Why didn't the native inhabitants of Australia develop an empire?

I assume it has a lot to do with the temperature. In colder climates people found it most beneficial to build cities to survive. But I know that’s not totally true.

Not knowing anything about their history I would guess that they held other things more valuable such as culture, tradition and family.

Read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Society for some ideas.

Or his follow-up book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

I would guess that the primary reason would be that the population never reached a level necessary to establish the fundamentals for empire. Just try to imagine an empire without bureaucracy, The key to the establishment of cities is organized and systematic farming. It’s the farms that provide the surplus food which allows the population to balloon. It’s at the point that not everyone has to spend their time hunting down a meal that organized settlements come about.

There are several simple, quiet living nomadic tribes throughout the world, even present day. The North American tribes who inhabited the area now the United States were mostly nomadic, roaming with seasons, and food. Some had rather populous cities, but none had empires. Besides here and Australia, there are tribes in Mongolia, and other parts of the world too, where tribes exist or existed who had no desire to build empires. They are simple people, with simple ways of looking at life. They are happy simply to live in harmony with the universe, and do not desire big structures or fancy political dynamics.

The population never reached the level where one group was bumping into another, so there wasn’t any need to develop a combative personality, no need to exert hegemony. Who needs an empire when there is plenty of land?

@gailcalled Guns, Germs, and Steel is one of my favorite books. It certainly offers plausible and well thought out explanations for the way societies developed and ended.

I figure a society that has plenty of food and water all year, and has a temperate climate, does not need to build large structures and an agrarian society to survive. Food an shelter are easily obtained. There is no need to plan ahead.

Throw bad weather, freezing temperatures, and shorter growing seasons at them and the survivors will be the ones who planned and began to build. That takes organization, the first step on the slippery slope to nation building. The larger the group the bigger the projects they can tackle. They can specialize and grow crops efficiently, dig irrigation ditches, build storage facilities, build communal ovens for cooking and later for firing bricks for housing. Unfortunately, once a group has something that others need to survive, they need to start protecting it so they need some force to fight back in case of attack.
On the other side of the spear point is the equally capable group that had been organizing but for some reason their water or crops ran out or were spoiled. They can either sit back and starve or they can raid the group in the area and steal their goods. Even if there is no food they can make weapons and train. It is a numbers game.* The larger the army the better chance of winning. It did not take long to figure that out. Heck even bacteria know it.

Just as fire needs fuel, heat, and oxygen, wars and empire building need higher population density, resource imbalance, and the spark of an ambitious leader.
—————-
*There was an interesting computer science simulation we wrote waaaay back in college days. We had two armies that used muskets that could only hit their target x% of the time. The rate would increase as the armies got closer to each other. It took a certain amount of time to load, aim and fire the musket. (There were many other factors but this will give you the main idea.) When one side fired it reduced the other side by X% That meant the other side would reduce the first side by some number less than X%. The side with bigger numbers had a huge advantage over the smaller force. It fired more, hit more, and reduced the other force more quickly.

Have you tried their beer?

Like the two of you, I also found “Guns Germs and Steel” to be a real eye opener when I first encountered his ideas.

The scope of Jared Diamond’s
coverage and knowledge plus
original thinking is pretty
astounding.

I first saw the multi-part PBS
special when it ran and
subsequently bought the book.

Utterly fascinating and makes
a lot of sense. And it really
gives the lie to the whole
Aryan genetic superiority line.

It was as simple as luck of the draw regarding where one was born. It’s all about the geography, baby. Simple
geography.

The idea of building an empire goes against everything I understand about Aboriginal culture and spirituality. I’m not Aboriginal so my comments here are based purely on my own reading and experience with Aboriginal people. I’m not speaking for or from any great knowledge. I feel it would be disrespectful to suggest that.

Australia’s First Nations people are emotionally and spiritually connected to their land. Their ancestors have lived on their land for thousands of years. Each tribes’ Dreamtime stories relate to the animals and the geography of their country. They refer to their tribal lands as their country. They would have had border wars prior to colonisation, but my understanding is they didn’t (and this continues although in a different way) see ownership in the same way as Westerners do. The land belongs to the community. Items they own are to be shared. Families will even now help each other out if one is doing well and others are not. My understanding is this is part of their culture.

It’s an error to imagine they were an unsophisticated people or that their culture lacked depth. Prior to colonisation, the various tribes did war. They also traded and political systems were in place that transcended individual groups. The doctrine of terra nullius (empty land) is founded on European observations that Aboriginal people didn’t use a farming system and there was no evidence of other structures Europeans expected. However, Aboriginal people did have their own land, flora and fauna management systems in place. They knew when certain berries, fruits, grasses etc. were in season. They regularly burned the bush on their land to manage fire risks. They were cautious about over hunting or fishing their lands. While some tribes were nomadic, there were others that weren’t. The Europeans’ ignorance of the culture they were observing, led them assume Aboriginal people were backwards and lacked culture or societal systems but that doesn’t make it true. This also provided (in the European minds) justification for stealing Aboriginal land and killing the inhabitants in various ways.

This connection to the land also shows how cruel it was to push whole communities off their tribal lands and to disperse them around the country on missions and reserves. The people weren’t just being removed from a piece of dirt, that land is tied to their identity and who they and their ancestors are/were.

So to behave as Europeans or Western cultures did, and to embark on a process of colonisation and theft of others lands seems to me to contradict Australian Aboriginal philosophy. They may have had border skirmishes, but they wouldn’t have wanted to steal someone else’s land with all the spiritual and ancestral history that space represented. It wouldn’t be their own and it wouldn’t have meaning and I’d imagine their would have been penalties for doing so. I’d imagine stealing someone’s land would have carried with it very bad karma (or the Aboriginal equivalent).

I love ” guns germs, and steel’. As an Australian , the reason is that the aboriginal people see the world in entirely different way. The concepts and constructs of most modern society are meaningless to them.