University college ‘starved'

College family: January 8, 1945. Edna, first college librarian and eldest daughter of college founder David Drummond, marries first staff member and now acting Warden Jim Belshaw. This  is the tenth in the story of the Pacific Belshaws, the fifth on the early days of the New England University College, University of New England 

The 1940s were a difficult time for the New England University College as it fought to establish itself with limited funds. However, there were some advances.

In January 1943, the Commonwealth Government established the Department of Post-War Reconstruction under the leadership of H C (Nugget) Coombs to plan and coordinate Australia's transition from a war economy with the goal of achieving and maintaining full employment.

One result was the first direct Commonwealth financial support to the university sector via the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme (CRTS). Student numbers increased from 180 in 1945 to 246 in 1948, partly as a consequence of ex-service personnel enrolling under the CRTS.

In 1946, the University also received a Commonwealth grant of £33,000 under CRTS to build a temporary laboratory block, the Belshaw Block, which finally opened in 1949. The new building may have been, as University librarian Edith Tattersall said, “a bleak, ugly, two-story barn”, but it was still a God send to the Faculty of Science

There were also some new staff appointments, including two ex-students, Paul Barratt (Psychology) and Alwyn Horadam (Mathematics). Barratt had been the first student enrolled at the new University College in 1938 and would later become Professor of Psychology

Despite this growth, the efforts progress the autonomy issue failed completely. Possible Commonwealth funding was drained by the creation of the Australian National University in 1946, an action vigorously promoted by H C Coombs. In New South Wales, the Government transformed the Sydney Technical College into an Institute of Technology and then in 1949, with much fanfare, into the New South Wales University of Technology, now the University of New South Wales.

This was a bitter outcome from a New England perspective: “the University of Sydney is being financially starved”, Drummond said, and “its offspring, the New England University College, is even more starved” Staff bitterness lingered for years.

In February 1947, Jim Belshaw as acting Warden had been replaced by Robert Madgwick. It had been a busy and productive time for Belshaw.

In addition to his duties as acting Warden, he had continued teaching, played a major role in creating the institutions that the College required and had become actively involved in the promotion of Northern development. He had also found the time to marry.

“I wonder”, he had written in his diary in 1938, “whether I shall ever have a wife and children?” Now his new bride was Edna Drummond, David Drummond’s oldest daughter.

Edna’s sisters were a little surprised at the news because she had not always been complimentary about Doctor Belshaw. In fact, it’s not so surprising. Edna had established the College library so they worked together, while Belshaw and Drummond had worked closely on College and Northern Development matters.

In February 1945 their first son, James, was born.

Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express Extra on 21 March 2018. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because they are not all on line outside subscription. You can see all the Belshaw World and History Revisited/History Matters columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010, here for 2011, here for 2012, here for 2013, here for 2014, here for 2015, here for 2016, here  2017, here 2018 

Skara Brae: local responses to environmental change

Interesting piece in Nature Ecology & Evolution, The resilience of postglacial hunter-gatherers to abrupt climate change, on the Skara Brae site (photo) in Scotland published on-line on 26 march 2018.

I will give you the abstract first and then make a brief comment. The abstract reads:

Understanding the resilience of early societies to climate change is an essential part of exploring the environmental sensitivity of human populations. There is significant interest in the role of abrupt climate events as a driver of early Holocene human activity, but there are very few well-dated records directly compared with local climate archives. Here, we present evidence from the internationally important Mesolithic site of Star Carr showing occupation during the early Holocene, which is directly compared with a high-resolution palaeoclimate record from neighbouring lake beds. We show that—once established—there was intensive human activity at the site for several hundred years when the community was subject to multiple, severe, abrupt climate events that impacted air temperatures, the landscape and the ecosystem of the region. However, these results show that occupation and activity at the site persisted regardless of the environmental stresses experienced by this society. The Star Carr population displayed a high level of resilience to climate change, suggesting that postglacial populations were not necessarily held hostage to the flickering switch of climate change. Instead, we show that local, intrinsic changes in the wetland environment were more significant in determining human activity than the large-scale abrupt early Holocene climate events. 

