Here, they found an imposing natural feature: a flat-topped circular headland which seemed to grow straight out of the sea, seemingly defying the power of wind and wave [2]. On the sheltered southern side of the headland lies a useful port. The first Tjunini sailors to see this head called it Hope Hill, and built their first mainland town just to the south.
From their base at Hope Hill, Tjunini sealers started to explore both Tasmania's shores. Going west, they found only rugged coastline along Tasmania's western coast; good for harvesting seals, sometimes, but not for much else. To the east, they found Tasmania's northern coast to be relatively flat and fertile. To them this was bountiful empty land, only thinly-populated by hunter-gatherer Palawa.
To the Tjunini, the northern coast of Tasmania was an attractive target for colonisation. It was only slightly colder than their homeland, and its apparent emptiness was a welcome feature. Yet the most appealling feature of Tasmania was its distance from the mainland and the Empire who ruled there. The Tjunini homeland had been recently conquered by Watjubaga's armies, and many amongst the Tjunini resented imperial rule. For those brave enough to sail across the Strait, they could build new lives in a land untouched by imperial influence.
The lure of new lands proved to be a strong one. Over the course of the ninth and early tenth centuries, more than twenty thousand Tjunini crossed the Strait to permanently settle in Tasmania. The migration was substantial enough that the Tjunini on the mainland would disappear as a separate people over the next few centuries, having become few enough in number that they were absorbed into their neighbours.
On the Big Island, though, the Tjunini flourished. Most of their early settlements were on the coast, where they could rely on fishing or sealing for part of their food. Some of these early settlements would grow into significant cities; the largest of these were Kwamania [Smithton], Mulaka Nayri [Wynyard], and Mukanuyina [Devonport].
From these early cities, the Tjunini started to settle inland, and push further east. They did not encounter any significant opposition from the indigenous peoples; outnumbered almost from the beginning, some Palawa were assimilated into the Tjunini, and the rest pushed back into the rugged interior. Nor did the Empire ever offer a credible threat to the Tjunini expansion. The first real threat to the Tjunini came when they pushed far enough east to encounter the Kurnawal.
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The Kurnawal settlement of Tasmania began near-simultaneously with that of the Tjunini. Like their western neighbours, the Kurnawal had first settled an offshore island, then found a convenient port on the mainland of Tasmania which was first used as a sealing base. For the Kurnawal, this was Dawn Dunes [Bridport]. From here, Kurnawal sealers charted the coast of northern and eastern Tasmania. They established another early settlement at Orange Rock [St Helens]. Unlike the Tjunini, the Kurnawal moved inland relatively quickly. Inland from Dawn Dunes, they found a place where the soils were so rich that yams grew larger than anywhere they had heard of. This place they called Bountiful [Scottsdale], and it quickly grew into the largest Kurnawal town in Tasmania [3].
However, while the Tjunini had crossed the Strait in their thousands to flee imperial expansion, the mainland Kurnawal were not yet under threat. The apparent emptiness of Tasmania did attract some settlers, but it was not the main driver for Kurnawal migrations. It would take another discovery to lure large numbers of Kurnawal settlers across the Strait.
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The north-east of Tasmania contains many ancient granite mountains, worn down by rain and wind into rugged terrain. Many of the rocks worn down by ages of rain have been carried into river beds, which over the aeons have formed immensely thick alluvial deposits. Kurnawal explorers who travelled along the north-eastern rivers recognised several minerals in the beds, including one which would prove an irresistible lure: tin.
Although the early Kurnawal did not know it, the granite in the mountains they climbed over had rich concentrations of cassiterite (tin ore). Mining the granite itself would have been difficult, but millions of years of erosion had broken down the granite and washed large concentrations of cassiterite into the river beds. The Kurnawal easily recognised cassiterite; similar ores had been carried to their mainland homes from the trade routes.
