Guns, Germs, and Steel 8

Chapter 15 - the development of Australia. We are all familiar with the story of English criminals being shipped to Australia and later populating the continent, but what about the indigenous peoples who had come to live there long before the Europeans? Aborigines were hunter-gatherers, and that is one of the many reasons why Australia ended up the way it is today. Why were indigenous Australians technologically and socially inferior to Europeans at the time of their meeting? As mentioned above, Aborigines did not farm and therefore could not develop food surpluses and specialized societies. Much of the land in Australia was unfit for agriculture. Also, the Australian hunter-gatherers had low population limits. They had a lot less people than cultures in Eurasia did, and this led to a less cosmopolitan environment. Finally, European crops and livestock were well-suited to the Australian terrain and made colonization much easier. Not only this, but Europeans brought lethal diseases to the Australians. The big picture is that the British colonized and dominated Australia in the same way it did other countries at the height of its power.