Simon Blockley, Ian Candy, Ian Matthews, Pete Langdon, Cath Langdon, Adrian Palmer, Paul Lincoln, Ashley Abrook, Barry Taylor, Chantal Conneller, Alex Bayliss, Alison MacLeod, Laura Deeprose, Chris Darvill, Rebecca Kearney, Nancy Beavan, Richard Staff, Michael Bamforth, Maisie Taylor & Nicky Milner The resilience of postglacial hunter-gatherers to abrupt climate change Nature Ecology & Evolution (2018)
doi:10.1038/s41559-018-0508-4

The resilience of human populations to survive in the face of extreme change will not come as a surprise to anybody who knows something about the Tasmanian Aborigines. By the time that Skara Brae was established, Tasmania's Aboriginal peoples had survived the Late Glacial maximum and the separation of Tasmania from the mainland. They were affected by but adapted to dramatic climate change.

All this said. the Skara Brae case illustrates the importance of understanding the local effects of change and the nature of responses. I know that I am a broken record on this one. .

Dendrochronology and the discovery of the Late Antique Little Ice Age

I first came across dendrochronology when I was studied prehistory and archaeology in my undergraduate degree. Since then, the field has exploded.

Wikipedia describes dendrochronology in these terms:

Dendrochronology (or tree-ring dating) is the scientific method of dating tree rings (also called growth rings) to the exact year they were formed in order to analyze atmospheric conditions during different periods in history. Dendrochronology is useful for determining the timing of events and rates of change in the environment (most prominently climate) and also in works of art and architecture, such as old panel paintings on wood, buildings, etc. It is also used in radiocarbon dating to calibrate radiocarbon ages. 

New growth in trees occurs in a layer of cells near the bark. A tree's growth rate changes in a predictable pattern throughout the year in response to seasonal climate changes, resulting in visible growth rings. Each ring marks a complete cycle of seasons, or one year, in the tree's life As of 2013, the oldest tree-ring measurements in the Northern Hemisphere are a floating sequence extending from about 12,580 to 13,900 years.

A very user friendly description by Matthew Mason can be found in Environment Science: Dendrochronology: What Tree Rings Tell Us About Past and Present.

As indicated, dendrochronology can be used in dating including the calibration of radio carbon dates. However, variations in the tree rings can also provide evidence for climatic variation. This February 2018 Cambridge University promo, Silent witnesses: how an ice age was written in the trees, describes a little of the work being done here focused especially on the discovery of LALIA, the Late Antique Little Ice Age which dated from AD 536 to around AD 660.

The promo references a 2016 letter published in Nature Geoscience, Cooling and societal change during the Late Antique Little Ice Age from 536 to around 660 AD.. The abstract follows. Details of the footnotes can be found in the original. :

Climatic changes during the first half of the Common Era have been suggested to play a role in societal reorganizations in Europe 1,2 and Asia 3,4. In particular, the sixth century coincides with rising and falling civilizations 1,2,3,4,5,6, pandemics 7,8, human migration and political turmoil 8,9,10,11,12,13. Our understanding of the magnitude and spatial extent as well as the possible causes and concurrences of climate change during this period is, however, still limited. Here we use tree-ring chronologies from the Russian Altai and European Alps to reconstruct summer temperatures over the past two millennia. We find an unprecedented, long-lasting and spatially synchronized cooling following a cluster of large volcanic eruptions in 536, 540 and 547 AD (ref. 14), which was probably sustained by ocean and sea-ice feedbacks 15,16, as well as a solar minimum 17. We thus identify the interval from 536 to about 660 AD as the Late Antique Little Ice Age. Spanning most of the Northern Hemisphere, we suggest that this cold phase be considered as an additional environmental factor contributing to the establishment of the Justinian plague 7,8, transformation of the eastern Roman Empire and collapse of the Sasanian Empire 1,2,5, movements out of the Asian steppe and Arabian Peninsula 8,11,12, spread of Slavic-speaking peoples 9,10 and political upheavals in China 13.

