It's kind of a challenge. With all of the alternate history stuff around, I don't recall ever seeing a story that had much to do with Australian Aborigines. There is quite a bit of American Indian stuff, with scenarios where the Indians manage to avoid getting conquered, but as far as I know nothing similar has been done on Aborigines.

There are reasons for that of course. The Indians had a materially much more advanced culture and played a major role in early American history. They fought hard and lost in dramatic ways. By comparison, the Aborigines didn't seem to play much of a role in Australian history after the first decade or so. They were less militarily powerful than the American Indians and European technology in 1790-1800 was even more overwhelming to them than it had been to the Indians in the 1500's and 1600's.

Most people outside Australia see the Aborigines as a small and very primitive population of little significance to anyone except anthropologists. Some recent research has shown that the Aborigines were not as primitive as had been originally thought. In a few areas where there was enough water and enough food they had reasonably permanent settlements and considerably more material culture than most people realize. An article in Science magazine back in May of 1994 talks about the finding of an Aborigine cemetery with around 10,000 bodies in it, and evidence that the area (around Lake Victoria) had been densely and permanently settled for around 7000 years.

That got me to thinking: Could I come up with a scenario where Aborigine material culture ended up at or around the level of the American Indians at contact time, and if so what would the consequences be?

The Problem.

First off, chances are the Aborigines couldn't invent that level of culture on their own in the right time frame. That isn't a matter of them not being bright individuals. It is just a matter of how cultures evolve. Australia was just too small, too resource poor and too isolated to develop an Indian or above level culture by the 1790's. That isn't to say that it wouldn't have eventually. Aboriginal culture was evolving in subtle ways over the years, with a major jump about 4000 years ago. I suspect they would have eventually developed an Indian-level or higher material culture. It might have taken 5,000 or even 20,000 years given the level they were at and the number of people that they had to do the inventing.

So how would they get a higher culture level? Presumably by changing one or more of those restricting variables.

Variable 1: The size of Australia

I think arbitrarily changing the size of continents puts us closer to fantasy than alternate history, but your mileage may differ. I could buy a what if with Australia and Antarctica staying one continent instead of splitting apart during the late Cretaceous. If the combined continent ended up with the Australian part near the position where Australia is today and Antarctica just south of it, then we'd have a continent large enough for a pretty advanced culture to develop. The combined continent would be a little smaller than North America. It would have some high mountains in the Antarctic part, and some cold temperate areas. The plants and animals would presumably be a different blend of Australia's odd biology, with marsupials playing a major role. There would probably be some archaic South American elements thrown in. Antarctica was between Australia and South America in reality and recent fossil finds in Antarctica indicate that it was a cold country version of South America in terms of animal life before the cold killed off its last land mammals 20-25 million years ago.

With a greater area to develop in, chances are that the animals would have been more advanced and tougher than the Australian animals of our time line. Australia seems to have been too small and resource poor for a full set of mammal large carnivores to develop. The really big carnivores were reptiles. Australian animals larger than a red kangaroo didn't have to run very fast or very long in our time line. A larger continent would have allowed larger predators. That might have allowed more of the large and middle-sized ones to survive first contact with the Aborigines. That in turn might have given the Aborigines domestic animals besides the dingo.

Sounds pretty good so far. We have more Aborigines with more resources. So can we have Cap'n Cook or the Dutch explorers finding a super-Australia and having fun trying to conquer it? (That would be more like what they were looking for than what they actually found, apparently. There was a theory that there was a large Southern continent that balanced the large northern continents of Europe and Asia.) So would that work?

Well, sort of. There are things I could do with this idea, but I would have trouble justifying the Dutch or English of our world running into a super-Australia with super-Aborigines. If you moved Antarctica around that much you almost certainly wouldn't get English or Dutch, and there is a very good chance that you wouldn't get any kind of Homo sapiens. The world's climate is too intimately related to the position of the continents and the circulation of the oceans. Our early evolution in turn was too intimately related to that climate. Make Africa a little wetter or drier or warmer or colder at the wrong time and we wouldn't be around in our current form. It would take even smaller changes in the climate at any number of points to scupper any recognizable England or Holland. So: some potential for an alternate world here, but not exactly what I'm looking for at the moment.

Variable 2: Too resource poor.

I don't know enough about plants to know if anything could have happened differently there, but I can think of a couple of things that might have helped as far as meat sources/potential domestic animals goes:

What if more of the large and medium-sized animals had survived? The largest surviving Australian animals were a couple of species of Kangaroos that weigh in at around 150-200 pounds for a big male. When the Aborigines first got to Australia there were species of kangaroos around which stood up to 10 feet tall and weighed at least twice as much as the living species do. There were also several species of a group called the Diprotodons which weighed as much as a ton and vaguely resembled a cross between a rhino and a wombat. There were a lot of good meat sources and potential domesticates around but most of them died out around 20-30,000 years ago--same problem that the American Indians had only more so. If some of those animals had survived, Aborigine cultures would have had a lot more to work with.

