The aboriginal legacy

Introduction Aboriginal people are largely ignored in conventional economic history of early colonial Australia. Indeed, the earlier economic histories make no direct reference to Aboriginal people. Sinclair (1976, p. 1) confidently wrote: Australia was a country where 'land was abundant and economic development took the form of European penetration … the technical knowledge of the existing inhabitants was much more primitive than that of the Europeans and the existing social order was not transformed so much as replaced by an alien culture. One excuse for this blind spot in Australia's economic history is the lack of an Aboriginal voice in many written historical records. Even where recent economic histories include a discussion of the Aboriginal contribution to Australia's economy, it is implicitly discounted by a focus on prosperity and economic growth (McLean 2013, pp. 38-44). McLean briefly discusses depopulation of the original Indigenous population through disease and frontier violence, but discounts Aboriginal contribution to Australia's prosperity as there was no reproducible capital for the colonists to appropriate, while fire-stick farming is argued to have had only a temporary effect. McLean makes the case that the main Aboriginal contribution is through the provision of labour, although the qualitative evidence of this contribution is fragmentary and specific to a region or industry (2013, p. 43). White (1992) criticises the notion that pre-contact Aboriginal people made a conscious choice to remain hunters and gatherers, because these people did not have perfect knowledge about prospective levels of risk under a different economic system. Aboriginal risk management may have been carried out at the cost of growth promotion, but the environmental challenges facing Aboriginal people were very substantial. This chapter builds on McLean and White by describing key economic features of the Aboriginal economy while dispelling some myths about the lack of resource management, capital investment, or task specialisation.