To the Kurnawal, the alluvial cassiterite deposits offered a source of wealth which made seal-hunting seem trivial. Although essential for forming bronze, tin was a rare metal. At the time, the only significant source for Gunnagalic peoples came from far-off New England, in northern New South Wales. Some of it did come south along the trade routes, but it was very expensive. The promise of tin-based wealth brought several thousand Kurnawal across the Strait to settle in Tasmania. Unlike the Tjunini, though, the mainland Kurnawal did not migrate en masse to the Big Island; the majority of them remained in their home country.
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The early history of the Tjunini and Kurnawal settlers on Tasmania is shrouded in mystery. In large part, this is because it is prehistory, not history. Writing was unknown in the Kurnawal homeland at the time that the first settlers crossed the Strait, and it was only barely known amongst the Tjunini, who regarded it as a tool of imperial conquest and bureaucracy, and wanted no part of it. Archaeology can reveal only glimpses of those early days, and oral history has been overlaid by many embellishments and biases.
From what truth can be sifted from myths and legends, it seems that Tjunini and Kurnawal settlers on Tasmania had some clashes with each other even during the early days of colonisation, but these did not develop into full-scale war for more than a century. In the early days, both peoples lacked the population to support a major war, and considerable distance separated their main settlements. The two peoples were never fond of each other, but they appear to have tolerated each other's existence for a time.
By the mid-eleventh century, the Tjunini and Kurnawal had both grown considerably in population. The Tjunini were the more numerous people, and were well-established along the north-west coast; later archaeologists will excavate quite a few large settlements. They were a people without political unity; each of their cities had its own king. Mukanuyina was the most populous city, with Kwamania and Mulaka Nayri roughly equal second, while six other cities also had monarchs who claimed descent from the Rainbow Serpent.
The Kurnawal had never received the same number of immigrants from the mainland, but they still had a substantial presence in the north-east coast. By far their most important city was Bountiful. The rich soils supported its large population, and the city marked one end of the Tin Trail which ran through the mountains to Orange Rock on the east coast [4]. Orange Rock was their second most populous city, with ancient Dawn Dunes a distant third, and there were a few other small towns further south along the east coast.
The boundary line between the two peoples was for a long time the Tamar River, which is in fact a 70 kilometre estuary. Later Kurnawal sagas claim that the Tjunini kept crossing the river to steal their land for farming; Tjunini songs speak of furtive Kurnawal sneaking across the Tamar on winter nights to raid and steal what they could. While the truth of these accounts is open to dispute, it is clear that the two peoples were becoming more hostile. The stage was set for a series of events which would be immortalised in song.
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What happened in Tasmania in the turbulent decades of 1060-1080? The short and unhelpful answer is: a war. The long-enduring tensions between Tjunini and Kurnawal came to crisis point during this time, and led to a war which the Tjunini won and the Kurnawal lost. That much can be known, at least with as much certainty as anything is known about history. Beyond that, well...
About a century after the events of that troubled time, a bard named Tjiganeng took the existing tales and verses and wove them into song. Into a very long song. If written out (which it later would be), it ran to over 25,000 lines in the alternating twelve and ten syllable patterns of Tjunini verse. As far as is known, Tjiganeng gave his song no title, referring to it simply as "My Song." Some later Tjunini would give it that name, but it was most popularly called the Song of the Princess. It told the tale of the War of the Princess, a war which raged for twelve years, and which rearranged the political and cultural borders of the Big Island.
The War of the Princess was undoubtedly a real war; archaeology has confirmed the destruction of Bountiful which was the central event depicted in the Song. Still, for all that memorising the Song became fundamental for the training of all later bards, the historical accuracy of the events it depicts are open to considerable dispute. Some historians think that the gist is accurate, but many details were invented. Some think that only the names of the central characters are accurate, and that almost everything else was artistic licence.