Ulf Büntgen, Vladimir S. Myglan, Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist, Michael McCormick, Nicola Di Cosmo, Michael Sigl, Johann Jungclaus, Sebastian Wagner, Paul J. Krusic, Jan Esper, Jed O. Kaplan, Michiel A. C. de Vaan, Jürg Luterbacher, Lukas Wacker, Willy Tegel & Alexander V. Kirdyanov "Cooling and societal change during the Late Antique Little Ice Age from 536 to around 660 AD".. Nature Geoscience volume 9, pages 231–236 (2016) doi:10.1038/ngeo2652

Discussion

One of my weaknesses when I first started studying history at school and then as an undergraduate is that I underestimated the importance of variations across space and time in environmental conditions. I became much more conscious of these issues when I started Aboriginal history. Even the, I had unconscious blind spots.  As a simple and much later example, until I visited the Greek Islands in 2010 I really had no idea of the importance of water, food production and transport to life and politics on particular islands. Perhaps more precisely, I knew in an abstract sense but hadn't made the concrete connection.

As we gain more knowledge of the past, our views shift. The knowledge that the still new colony at Port Jackson was hit by an El Nino event that counters a previously prevailing view that its food problems were primarily due to lack of knowledge of soil and farming techniques in a new land.

The discovery from dendrochronology of the Late Antique Little Ice Age, although I'm not sure that I buy all the hype attache, is actually exciting. Here we have a case of difficulties that were identified in the documentary record but that, like the Sydney example, lacked a context to interpret them in a coherent way.      

Billy Griffiths, Isabel McBryde and Deep Time Dreaming - a note

On Saturday 17 March 2018, ABC's Radio National Geraldine Doogue interviewed Billy Griffith, the author of Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia. (Black Inc, February 2018).

Billy is a historian and research fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation. In his book, he explores a twin revolution: the reassertion of Aboriginal identity in the second half of the twentieth century, and the simultaneous uncovering of the traces of ancient Australia by pioneering archaeologists.

The ABC interview is on-line and well worth listening too.An excerpt from the book telling the story of archaeologist Isabel McBryde, Haunted Country, was published in Inside Story. It is well written and will give you a feel for the book as a whole. It is also an excerpt of particular relevance to me because I was one of that group of Isabel's students that Billy talks about.

I have written a little on all this, material that I need to consolidate. Billy's assessment is to a degree limited by space and focus.This does not detract from its value, it's a very good piece indeed, but means that it does not fully reflect the scope of Isabel's work.

John Mulvaney, Isabel's mentor, has been described as the Father of Australian archaeology, while. Trowelblazers described  Isabel as the mother. Leaving aside a certain feeling of discomfort about the use of such gender specific terms, it does reflect her importance and influence.

In a paper delivered in 2010, Unrecognised and now almost unknown: explorations through the history of the broader New England, I described Isabel's contribution to the University of New England in this way:

" Isabel’s personality and approach exactly fitted the University’s culture. The results were quite outstanding for such a small institution.

Four years after Isabel’s arrival came the first thesis, Sharon Sullivan's 1964 honours study on the material culture of the Aborigines of the Richmond and Tweed Rivers.

By 1978, UNE students had written at least 22 theses on the Aborigines, 4 Litt.B's, 16 BA honours and 2 MAs. Isabel herself was awarded her PhD in 1967, laying the basis for a 1974 book, Aboriginal prehistory in New England. This was followed in 1978 by book of essays, Records of Time Past: ethnohistorical essays on the culture and ecology of the New England tribes mainly written by her former students. This included an article of mine, Population distribution and the pattern of seasonal movement in Northern NSW, drawn from my original work. The story does not end there, for there were also journal articles and monographs, including her pioneering study with R A Binns, A petrological analysis of ground-edge artefacts from northern New South Wales.

The citation for her award in 2003 of the Rhys Jones Medal for Outstanding Contribution to Australian Archaeology justly summarised her work this way:

Her work in New England was remarkable for its extent and depth, and Isabel's examination of the interface of archaeology and ethnography in the region shaped not only the approach taken by many later researchers but also prepared the basis for the arguments about upland regions created by archaeologists such as Sandra Bowdler and Luke Godwin."

