We mapped the ‘super-highways’ the First Australians used to cross the ancient land

Author provided/The Conversation, Author provided

Stefani Crabtree, Santa Fe Institute; Alan N Williams, UNSW; Corey J. A. Bradshaw, Flinders University; Devin White, University of Tennessee; Frédérik Saltré, Flinders University, and Sean Ulm, James Cook UniversityThere are many hypotheses about where the Indigenous ancestors first settled in Australia tens of thousands of years ago, but evidence is scarce.

Few archaeological sites date to these early times. Sea levels were much lower and Australia was connected to New Guinea and Tasmania in a land known as Sahul that was 30% bigger than Australia is today.

Our latest research advances our knowledge about the most likely routes those early Australians travelled as they peopled this giant continent.

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We are beginning to get a picture not only of where those first people landed in Sahul, but how they moved throughout the continent.

Navigating the landscape

Modelling human movement requires understanding how people navigate new terrain. Computers facilitate building models, but they are still far from easy. We reasoned we needed four pieces of information: (1) topography; (2) the visibility of tall landscape features; (3) the presence of freshwater; and (4) demographics of the travellers.

We think people navigated in new territories — much as people do today — by focusing on prominent land features protruding above the relative flatness of the Australian continent.

To map these features, we built the most complete digital elevation model for Sahul ever constructed, including areas now underwater.

How the Sahul landmass would have looked more than 50,000 years ago.
Author provided

We used this digital elevation model to understand what was visible to early travellers. Essentially, from each point in the continent we asked “what can you see from here?” This moving window calculates the largest “viewshed” map ever created. When our virtual travellers move, they reorient based on visible terrain everywhere they go. The figure above shows the prominence of features across the continent as increasingly yellow shades against the blue background.

You can clearly make out features such as the the New Guinea Highlands, the Flinders Ranges in South Australia, the Great Dividing Range in the east, and the Hamersley Range in the Pilbara region of Western Australia.

But navigation using prominent landscape features isn’t enough to tell us where the most commonly travelled routes were.

For this we also need to take into account other factors, such as the physiological capacity of people travelling on foot, how difficult the terrain was to traverse, and the distribution of available freshwater sources in a largely arid continent.

Billions and billions of routes

We put all these different bits of information together into a mega-model, known as From Everywhere To Everywhere (FETE), and created more than 125 billion possible pathways from everywhere on the continent to everywhere else. Each route represents the most efficient way to move from one location to another. This was the largest movement simulation of its kind ever attempted.

This gives us an idea of the relative ease or difficulty of walking across all of Sahul.

We cannot possibly examine every metre of the 125 billion pathways we created, so we needed a way to weight the relative importance of likely pathways. To do this, we compared all plausible pathways with the distribution of the oldest known archaeological sites in Sahul, providing weighted probabilities for each path.

This provided a scale going from the “most likely” to the “least likely” chosen paths.

Super-highways of the initial peopling of Sahul, with known archaeological sites older than 35,000 years indicated by the grey dots. Megan Hotchkiss Davidson, Sandia National Laboratories (map) and Cian McCue, Moogie Down Productions (animation).

The most likely pathways in the map above are what we are calling the “super-highways” of Indigenous movement. The next most likely paths are marked by dotted lines.

This allows us to discard many of the billions of paths as less likely to be chosen, helping us focus on those that were the most probable.

We now have a first glimpse into where Indigenous Australians likely travelled tens of thousands of years ago.

Pathways well trodden

These super-highways might have been more than just routes used for the initial peopling of Sahul.

Several of the super-highways our models identified echo well-documented Aboriginal trade routes criss-crossing the country. This includes Cape York to South Australia via Birdsville in the trade of pituri native tobacco, and the trade of Kimberley baler shell into central Australia.

There are also striking similarities between our map of super-highways and the most common trading and stock routes used by early Europeans. They followed already well-known routes established by Aboriginal peoples.