Still, with all the appropriate caveats, the Song records a reasonably credible account of a war. It describes how the Tjunini kings had long fought amongst themselves as much as they fought the Kurnawal, until King Tiyuratina of Mukanuyina established a loose confederation. All the other kings became vassals who could not make war except with his permission. Tiyuratina took the title of Nine-Fold King.
According to the Song, Tiyuratina sought peace with the raiding Kurnawal, and so offered a pact of eternal friendship. This was to be sealed by a dual marriage, with Tiyuratina's son Mulaka to marry the daughter of the Kurnawal monarch, while in turn the Kurnawal monarch's son married Tiyuratina's daughter, Lutana. The Kurnawal king, Anguma, agreed with the peace pact, until the appearance of a brilliant comet the night before the dual wedding, which he interpreted as an unfavourable omen [5]. Haunted by this omen, Anguma betrayed the pact by dressing a servant Palawa girl as his daughter during the double wedding. The subterfuge was not discovered until after the dual marriage was completed. Anguma insisted that despite the deception, Lutana was now his son's lawful wife. Tiyuratina refused to break the oaths of safe-conduct which he had sworn, and so watched his only daughter carried off to Bountiful where she would be both wife and hostage.
When he returned home, Tiyuratina had the fake princess killed then dismembered, sending parts of her body to each vassal city, calling on them to avenge the honour of the Tjunini. Each king brought their armies, and they began a campaign to release the princess and drive the Kurnawal from the Big Island. The Song lists each of the captains of the army, and names several heroes who were to play leading parts in the war. After several battles which are mostly glossed over in the Song, the Tjunini armies reached Bountiful and besieged it. The granite walls held off every attack from the Tjunini armies for seven years, with many clashes of heroes along the way, while the besieged Kurnawal waited for help from their mainland cousins which never came.
Bountiful eventually fell when a Tjunini hero known only by his nickname of the Wombat dug beneath the granite walls and made a section collapse at a well-timed moment. The besiegers on the surface were already attacking, and used the breach in the walls to capture the city. Many heroes on both sides died during this final battle, which ended with the burning of Bountiful and the massacre of most of its inhabitants. Princess Lutana was returned to her father, but Anguma escaped. Tiyuratina vowed that the war should continue until the Kurnawal king was dead and his people driven into the sea. His vassal kings refused to honour his vow, saying that they had come at his calling to ensure that his daughter was returned, and that had been accomplished.
Tiyuratina continued the war with only his own forces and those of a few captains who remained loyal. He divided his armies in half, taking personal command of the forces sent to Dawn Dunes in case Anguma had fled there. The Wombat led the other half east through the mountains until they reached Orange Rock. In Dawn Dunes, Tiyuratina fought his way into the city and met Anguma's son, where they fought a duel where both of them slew the other. On the same day, the Wombat dug under the walls of Orange Rock in a raid, since he lacked the troops to besiege the city. There he found Anguma in a tower overlooking the eastern sea. They fought their own duel, which ended with each wounding the other, then wrestling and trying to push each other out of the tower. The Song ends with the description of the Wombat and Anguma each dragging the other out of the tower window, where they fall to their deaths in the eastern sea.
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Whatever the historical truth of the Song, it is clear from the archaeological record that the Kurnawal were pushed out of most of the north-east during this period. Excavations of Dawn Dunes and Bountiful show a layer of destruction which can be dated to sometime between 1060 to 1080. Below this the record shows Kurnawal pottery and artefacts, above it they are entirely replaced by Tjunini pottery.
Of the major Kurnawal cities, only Orange Rock survived the wars of this period. Still, it appears that much of the population from the defeated cities survived and fled south. A number of new Kurnawal towns can be dated to this period. Of these, the most important were Narnac [Woodbury], Dabuni [Hobart] and Gamoma [Orford]. Here, the Kurnawal would thrive. Despite later attempts by various Tjunini warleaders, the Kurnawal would never be completely dislodged from their new homes.
