Mark Odegard wrote:
> I dislike the idea that I have to disagree with MCV. But I agree
with Piotr, I think.
>
> New Guinea is a mixture of exteme mountains and tropical swamps. As
a 'biome', it it considerably more habitable than Australia ever has
been until recently
>
> In distinction, Australia is and largely has been mostly wide-open
desert (tho bits and pieces topside are impenetrable NG style swamp-
mountains).
>
> It's also that NG is the big piece of geography that you hit when
you sail east from Indonesia -- whereas Australia is not, and never
has been (winds and currents take you away from Oz). Topside
Australia has always been difficult to reach from what used to be
Sundaland. It's winds and currents. New Guinea really is big. Topside
Australia has always been harsh, and what you reach once you
penetrate the interior is and always has been considerably more dry.
Deserts are more conducive to sprachbunds than are jungles and
mountains. NG is rather like Amazonia, and its confused jumble of who-
knows-what-it-is native languages.
>
> NG is not a few boatloads of people a la New Zealand, but rather
multiple boadloads over a broad period of time. Oz just might be the
frog on a log thrown up on the beach just once, a la the Galapagos.
MArk, this used to be part of conventional wisdom but it has more
recently been thrown out of the water by latest Australian findings.
Firstly, Australia has not been that difficult to reach from
Sundaland. The summer monsoons all blow from South East Asia to
Northern Australia, while the winter monsoons allow a safe reverse
trip (blowing out of Australia back to Sundaland). This has enabled
groups of seafaring Austronesians to regularly travel to northern
Australia in search of beche la mer (sea cucumber), turtles, dugong,
trochus and conch shells and other delicacies of great delight in
China and South East Asia, and not locally available. The age of
these trade routes must not be underestimated. They have been open
at least since 3,500 BP if not much earlier. The dingo travelled
down with these contacts and there is much evidence of to-and-fro
movements. Aboriginal Australians have been living in Macassar for
hundreds of years, taken as servants and settling in Indonesia as a
result.
There is also new evidence that Eastern Australia was reached by
Polynesians, who seem to have an impact on some cultural features in
North Eastern Australia. Certainly the Maori knew of the presence of
a big land to the west. Trade routes also ciss-crossed from the Cape
York Peninsula, across the Torres Strait to Papua New Guinea. There,
however, the PNG bow and arrow, was recognised as no match for the
Abroiginal hunking or killing "spear" and womera whose distance and
accuracy compared with the early firearms of the Dutch and
Portugese. Indeed it has now deen confirmed that the Wik people of
Cape York drove out a Dutch settlement there, and it would seem that
the people north of Derby, Western Australia may have repulsed a
Portugese settlement from Timor pror to 1606.
Regards
John