It is now 55 years since I first became involved as a student with Isabel. My career choices took me well away from archaeology, prehistory or Aboriginal studies.Still, here I am 55 years later trying to develop a new synthesis for New England Aboriginal history. That's a remarkable reach.  

New questions on the origin and spread of Australia's Aboriginal languages

Proposed Australian language tree

A University of Newcastle (UON) news item published on 21 March 2018, Indigenous language link reveals common ancestor, reported on new research on the history and structure of Australia's Aboriginal languages. As I have done before, I provide the information first while comments follow at the end.

The University of Newcastle piece reads:

"New research has found a ground-breaking link between Australian Indigenous languages, demonstrating for the first time that all Indigenous languages descend from one common ancestor. 

The unprecedented finding sheds new light on the origins of Australian language and has significant implications for the cultural history of Australia.

The result of a collaboration between the University of Newcastle (UON) and Western Sydney University (WSU), the finding is the first time the theory that all Australian languages derive from one language, Proto-Australian, has been proven. 

UON Chief Investigator and historical linguist, Associate Professor Mark Harvey, said the finding was an exciting culmination of a three-year project, which he hoped would enhance the understanding of Australian and human history. 

“Until now, it was speculated that Australia was significantly more linguistically diverse than somewhere like Europe, because it had not been proven that all Australian languages actually stemmed from the same lineage. 

“This is the first demonstration that all Australian languages are part of the same language family. This language family spread across all of Australia, presumably from a small area in Northern Australia. This spread is likely to have been carried out by at least some population movement whose material and genetic traces have remained somewhat elusive. 

“However, with further interdisciplinary research, this new linguistic evidence is likely to give us a more precise reconstruction of Australian prehistory from what is currently known,” Associate Professor Harvey said. 

The project used the standard method in historical linguistics to establish whether similarity between languages was due to inheritance from a common ancestor, as opposed to transfer from one language to another through human contact or chance. 

WSU Chief Investigator, Associate Professor Robert Mailhammer, said the findings revealed recurrent similarities between languages that were not in contact. 

“We discovered that the sounds of words we compared showed recurrent systematic differences and similarities across a set of languages that are spread out in a geographically discontinuous way, which makes it very unlikely that they are the result of chance or language contact,” Associate Professor Mailhammer said. 

While a multitude of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages were spoken at the time of European settlement, the findings also imply that Indigenous Australian languages only spread after the end of the last ice age, some 10-12,000 years ago. 

“These findings show that Indigenous Australian languages were not the likely languages spoken by the first inhabitants of Australia, raising more questions around how the languages spread and how the linguistic findings connect to the genetic findings,” Associate Professor Mailhammer added. 

Both researchers recognise that work in this area will continue, with plans to publish a book on Proto-Australian and collaborate with other disciplines to inform what is known about the prehistory of Australia. 

Funded under an Australian Research Centre (ARC) 2014 Discovery Project, the key research was published in the leading journal of historical linguistics, Diachronica. 

Researching in the field of Indigenous language, Dr Raymond Kelly from the University of Newcastle’s PURAI Global Indigenous and Diaspora Research Studies Centre said the findings would come as a welcome relief to many first nation people in the state of New South Wales (NSW) working at the coal face of language reconstruction, revival and renewal programs. 

“During the course of research for my own PhD, I also developed a similar conviction that Aboriginal languages in NSW are formed or drawn from a single source and expand beyond the state and territorial boundaries that we know exist today. These findings provide a healthy opportunity to re-evaluate the concept of connection and relationship for community,” Dr Kelly said."