The main legacy of the War of the Princess was long-lasting enmity between Tjunini and Kurnawal. The Tjunini took control of the rest of the northern coast; Bountiful and Three Waters [Launceston] became major cities under new kings. The Kurnawal were pushed into the eastern coast; Orange Rock became their northernmost bastion on the main island. For a time it was the capital, but the Kurnawal monarchs would eventually establish their royal city at Dabuni, far from the Tjunini threat.
In the immediate aftermath of the War, the border between the two peoples ran roughly from Orange Rock to Lake Sorrell, although it was never fixed in one place for long. Friction over the border became a regular inspiration for wars, particularly disputes over the tin mines in the north-east. The long-term trend has been for the Tjunini to push the Kurnawal further south, although there have been several temporary reversals. The most significant long-term conquest has been Flinders Island, which for long held a Kurnawal hold-out population, but which was permanently conquered by the Tjunini in 1554.
The unending war between the two peoples would produce something unusual in Australasia: a very strong sense of nationalism and a view of particular lands as being the inalienable heritage of a particular people. Even though both peoples fought amongst themselves from time to time, cooperation with anyone from the other people was regarded as the worst sort of treachery. They also viewed their own lands as being part of their inalienable heritage, and a call to war to liberate any enemy-occupied lands would always be well-received amongst both the Tjunini and the Kurnawal.
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In 1618, the whole of Tasmania is divided into three parts. On the north coast dwell the Tjunini, the most numerous people. Warriors, singers, feasters, and bronze-smiths par excellence, the Tjunini live according to their own code of honour. Memories of the past guide how they think they should live in the present. Writing is known to them, a necessary tool of government, but for their folk memory they rely on the ideals depicted by their bards.
Bards are their most honoured profession, requiring a combination of memory, musical talent, and dramatic flair. The foundation of any bard's skills is the memorisation and appropriate recitation of the many verses of the Song of the Princess. Any bard who cannot remember the entirety of the Song is not considered a bard, but at best a student and at worst an imposter. Tjunini bards know a variety of other epic songs, and compose many more topical and light-hearted songs which they recite when appropriate, but it is a rare winter's evening when a bard does not recite a few verses of the Song.
As a people, the Tjunini have done their best to forget that they ever dwelt on the mainland. They see themselves as the heroes of the world, descendants of those who answered the call of Tiyuratina and fought in the great war. What happened before that war means little to them. They adhere to what they see as the standards of behaviour and conduct laid down by the captains who fought in the war. While the bards are the repositories of the full knowledge of the war, even a small child can recite the names of each of the great captains.
In truth, the Tjunini are much changed from their mainland forebears. While they are a Gunnagalic people, like so many others in Australasia, their ancestors mingled their blood with the Palawa who lived on the Big Island before them. About ten percent of the words in the Tjunini language are of Palawa origin, and an even higher percentage of place names and personal names. Even the name of their greatest king, Tiyuratina, was originally a Palawa name, as were the names of his son and daughter. Still, the Tjunini have forgotten this truth; they have pushed the Palawa off the north coast and into the less fertile highland regions of central and western Tasmania. They trade with them from time to time, but consider them wild barbarians who lack honour.
Politically, the Tjunini have not much changed from the old system of petty kings which existed in the days of the War. Or what they believe existed during the war, at any rate. The Tjunini lands are divided into a number of feuding city-states, each ruled by a king who claims divine descent from the Rainbow Serpent. The rank of the Nine-Fold King still exists as titular head of the Tjunini confederation, although there are now more than nine subject kings. There has not been a continuous line of Nine-Fold Kings; there have been periods when no-one has held the crown, and several wars have been fought amongst the Tjunini to determine which head shall wear the crown. Internecine warfare is an integral part of the Tjunini way of life; the vassal kings fiercely guard their individual rights, and fighting each other is as much a part of their tradition as the list of the great captains. The Tjunini fight, in essence, because they have always been fighting.