Early routes of European explorers in Australia.
Courtesy of Universal Publishers Pty Ltd

These Aboriginal exchange routes and the relatively recent trade routes of early Europeans cannot be used directly to validate a map from tens of thousands of years ago. But there are strong similarities that might suggest an extraordinary persistence of routes across the entire time period of human occupation of Australia.

Our findings also point to the now-submerged continental shelves of Sahul as important conduits for human movement.

We infer that early populations spread across the broad plains on the western and eastern margins of the continent (now under water) and through the region that now forms the Gulf of Carpentaria, which connected Australia to New Guinea.

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It is worth noting these early people traversed and lived in all environments of Australia, ranging from the tropics to the arid zone. The ease of adaptation to all ecosystems is remarkable and one of the reasons for the success of the human species across the globe today.

Professor Lynette Russell (Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage and Co-Chair of its Indigenous Advisory Committee), who was not involved directly in the study, noted:

[This] modelling establishes the infrastructure for detailed local and regional studies to engage respectfully with Indigenous knowledges, ethnographies, historical records, oral histories, and archives.

The fundamental rules we described apply even to questions about how the first migrations of people out of Africa might have occurred, and how people ultimately proceeded to inhabit the rest of the planet.

This work might even have implications for humanity’s future, if climate scenarios require large-scale migrations. Learning from those who have been present in Sahul from more than 60,000 years ago could help us anticipate migration patterns in the future.

Stefani Crabtree, Assistant Professor for Social-Environmental Modeling @ Utah State University and Associate Investigator ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage and ASU-SFI Biosocial Complex Systems Fellow, Santa Fe Institute; Alan N Williams, Associate Investigator, ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, UNSW; Corey J. A. Bradshaw, Matthew Flinders Professor of Global Ecology and Models Theme Leader for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Flinders University; Devin White, R&D Manager for Autonomous Sensing & Perception (Sandia National Laboratories) and Research Assistant Professor of Anthropology (UTK), University of Tennessee; Frédérik Saltré, Research Fellow in Ecology for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Flinders University, and Sean Ulm, Deputy Director, ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, James Cook University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Today in History: April 30

Today in History: April 29

Ferdinand Magellan’s death 500 years ago is being remembered as an act of Indigenous resistance

Kate Fullagar, Australian Catholic University and Kristie Patricia Flannery, Australian Catholic University

This week, the Philippines is marking a significant event in the history of European colonialism in the Asia-Pacific region — the 500th anniversary of the death of Portuguese explorer Fernão de Magalhães (more commonly known as Ferdinand Magellan).

The Philippines government is hosting a series of events to mark the role that Indigenous people played in Magellan’s contested first circumnavigation of the earth in the 16th century.

European history books celebrate the expedition as a three-year Spanish-led voyage, carrying 270 men on five ships. But Filipino commemorations remind audiences that Magellan died halfway through the expedition in the Philippines and that only one ship with just 18 survivors limped home to Seville.

In particular, Filipinos remember how Lapu Lapu, the datu (leader) of the island of Mactan, inspired a force of Indigenous warriors to defeat Magellan’s crew — and the Spanish threat to their sovereignty — on April 27, 1521.

The Filipino commemorations show what an Indigenous-centred government approach to imperial history in the Pacific can look like. They also sit in stark contrast to the exhibitions, reenactments and publications that marked the 250th anniversary of James Cook’s arrival in Australia and New Zealand in recent years.

These commemorations mostly upheld the unique bravery of the British navigator, sidelining potentially deeper discussions of the violence to Indigenous people he and his crew also brought.

What happened to Magellan in 1521

Magellan reached what are now the Philippines in March 1521 after an arduous 100-day Pacific crossing. He set about using a combination of diplomacy and force to get local leaders and their followers to convert to Catholicism and submit to the authority of the far-away Spanish king.

Rajah Humabon of Cebu and other local rulers embraced an alliance with the Spanish, hoping to gain an advantage against their rivals.