The abstract of the :Diachronica article, the full article is behind a paywall,  reads:

"Evaluation of hypotheses on genetic relationships depends on two factors: database size and criteria on correspondence quality. For hypotheses on remote relationships, databases are often small. Therefore, detailed consideration of criteria on correspondence quality is important. Hypotheses on remote relationships commonly involve greater geographical and temporal ranges. Consequently, we propose that there are two factors which are likely to play a greater role in comparing hypotheses of chance, contact and inheritance for remote relationships: (i) spatial distribution of corresponding forms; and (ii) language specific unpredictability in related paradigms. Concentrated spatial distributions disfavour hypotheses of chance, and discontinuous distributions disfavour contact hypotheses, whereas hypotheses of inheritance may accommodate both. Higher levels of language-specific unpredictability favour remote over recent transmission. We consider a remote relationship hypothesis, the Proto-Australian hypothesis. We take noun class prefixation as a test dataset for evaluating this hypothesis against these two criteria, and we show that inheritance is favoured over chance and contact". 

Mark Harvey and Robert Mailhammer, Reconstructing remote relationships, Diachronica, Volume 34, Issue 4, 2017, pp 470 –515, Published online 09 February 2018

Comment

In The origins of Pama-Nyungan - a note on the implications for the history of New England's Aboriginal peoples (13 March 2018) I reported on new research by Professor Claire Bowern and her colleagues that concluded that all Pama-Nyungan languages, the dominant language family across Australia, emerged just under 6,000 years ago around what is now the Queensland town of Burketown and then spread across Australia as people moved in response to changing climate. This research appears consistent with those conclusions but goes further, suggesting that all Aboriginal languages were related to some common proto-language but only spread after the end of the last ice age, some 10-12,000 years ago.

My 13 March comment focused on the difficulty I was having in meshing the conclusions of  Professor Claire Bowern and her colleagues with my evolving conclusions on New England Aboriginal history. A particular difficulty was the pattern of language diffusion and replacement given my evolving thoughts on Aboriginal retreat and resettlement during the Late Glacial Maximum (LGM) and following Holocene period. To restate my views:

• We have a range of dates from the Hunter Valley, Liverpool Plains and at Wallen Wallen in SE Queensland suggesting occupation during the late Pleistocene (17,000 to 22,000 years ago)
• The LGM (Late Glacial Maximum) forced populations to shift to survive. Parts of the North Coast were not very hospitable, so I postulated a retreat north and south.
• As the new coastal environment began to form, people returned. Inland, the population spread from refuge areas along the slopes and plains. The Tablelands constituted an initial barrier.As the climate eased further and the environment changed the Tablelands were resettled primarily from the coast, but also onto the slopes from the West. I think that this pattern is reflected in later language differences.
• In terms of the patchy dates we have, we have earliest settlement in the Macleay around 9,000 years ago, a date of over 6,000 years ago for Seelands in the Clarence, around 5,500 years ago for Graman on the western slopes. My feeling was that by around 6,000 years ago, reoccupation of territory after the LGM was well underway.  
• from around 4000 years ago the number of dates begins to accelerate with accelerated population increase.

.In the UON piece, the second researcher Professor Mailhammer states “These findings show that Indigenous Australian languages were not the likely languages spoken by the first inhabitants of Australia, raising more questions around how the languages spread and how the linguistic findings connect to the genetic findings,”

Then, in a comment on the findings, UON's Dr Kelly state that  they would come as a welcome relief to many first nation people in the state of New South Wales working at the coal face of language reconstruction, revival and renewal programs. He goes on: :

“During the course of research for my own PhD, I also developed a similar conviction that Aboriginal languages in NSW are formed or drawn from a single source and expand beyond the state and territorial boundaries that we know exist today. These findings provide a healthy opportunity to re-evaluate the concept of connection and relationship for community,” 

There is something of a tension between these views. The problem is that the linguistic evidence appears to be suggesting that the Aborigines in NSW/New England who survived the LGM were supplanted by/ absorbed by later groups. So the first nations of NSW may not be the first nations at all, but peoples who came millennia later. I'm not sure that that conclusion will provide much comfort.

Professor Mailhammer suggests that the research raises more questions around the way the languages spread and how the linguistic findings connect to the genetic findings. I think that we should add archaeological findings to the list.