On the east coast dwell the Kurnawal. Like the Tjunini, these are a Gunnagalic-speaking people, but otherwise they have little in common. Where the Tjunini are numerous, fractious and tradition-bound, the Kurnawal are less populous, but more united and less interested in the mores of the past. The Kurnawal are a people who inherited a tradition of survival from the massacres and defeats of the War. To them, cunning and resourcefulness are a way of life, both in war and in peace. A Tjunini merchant will always name his price and expect it to be honoured, while a Kurnawal merchant would think that anyone who accepted the first price was a fool. In war, the Kurnawal place much more emphasis on deviousness, feints, manoeuvres, and surprise attacks.
Where the Tjunini are politically divided, the Kurnawal have been forced by necessity to adopt a united monarchy, except for a renegade outpost at Jangani [Cockle Creek]. Their kings claim descent not from any divine beings, but from the daughter of Anguma, who survived the War. They do not have a bardic tradition, but they inherited some of the old forms of poetry and storytelling which their ancestors used on the mainland. The mainland Kurnawal used a form of alliterative verse to describe the deeds of their ancestors and of modern heroes. The Kurnawal who live on the Big Island have kept up this tradition, but have developed it much further.
Where the Tjunini have bards who speak in song, the Kurnawal emphasise the use of the spoken word alone. Their word for such speakers is wusaka, which can be broadly translated as poet, but which encompasses much more. The wusaka recite not just alliterative verse, but also sagas and other epic tales, which often include many poetic stanzas as part of the tales. When writing spread from the mainland, the Kurnawal enthusiastically adopted it to record the sagas, although they still emphasised oral recitation.
Most Kurnawal poets recite epics and poems in language which is meant to be easy to understand, since their audiences are usually the general populace. However, there is another kind of poetry, which specialises in using metaphorical language, allusions, and other poetic devices. These poets evolved out of an old Kurnawal tradition which was an equivalent to a court jester. The early Kurnawal kings appointed an individual poet who was given exclusive permission to "scold" or chastise the king without fear of retribution. While speaking rudely to a Kurnawal monarch could mean death for anyone else who was so foolish, the "scold" had free license to criticise the king's action. As part of the same tradition, any scolding had to be done in poetic speech rather than plain speech; the ambiguous language of the criticism made it more difficult for the common man to understand, while the kings had to be adept at understanding the literary language and allusions to understand the nature of the criticism.
The function of this class of poets has evolved considerably, but they are still remembered by their old name, the scolds. Now they create poems and panegyrics praising the kings as often as criticising them. They also create poems on a diverse range of topics, from religious to historical to mythical. The best scolds are kept around the king's court, but they also find audiences elsewhere, amongst the nobility or wealthy commoners. Scolds speak in a poetic language which is intricate almost to the point of opaqueness; to the Kurnawal, who esteem cunning and cleverness, the more obscure the poetic language, the more it is appreciated. The scolds pile allusion upon pun upon double meaning in an elliptical, inverted style of language which makes their meaning almost impossible for the casual listener to follow.
In the central uplands and the rugged lands of Tasmania's south and west, the Palawa still dwell. Once they lived all over the Big Island, but the Gunnagalic invaders have pushed them out of the flatter, more fertile lands on the north and east coasts. What they have left is the more rugged terrain, where the elevation and cool westerly winds means that it is less suitable for agriculture. Both the Tjunini and Kurnawal usually treat them with hostility, calling them wild men, barbarians, uncouth speakers of an incomprehensible language, ignorant of farming and city-building. The Palawa, for their part, often raid the fringes of Tjunini and Kurnawal territory, sometimes for food, sometimes for tools and weapons. The Palawa also have some contact with the Islanders, who have mastered the difficult sailing route into Macquarie Harbour, and built a few timber-harvesting camps and trading outposts along its shores.