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Read more: 500 years after Ferdinand Magellan landed in Patagonia, there’s nothing to celebrate for its indigenous peoples

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Magellan decided to attack Mactan, however, when Lapu Lapu refused to negotiate. About 60 European sailors and soldiers joined forces with Humabon and attacked Mactan at dawn, but they were met on the beach by Lapu Lapu and his armed warriors.

Weighed down by their armour, the Europeans stumbled in the shallows under arrow fire. Filipino folk histories say that an army of sea animals were also part of the resistance. Octopus wound their tentacles around the legs of the invaders, dragging them to their deaths. The battle was over within an hour.

A mural painting of the Mactan battle at the Mactan shrine in Cebu, Philippines. Shutterstock

Celebrating the victory at Mactan

The events organised by the Filipino government’s National Quincentennial Committee to mark Magellan’s death include a drone show, military parade and the televised unveiling of a new shrine to Lapu Lapu. All of these commemorations are designed to pay “tribute and recognition to Lapu Lapu and the Mactan heroes”.

The NQC also sponsored a national art competition centred on four themes connected to the Mactan victory — sovereignty, magnanimity, unity and legacy.

Matthius B. Garcia’s painting, Hindi Pasisiil (Never to be Conquered), recently took the grand prize in the “sovereignty” category.

In his work, the viewer’s eyes are drawn to the strong figure of Lapu Lapu. He is covered in Visayan tattoos and wears the bright red bandana and thick gold chains of a warrior and ruler. He leaps into the centre of the canvas, kampilan (sword) raised above his head, leading the charge of men rushing at the European invaders.

Magellan and his men, decked out in armour over puffy sleeves and stockings, fall over each other and into the sea to their deaths.

The artwork is Indigenous-centred because it was crafted by a Filipino artist for a Filipino audience. It is telling the story of what happened at Mactan from the point of view of the locals rather than the strangers.

Ordinary Filipinos have also been sharing their own artistic representations of the battle of Mactan on the NQC’s Facebook page, such as 5-year-old Miguel Alfonso Manzano Noriel’s painting, entitled The Battle of Mactan, below.

The Battle of Mactan by Miguel Alfonso Manzano Noriel. Author provided

The NCQ has also encouraged children to print paper doll figures of Lapu Lapu and Magellan so they can re-enact the battle of Mactan at home.

In contrast to Garcia and Noriel’s fiery scenes of mayhem, the winning entries in the art competition’s “magnanimity” section remember the compassion that Filipinos showed to the explorers.

In Romane Elmira D. Contawi’s prize-winning painting, a local man holds out fruit to a bedraggled, hollow-eyed white man. The work illustrates the key role locals played in the expedition, giving provisions to Magellan’s fleet and sharing their expert knowledge on surviving the dangerous seas.

Remembering Cook in Australia and NZ

From 2018–20, the Australian and New Zealand governments also sponsored events related to a significant anniversary of European incursion into their lands — the arrival of Cook’s ship, the Endeavour, in 1769–70.

Some did aspire to take an Indigenous-centred viewpoint. But the majority ended up pushing, at best, a “shared histories” approach. They encouraged audiences to consider “both sides” of the beach when the Endeavour docked on Indigenous shores.

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Read more: Explorer, navigator, coloniser: revisit Captain Cook’s legacy with the click of a mouse

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National institutions in Australia held exhibitions entitled “Cook and the Pacific” or “Cook and the First Australians”. The New Zealand centrepiece event was a six-vessel flotilla — three European, three Pasifika — that stopped off at 14 communities to instigate “a balanced telling of a shared Māori and Pākehā history.”

In these performances, Cook was made to forego some of the limelight, but never to step off his pedestal entirely.

Other memorials did not achieve even this fuzzy sense of mutuality. Pre-existing statues of Cook, for instance, not only remained standing through the anniversary years, they were often protected from being defaced. In the case of the Cook statue in Sydney’s Hyde Park, this came in the form of dozens of police officers.