Last year, I reported (When and where did the Australian Aborigines and the Denisovans meet? 17 September 2017) on a 2106 Nature article by Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas, Michael C. Westaway et al
A genomic history of Aboriginal Australia. The abstract to that paper reads:

"The population history of Aboriginal Australians remains largely uncharacterized. Here we generate high-coverage genomes for 83 Aboriginal Australians (speakers of Pama–Nyungan languages) and 25 Papuans from the New Guinea Highlands. We find that Papuan and Aboriginal Australian ancestors diversified 25–40 thousand years ago (kya), suggesting pre-Holocene population structure in the ancient continent of Sahul (Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania). However, all of the studied Aboriginal Australians descend from a single founding population that differentiated ~10–32 kya. We infer a population expansion in northeast Australia during the Holocene epoch (past 10,000 years) associated with limited gene flow from this region to the rest of Australia, consistent with the spread of the Pama–Nyungan languages. We estimate that Aboriginal Australians and Papuans diverged from Eurasians 51–72 kya, following a single out-of-Africa dispersal, and subsequently admixed with archaic populations. Finally, we report evidence of selection in Aboriginal Australians potentially associated with living in the desert."

As the title of my post indicates, my main focus was on the nature of DNA evidence and the linkages with the Denisovans. However, the broad conclusions as summarised in the abstract are broadly consistent with the latest linguistic evidence, with the spread of Pama–Nyungan by absorption and contact rather than occupation and replacement.  However, problems remain.

Since the Nature article was published, we have the latest results from the Madjedbebe Rock Shelter (The lessons and questions from Madjedbebe) pushing back the date of human occupation of Sahul to 62,000+ years ago.As noted before, on the assumption that the Aboriginal peoples were the first occupants a tension arises between the dates suggested by DNA analysis and those from archaeology. Further, each new piece of analysis suggested a far more complex picture in terms of out-of-Africa and the spread and mixing with other hominid species.

At this point I do not quite know what to think. I am documenting for later analysis and synthesis.

New England University College fights to stay open.

Booloominbah, army convalescent hospital First World War: In 1942, the army's desire to use the mansion in the same way could have closed the New England University College for good. This  is the ninth in the story of the Pacific Belshaws, the fourth on the early days of the New England University College, University of New England 

Those who had fought so hard to establish the New England University College had always seen it as a first step towards the creation of a full university for the North. This view would shared by the newly formed Advisory Council and staff.

The outbreak of war affected students and staff, bringing progress to a standstill. At first it seemed that the College itself might close. In 1942, the Army sought to requisition Booloominbah as a convalescent home for wounded soldiers, a role that it had played during the First World War.

These were difficult hours. Despite opposition from College supporters, Sydney University VC Robert Wallace advised NEUC Warden Edgar Booth in May 1942 that the Army requisition was mandatory and that immediate action was required.

Now desperate, Booth visited Canberra to see the Minister for the Army and Deputy Prime Minister Frank Forde to put the College’s case. He was persuasive. Forde immediately revoked the decision, adding that proposed requisition was “neither essential nor in the best interests of the Commonwealth.”

This was a real-payback for the earlier speed in establishing the College and the subsequent work of the first staff and students. Without it, the College could well have closed, perhaps never to re-open.

By the middle of 1943, the College felt sufficiently settled to again pursue the autonomy question.

In July 1943, the Council submitted a memorandum to the Sydney University Senate suggesting that the time had come to prepare the College for independence. This was followed by a similar petition to NSW Premier William McKell in February 1944. In both cases, the appointment of full professors was seen as a central step.

Booth as College Warden pursued the autonomy cause with vigour. In May 1945, the Sydney University Senate agreed that the College should be prepared for autonomy and that its subsidy should be increased to allow the appointment of professors.

Satisfied that autonomy was in sight, Booth resigned in July 1945. He had played a crucial role in the successful establishment of the College and in the creation of its character and ethos.

Jim Belshaw as Deputy Warden became Acting Warden, a position he would hold until February 1947. when Robert Madwick was appointed Warden.

Belshaw continued to press the autonomy cause with the NSW Government, but to no avail. In late 1946, he was forced to report to the Advisory Council that “the replies being received were still of the same nature – the matter was still under consideration and the Government had not yet determined its final policy in relation to the decentralisation of university education.”

Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express Extra on 14 March 2018. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because they are not all on line outside subscription. You can see all the Belshaw World and History Revisited/History Matters columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010, here for 2011, here for 2012, here for 2013, here for 2014, here for 2015, here for 2016, here  2017, here 2018 

The story of Camp Victory and the Casino Boys

Last year I wrote a series of Armidale Express columns telling the story of Camp Victory and the Casino Boys. It's a fascinating story set in the context of WWII that begins with the fall of Holland to the Nazis.

This post on my general New England blog, New England Stories - Camp Victory and the Casino Boys - brings that story together.

Intense first days for new College

Creating student life. First New England University College rugby union team, 1939. Back Row: Lewis Border, Consett Davis, Max Hartwell, John Rafferty, Jim Belshaw (Coach), Alf Maiden, Les Titterton, Frank Rickwood, Ken James Middle Row: Ralph Crossley, Paul Barratt, Pat Thompson, Alan Sutherland, Peter Durie Front Row: Ed Scalley, Harry Savage. For more detail on the players see Paul Barrat's New England University Rugby Team 1939

This post is the eighth in the story of the Pacific Belshaws, the third on the early days of the New England University College, University of New England 

The early days of the New England University College have been well described in memoirs including Keith Leopold’s Came to Booloominbah and Paul Barratt’s Psychology at New England.

From the student perspective, two things stand out: the first was the intensity of life in the small College, the second the standard of the education received. The staff perspective is a little different, more concerned with the practical difficulties of institution building and of teaching with limited resources.

The College’s academic staff necessarily came from elsewhere. They saw a university as a collegiate community of scholars, themselves as belonging to an international and especially British and Commonwealth academic tradition. They also saw teaching as a key role.

With the exception of local students who were allowed to live at home, the new institution was to be a fully residential. This was partly a matter of necessity, but it also reflected a belief that a true university was a residential university. Here many contrasted New England with the mother University, Sydney, where some students had little connection with the place apart from attendance at lectures.

During the early periods, limited accommodation on campus meant that many students had to live in town houses, but they were still expected to eat on campus and to be there for the day, to be full time students.

The students who came from across the North were generally young. For most, this was the first family connection with a University. Both the College as an institution and its staff saw part of their role as introducing the students to the academic community, to giving them the knowledge and life skills required to fit into their new world, to contribute and advance.

This was not just the required course knowledge, but a total university immersion. There was also a strong competitive ethos, of pride in institution. The early staff were well aware that their new institution was the subject of suspicion; they had to be better.

Student results were remarkable. On average, New England students had lower entry level qualifications than those going to Sydney. On average, they had better examination results. During the period 1938-1953, the life of the University College, 441 students took their degrees. Of these, 88 graduated with honours, 27 with firsts of whom more than half took out university medals.

In addition to their other duties, staff had to manage the sometimes fractious relations with a remote mother university. This strengthened a growing desire for autonomy, a desire shared by the new College’s Advisory Council whose members had been carefully selected to ensure broad representation from across the North.

This would prove to be a long battle.

Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express Extra on 8 March 2018. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because they are not all on line outside subscription. You can see all the Belshaw World and History Revisited/History Matters columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010, here for 2011, here for 2012, here for 2013, here for 2014, here for 2015, here for 2016, here  2017, here 2018 

The origins of Pama-Nyungan - a note on the implications for the history of New England's Aboriginal peoples

The map shows the distribution of Pama-Nyungan languages across Australia

Interesting article in Nature Ecology & Evolution by Remco R. Bouckaert, Claire Bowern & Quentin D. Atkinson, The origin and expansion of Pama–Nyungan languages across Australia  that in some ways throws a cat among the pigeons The abstract reads:

It remains a mystery how Pama–Nyungan, the world’s largest hunter-gatherer language family, came to dominate the Australian continent. Some argue that social or technological advantages allowed rapid language replacement from the Gulf Plains region during the mid-Holocene. Others have proposed expansions from refugia linked to climatic changes after the last ice age or, more controversially, during the initial colonization of Australia. Here, we combine basic vocabulary data from 306 Pama–Nyungan languages with Bayesian phylogeographic methods to explicitly model the expansion of the family across Australia and test between these origin scenarios. We find strong and robust support for a Pama–Nyungan origin in the Gulf Plains region during the mid-Holocene, implying rapid replacement of non-Pama–Nyungan languages. Concomitant changes in the archaeological record, together with a lack of strong genetic evidence for Holocene population expansion, suggests that Pama–Nyungan languages were carried as part of an expanding package of cultural innovations that probably facilitated the absorption and assimilation of existing hunter-gatherer groups. 