For while the Palawa were hunter-gatherers when the Gunnagalic peoples arrived, they have learned much since that time. The Palawa have not taken up full-time farming, but they have acquired some domesticated crops from their neighbours. They plant these crops in suitable areas, and at the right time of the year, they move to harvest them, and they store much of this food for later use. The Palawa are not yet full farmers, but they are hunter-gardeners, and lead a semi-nomadic lifestyle. With these gardened crops to feed them, the Palawa are more numerous than at any time in the last ten millennia, despite having lost much of their ancestral lands. They are still much fewer than the Tjunini or even the Kurnawal, but they are thriving in their way.
For the Palawa have learned much from their neighbours, not just about farming. The Palawa conduct only limited mining, but trade and raids have given them metal tools, and they have a few smiths who have learned how to melt and reforge bronze. They have learned how to make textiles and ceramics. Above all, they have learned how to make weapons, especially ranged weapons. In some cases, ingenious Palawa have developed weapons beyond anything which the city-dwellers can match. The most significant of these is a kind of longbow, which the Palawa lovingly craft from the wood of the Tasmanian myrtle [6]. All Palawa men learn to use this longbow, since it is very useful both for hunting and for piercing even the strongest of bronze armour. Even the boldest Tjunini soldiers hesitate to chase Palawa into the hills when they might receive a barrage of arrows if they get too close to their targets.
Relations between the Palawa and their neighbours are often hostile, but not always; there is intermittent trade contact, for instance. The Palawa lifestyle requires that they become expert hunters, and they are experts at moving without being noticed. This ability makes them very useful as scouts, and both Tjunini and Kurnawal have been known to recruit Palawa auxiliaries during times of war. The Palawa are too few to supply significant numbers of longbowmen, even if they were interested in doing so, but they excel at finding the enemy without being spotted themselves.
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For all that Tjunini, Kurnawal and Palawa have so much hostility toward each other, there are three things which they all agree on. Every person on the Big Island knows the merits of bronze, the good taste of a goose, and the worth of the cider gum.
For without a doubt, Tasmania is the island of bronze. For a long time, the name which mainlanders called it meant "the place of tin." Tasmania has abundant reserves of tin and copper, and the peoples here have a wealth of bronze by the standards of mainlanders. Bronze weapons are abundant; both Tjunini and Kurnawal make bronze swords, daggers, axes, spears, and maces. Bronze tools are extremely common, far more than on the mainland: knives, hammers, chisels, wedges, saws and many other tools. Bronze-based jewellery is popular and widespread, and some people can afford to use bronze nails, screws, horns and other musical instruments, to say nothing of cooking utensils and dishware. Both Tjunini and Kurnawal can afford to protect their common soldiers with full bronze armour which would be considered extravagant even for elite officers in mainland armies.
The Tasmanians are aware of iron as a metal, since the Islanders have traded a few iron artefacts. However, they regard iron as inferior to bronze. Wrought iron from the mainland is less versatile than cast bronze, and much more prone to corrosion along the coast. With ample quantities of bronze, both Tjunini and Kurnawal regard iron as little more than a curiosity. The spread of ironworking on the mainland has reduced the importance of the tin trade, but on the Big Island itself, bronze remains the metal of choice.
Of course, while it is a useful metal, man cannot live by bronze alone. The Tasmanian peoples have all become acquainted with agriculture to some degree, even the Palawa, and many of the mainland crops are quite suitable to growing on the Big Island. Still, all of these peoples prefer meat, when they can get it. They are fortunate in that regard, for they have another species of domesticated bird which is still uncommon on the mainland.