Police encircling the Cook statue in Sydney last year. Rick Rycroft/AP

Decolonised public histories

The Philippines’ approach to a more Indigenous-focused and critical form of public history is imperfect. The government has come under attack for silencing “unpatriotic” criticism” of national leaders today — and in the past.

And the government was criticised for its handling of the death of another Ferdinand – the Philippines’ former president Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled the country through martial law for nearly a decade. He was given a hero’s burial to the outrage of many.

Similarly, public histories that happily remember 16th-century rebellions against Spanish conquistadors so as to “uplift the cultural confidence of the Filipino people” can render invisible some modern Indigenous struggles for autonomy, particularly in the Philippines’ Islamic south. There is only room for patriotic versions of the country’s history that emphasise unity.

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Read more: Cooking the books: how re-enactments of the Endeavour’s voyage perpetuate myths of Australia’s ‘discovery’

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Despite these serious concerns, the Filipino approach to the era of European expansion offers a refreshing contrast to the dominant stories about Cook in Australia and New Zealand. It is not simply adding in Indigenous voices or awarding Indigenous people co-star status on commemorative occasions.

Rather, the Filipino attitude to Magellan flips colonial history on its head by focusing on Indigenous resistance.

The promise of decolonised public histories in the Pacific is not to punish, shame or settle scores. It is instead intended to help forge as-yet undreamed futures for the region that place original sovereigns at their heart.

Kate Fullagar, Professor of History, Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Australian Catholic University and Kristie Patricia Flannery, Research Fellow, Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Australian Catholic University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Today in History: April 28

Our history up in flames? Why the crisis at the National Archives must be urgently addressed

Bidgee (Wikimedia commons)/The Conversation, CC BY-SA

Michelle Arrow, Macquarie UniversityImagine you are in a large building near Parliament House in Canberra filled with irreplaceable objects. Not jewels, medals or paintings, but a collection of letters, tapes and documents of Australian life.

The collection contains letters written to and from prime ministers, and recordings of their speeches. It has historic episodes of the ABC television programs Four Corners and Countdown. Audio recordings of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. Your grandmother’s migration records. Your uncle’s military service records. Covert ASIO surveillance footage of anti-Vietnam war demonstrations. Letters from women living under the shadow of domestic violence, written to the Royal Commission on Human Relationships.

These are just some of the things to be found in the National Archives of Australia. Its role is to collect, manage and preserve records generated by the Australian government. This sounds dull, but it is anything but.

The National Archives is a repository for all aspects of Australian history, including iconic television programs such as Countdown.
AAP/ABC/PR handout

It is not merely a “politician’s archive”: while the NAA is famous for its annual release of cabinet records on January 1 each year, some of the collection’s richest records are those that offer insights into the lives of ordinary Australians. Whether they were migrating to Australia, registering for military service, or writing to the prime minister to demand that he fund women’s refuges, ordinary citizens generated paper trails that have been preserved in the NAA’s collections. As a resource for understanding the ways that government works, and the ways that citizens interacted with it, the NAA is a peerless resource. The material it houses belongs to all of us.

Now imagine burning this building to the ground, destroying almost everything inside. Last week, historians around the world watched in horror as the Library at the University of Cape Town burned down, taking with it thousands of irreplaceable historical records. Thanks to years of underfunding, Australia is on track to see a similar, though less spectacular, destruction of historical records, unless the federal government makes an urgent injection of funds.

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Over the past few years, both Labor and Liberal governments have repeatedly cut funding to our national cultural institutions, including the National Archives. All commonwealth agencies have been subject to so-called “efficiency dividends” since 1987. This means that each year they receive a reduction in funding.

While this is intended to drive savings, in effect, according to a 2019 parliamentary inquiry, it has had a “significant and compounding effect” on cultural institutions over the last decade. This was made even worse in 2015-16, when the Turnbull government imposed an additional 3% “efficiency target” on national cultural institutions.