Only problem is I can't figure out a mechanism that would let the big Australian marsupials survive given a human big game hunting culture in Australia. They were too slow and too defenseless. The larger ones not only weren't adapted against human predators, they weren't even adapted against mammal predators. As I pointed out earlier, Australia didn't develop much of a set of large mammal predators. There were Tasmanian Wolves, which were dog-like animals about the size of coyote, but with about half the brain size, an extinct cat-like animal that is often called a Marsupial Lion, which was about the size of a small Mountain Lion and possibly an extinct partly carnivorous Kangaroo that has been nicknamed "Paws" by Australian paleontologists. The really big predators in Australia when the Aborigines arrived were reptiles--a twenty foot lizard related to the Komodo Dragon and a Crocodile adapted to dry land.

So the big Australian animals didn't have to worry about mammal predators after they reached adult size. That would probably make them easy prey for the aborigines. I can't figure out a mechanism that lets them survive long enough to be domesticated.

What if pigs had made it to Australia? Pigs made it to New Guinea and became a major meat source, but they apparently never made it over to Australia (though there is a little bit of controversy about that--some groups of feral pigs in northern Australia may have made it there a little before Cap'n Cook). Get pigs to Australia early enough--a couple of thousand years before contact, and at least you would add to the resources available for hunting, even if they were mainly feral. Of course there would be a downside to that because pigs can be tough on an ecology that hasn't run into them before. Pigs would make some difference but I doubt that they would make enough difference to have the effect that I'm after here.

Variable 3: Isolation

A little background: The Torres Strait between Australia and New Guinea is sort of like the Bering Strait between North America and Asia. It is dry land during the ice ages and shallow ocean between ice ages. In the case of the Torres Strait, the water is very shallow--tens or less feet deep rather than hundreds of feet deep. There are a few small islands in the Torres Strait. Those islands are or were inhabited by people that are in many ways intermediate between the people of New Guinea and the Australian Aborigines.

The Torres Strait was a major barrier or at least a filter to people, things, and ideas. When the first white explorers came, New Guinea was arguably pretty close to the same level of material culture as the American Indians outside of Mexico and Peru. The Australian aborigines were maybe 5-10,000 years behind either of those groups in terms of material culture. The Aborigines:

•   Had no domesticated plants. (Though a few areas seemed to be headed in that direction) -- New Guinea, on the other hand had farming for at least 9000 years.
• Had only one domestic (or semi-domestic) animal--the dingo. And the dingo had only been around for about 2,000 ears--versus at 10-15,000 years for domestic dogs in Europe or Asia.
• Did not use pottery--New Guinea had pottery for at least 4,000 years.
•  Did not use bows and arrows. (At least one Northern tribe knew about bows and arrows from their fights with Torres Strait Islanders and used them as toys for little kids.)

There was a large material culture gap between Australia and New Guinea. No Torres Strait would have probably meant a much smaller gap. Would Cap'n Cook had met up with a culture at pretty much the same level as New Guinea's? Would he even exist? The more I think about it, the more doubtful I am that you could cut off a strait like that without having consequences outside the area. Homo Sapiens would probably still exist, but Cap'n Cook might not. Ok, so what if you kept the Strait and made it narrower? (No puns please.) There is a trade-off here. More strait equals more of a filtering effect but also less chance of consequences outside of the area. So you end up with somewhat bigger islands somewhat closer together and some things not making it over to Australia. As long as the important stuff like domestic pigs and agriculture and the bow and arrow made it over, the aborigines would probably be smart enough to fill in the gaps themselves.

The ecology of parts of Northeastern Australia is similar to New Guinea, which isn't too surprising since they are connected during the ice ages. So probably the typical New Guinea food plants would carry over pretty well, then start faring less well in dryer and less tropical areas. A good hunk of the interior of Australia would probably never see agriculture, and it might never reach the southwest. Along the East Coast, tropical crops would thin out as you went further South of the equator and reached more temperate areas.

You might see new plants domesticated in the Southeast--once farming has established itself domesticating new plants isn't nearly as hard, and if only a few of the New Guinea food crops were suitable the incentive would be there. There might also be new domestic animals. In some areas Aborigines had a habit of capturing and tying up young wallabies and possums until they got used to being around people, then letting them hang around the camps. More permanent settlements and experience with handling pigs might let that pattern lead to domestication of a species or two of wallabies.

I see the Southeast of Australia developing like the Mississippian mound building culture in the Southeast US. They would borrow big time from New Guinea just like the Mississippians borrowed from Mexico, but they would also add innovations of their own just like the Mississippians did. The Northeast would be kind of a backwater New Guinea. The Center and West would not change much except that the Aborigines would hunt with bows and arrows instead of spear throwers and they would have feral pigs to hunt in some areas.

Then What?

So, Capn Cook comes along and runs into this super-Aborigine culture. What happens next? Would Australia have been colonized? Would there have been much impact on the rest of the world? (A point to consider: New Guinea participates to some extent in the rest of the world's pool of diseases and has some nasty ones of its own. Close enough contact between New Guinea and Australia might mean that the disease weapon would go both ways if the Europeans tried to colonize.) Would Australia contribute new food crops to the world like North and South America did? In our time line it only contributed one crop that I know of. Would this version of the Aborigines discover the Australian gold fields? That would be a good way to get themselves conquered. If these Aborigines took the basic culture they inherited and developed it, what would they contribute in the way of ideas and ways of looking at things? Maybe not as much as the American Indians did. After all, the Indians had two continents to develop in and both of those continents were much larger than Australia. But the Aborigines in this time line would add a few more pieces to the conglomeration of modern culture.