The Cape Barren goose (Cereopsis novaehollandiae) is a gregarious bird which breeds mostly on offshore islands; it is abundant on several of the Bass Strait islands. Kurnawal sealers were the first to start it on the road to domestication, keeping semi-wild flocks on some of their sealing islands as a source of food while they were hunting seals. Some Kurnawal brought these geese with them to the Big Island, since they had discovered that these birds could be easily bred and reared in captivity, since they are grazers that could be left to feed themselves on pasture. Domesticated Cape Barren geese have become widespread across the Big Island; even the Palawa keep a few semi-wild flocks around as handy sources of meat and eggs. Tasmanian cuisine features a variety of dishes based on geese, from simple roasted goose at feasts, to goose fat used as an equivalent to butter, to goose meat sprinkled with herbs and then slowly left to cook in its own fat (which also acts as a preservative).
The third thing which unites the peoples of Tasmania is the cider gum. While the Big Island did not provide many new plants suitable for domestication, the cider gum would transform the culture of the Tjunini and Kurnawal settlers. The Palawa had long learned to tap the cider gum for its sweet sap, which is similar to maple syrup. While this was often used as a flavouring, the Palawa also discovered that if the syrup was sealed in a container and left to wild ferment, it would produce a mildly alcoholic beverage [7].
When the Tjunini and Kurnawal landed on the Big Island, they were quick to appreciate the virtues of the cider gum. They brought their own tradition of brewing with them, which was mostly done with various kinds of yam wine. The Tjunini and Kurnawal used ceramic containers which were much more easily sealed for suitable periods to allow fermentation, and they had discovered controlled use of yeast to make fermentation more reliable. With these techniques, they could now brew much stronger ciders than the old wild-fermented Palawa versions (up to about 9% alcohol).
Gum cider has become one of the Big Island's most valued products, supported by the cultivation of large numbers of cider gums. All three of the Tasmanian peoples drink it to some degree. The Tjunini, in particular, like nothing better than to feast away the long winter evenings, drinking gum cider while bards sing of the heroes of the War. Gum cider is also a valued trade good. The Islanders who regularly visit the northern coast trade it over a wide area. Since the rise of ironworking on the mainland has reduced the value of the tin trade, gum cider has become the most well-known product of Tasmania. No longer do people on the mainland speak of the Big Island or the Place of Tin; now, they call it the Cider Isle.
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[1] Estimates of the Palawa population before European contact vary considerably, but most conclude that it was no more than ten thousand. The Palawa as depicted here essentially are the historical Tasmanian Aborigines; the butterfly net has meant that their languages and cultures are effectively unchanged until first contact with the colonisers from the mainland.
[2] Historically, this headland was named Circular Head by the first Europeans to see it (Bass and Flinders in 1798), although it is informally called the Nut.
[3] Historically, the first European surveyor who explored the Scottsdale region considered that it had the best soil in all Tasmania. The inhabitants of the region seem to have liked that claim, since they named the town after him. The modern region of Scottsdale is a major agricultural centre, especially for potato farming.
[4] The Tin Trail starts roughly at the modern town of Scottsdale (western end), runs through the rich tin mines around Derby, Moorina, Weldborough, and Blue Tier, and ends in the modern town of St Helens (eastern end). This is the same trail used by tin miners during the Tasmanian tin rush of the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries; there were hundreds of tin mines along the trail, including the Briseis Mine which was for a while the world's richest tin mine.
[5] Historians who view the Song as essentially accurate believe that this was the appearance of Halley's Comet in 1066, and so use this to date the beginning of the war.
[6] The Tasmanian myrtle (Nothofagus cunninghamii) is not actually related to the myrtle family, but is a member of the beech family. It is quite common in the wetter areas of Tasmania, and produces a timber which is used to make some modern longbows.
[7] The Palawa use of the cider gum (Eucalyptus gunnii) for syrup and gum cider is exactly what they did, historically. The cider gum is endemic to Tasmania, growing in both lowland and some highland areas. It grows easily in cultivation, and is established as an ornamental plant in some parts of Europe. Unlike most eucalypts, it can tolerate frosts and subzero temperatures. Its potential for commercial cultivation is currently being explored. In allohistorical Tasmania, the cider gum will become their most valuable crop.
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Thoughts?
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