This means institutions like the National Archives have been forced to shed expert staff and reduce services to users. In 2013, the archives had 429 staff around Australia but by 2019, this had shrunk to just 308. This has made it more difficult for people to access material at the archives, as opening hours have been reduced. Users report long delays when they request materials; obtaining digital copies of files can cost you hundreds of dollars. This user-pays system has further restricted access to collections.

Even more urgently, these funding cuts are also taking irreplaceable audio visual collections to the brink of a “digital cliff”: that is, where a combination of material fragility and redundant technology will destroy a huge audio visual archive. Australia’s audio-visual collections will hurtle over this digital cliff by 2025 if no action is taken.

Let’s think for a moment about what this means.

Australia has experienced a century of profound and rapid transformation, all of it captured by the mass media. Television, film and audio show us how people in the past moved, sounded and spoke: they offer vivid and compelling evidence of life in the past that is impossible to obtain any way.

This kind of footage is the mainstay of documentaries. Archival footage can light a fire of curiosity about our past, especially in those who might never pick up a history book. It is crucial especially for engaging young people in history. Brazen Hussies, the recent documentary about the history of women’s liberation, was so successful because of its use of vivid, rarely-seen archival footage, much of it held in the National Archives.

Filmmakers would struggle to create lively historical documentaries if we allow the archival film held by the National Archives to be destroyed. It would be disastrous for our historical understanding.

What is so astonishing is that the amount of money required to pull us back from the digital cliff is relatively small. The government has committed $500m to an expansion of the Australian War Memorial : the Tune Review of the National Archives, released in March this year, recommended the government fund a seven year program to urgently digitise at-risk materials. The cost? Just $67.7 million.

The National Archives is a crucial democratic institution. It plays an important role in holding the state to account, encouraging broad participation in civic life by facilitating access to records generated by the Australian government. This gives it enormous power to control – and limit – access to government records.

Yet it has not always exercised this power wisely.

Given the enormous financial pressures on the National Archives, its decision to fight Professor Jenny Hocking’s bid to access the so-called “Palace Letters”, a legal dispute that cost the archives more than $1 million, was a deeply misguided use of precious funds.

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Jenny Hocking: why my battle for access to the ‘Palace letters’ should matter to all Australians

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Similarly, many historians have criticised the archives’ overly cautious approach to clearing records for access, which has led to huge backlogs of unprocessed requests. Its practice of sending records back to the department that originally created them means documents can languish, unchecked, for months or even years.

The archives’ lengthy legal fight over the release of the ‘palace letters’ was a misguided use of public funds.
National Archives of Australia

As the Australian Historical Association noted in its submission to the Tune review,

A process which restricts or even refuses access to government documents without adequate justification does not reflect an open and free democratic process.

The National Archives has much work to do to improve access to the records it holds. But it is also clear it has been denied essential funding for many years, and this has taken a toll.

The archives contains irreplaceable records that are important to every Australian. It is the government’s role to fund our national cultural institutions adequately so they can preserve and maintain this material: not just for citizens today, but for the citizens of the future.

Michelle Arrow, Professor of History, Macquarie University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Today in History: April 27

Endless itching: how Anzacs treated lice in the trenches with poetry and their own brand of medicine

Royal New Zealand Returned and Services’ Association Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, NZ (Tiaki reference number 1/4-009458-G)

Georgia McWhinney, Macquarie UniversityWe think we know a lot about Australian and New Zealand soldiers’ health in the first world war. Many books, novels and television programs speak of wounds and war doctors, documenting the work of both Anzac nations’ medical corps.

Often these histories begin with front-line doctors — known as regimental medical officers — who first reached wounded men in the field. The same histories often end in the hospital or at home.

Yet, much of first world war medicine began and ended with the soldiers themselves. Australian and New Zealand soldiers (alongside their British and Canadian counterparts) cared for their own health in the trenches of the Western Front and along the cliffs of Gallipoli.

This “vernacular” medicine spread from solider to soldier by word of mouth, which they then recorded in diaries and letters home. It spread through written texts, such as trench newspapers and magazines, and through constant experimentation.

Soldiers presented a unique understanding of their experiences of illness, developed their own health practices, and formed their own medical networks. This formed a unique type of medical system.

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What was this type of medicine like?

Soldiers’ vernacular medicine becomes clear when looking at one significant example of war diseases — infestation with body lice — which caused trench fever and typhus.

The men’s understandings of the effect of lice on the body often contrasted to that of medical professionals.

Soldiers described lice as a daily nuisance rather than vectors of disease. The men sitting in the trenches were preoccupied with addressing the immediate and constant discomfort caused by lice, whereas medical researchers and doctors were more concerned with losing manpower from lice-borne disease.

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Many men focused on the endless itching, which some said drove them almost mad.

Corporal George Bollinger, a New Zealand bank clerk from Hastings, said: “the frightful pest ‘lice’ is our chief worry now”.

Australian Private Arthur Giles shuddered when he wrote home about the lice, noting it: “makes me scratch to think of them”.

Soldiers experimented

Soldiers’ reactions to lice, as a shared community, inspired them to experiment and share practical ideas of how to manage their itchy burdens. This included developing their own method of bathing.

When New Zealand Corporal Charles Saunders descended the cliffs to the beaches around Anzac Cove, he would “dive down and nudge a handful of sand from the bottom and rub it over [his] skin”, letting “the saltwater dry on one in the sun”. He also rubbed the sand across his uniform hoping to kill some of the lice eggs in the seams of his shirt and pants.

In some locations, fresh water was scarce and reserved for drinking. Without access to water, soldiers’ extermination methods became more offbeat, creative and original.

Men sourced lice-exterminating powders, such as Keating’s and Harrison’s, from patent providers — retail pharmaceutical sellers in the UK or back home in Australia and New Zealand — and rubbed various oils over their bodies.

Yet, one of the most popular extermination methods was “chatting” — popping the louse between the thumbnails.

Five soldiers delousing (‘chatting’) their infested clothing outside their tents.
Australian War Memorial (photograph C00748)

An Australian bootmaker, Lieutenant Allan McMaster, told his family in Newcastle it was “amusing indeed to see all the boys at the first minute they have to spare, to strip off altogether and have what we call a chating [sic] parade”.

Corporal Bert Jackson, an orchardist from Upper Hawthorn in Melbourne, took his “shirt off and had a hunt, and then put it on inside out”. He said that if he “missed any, the beggars will have a job to get to the skin again”.

Soldiers shared their knowledge

These soldiers shared their practices via their own medical networks, such as trench newspapers.

For instance, soldiers wrote humorous poems that also educated their fellow men. Australian Lance Corporal TA Saxon joked about lice-exterminating powders in his poem A Dug-Out Lament:

[…] They’re in our tunics, and in our shirts,

They take a power of beating,

So for goodness sake, if you’re sending us cake, Send also a tin of Keating.

Soldiers shared cartoons and jokes about delousing via magazines and newspapers, such as this one in March 1918.
Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW (Q91/244, FL3509202)

One image from the trench newspaper “Aussie: the Australian soldiers’ magazine” came with the caption “Chatting by the Wayside” that drew on the well-trod joke about the double meaning of the word chatting.

What can we learn?

Reflecting on these often-overlooked aspects of the past helps us rethink medicine today.

For marginal groups in particular, access to professional health care can, and has often been, an expensive, alienating, or culturally foreign and abrasive task. So even in today’s globalised world, networks of non-professional medicine are as active as ever.

With many people isolated and at the mercy of much conflicting information, informal medical networks (often found on social media) present an opportunity to allay fears and swap information in a similar manner to how Anzac soldiers communicated via trench newspapers.

Perhaps some forms of vernacular medicine are occurring right under our noses.

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Read more:
The comfort of reading in WWI: the bibliotherapy of trench and hospital magazines

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Georgia McWhinney, Honorary Postdoctoral Associate, Macquarie University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Today in History: April 26

Animated History of Korea