Remco R. Bouckaert, Claire Bowern & Quentin D. Atkinson, The origin and expansion of Pama–Nyungan languages across Australia, Nature Ecology & Evolution (2018) doi:10.1038/s41559-018-0489-3 Received:07 August 2017, Accepted:30 January 2018, Published online:12 March 2018

An article in the Conversation by Claire Bowern, The origins of Pama-Nyungan, Australia’s largest family of Aboriginal languages (13 March, 2018) provides further information. There is also a website, Pama-Nyungan Origins, that provides supplementary information.

Discussion

Again I won't be able to check the detail of the research until I can access the article into a library.

As before, my interest is in the implications for my broader New England, the Tablelands and the surrounding river valleys.  The Aboriginal languages spoken here belong to the Pama-Nyungan family. This research suggests that this family arose just under 6,000 years ago around what is now the Queensland town of Burketown. It suggest this language family spread across Australia as people moved in response to changing climate.

Why is this an issue?

 I said earlier that it threw the cat among the pigeons because the results conflict with some other research and with the idea of continuity in Aboriginal Australia. It also plays into a previous debate about the causes of the changes that took place in Aboriginal Australia c4000 years ago and the causes of those changes. Was it a natural process of evolution or due to some external influence?

From a New England viewpoint, I have been trying to understand the pattern of climate and sea level changes and their impact on Aboriginal occupation from the Pleistocene through into the Holocene.My views can be briefly summarised this way:

• We have a range of dates from the Hunter Valley, Liverpool Plains and at Wallen Wallen in SE Queensland suggesting occupation during the late Pleistocene (17,000 to 22,000 years ago)
• The LGM (Late Glacial Maximum) forced populations to shift to survive. Parts of the North Coast were not very hospitable, so I postulated a retreat north and south.
• As the new coastal environment began to form, people returned. Inland, the population spread from refuge areas along the slopes and plains. The Tablelands constituted an initial barrier.As the climate eased further and the environment changed the Tablelands were resettled primarily from the coast, but also onto the slopes from the West. I think that this pattern is reflected in later language differences.
• In terms of the patchy dates we have, we have earliest settlement in the Macleay around 9,000 years ago, a date of over 6,000 years ago for Seelands in the Clarence, around 5,500 years ago for Graman on the western slopes. My feeling was that by around 6,000 years ago, reoccupation of territory after the LGM was well underway.  
• from around 4000 years ago the number of dates begins to accelerate with accelerated population increase. .     

If we now compare this with the study conclusions that the Pama–Nyungan languages emerged just under 6,000 years ago and then spread  south as part of an expanding package of cultural innovations that probably facilitated the absorption and assimilation of existing hunter-gatherer groups, we have to ask how does this fit with the evidence for New England? The short answer is that we do know and I am cautious.

Professor  Bowern is a respected linguist. Based on evidence she and her colleagues have posed a new hypothesis. We will have to wait and see what it means for New England Aboriginal Studies.

The Pacific Belshaws 7: Fast-paced start for uni college

Booloominbah: Early staff and students at the university college lived and studied together in Booloominbah, creating an intense student experience. This post continues the story of the Pacific Belshaws with a shift now to the early days of the New England University College 

The first columns in this series explored the early world of the Pacific Belshaws. Our focus now shifts to the early days of the New England University College.

It was a remarkable period, remarkable in the academic results achieved, remarkable in the way that the College delivered on the objectives of the founders. It was also a period of considerable struggle.

As had happened earlier with the Teachers’ College, the university college was established with remarkable speed.

Legislation to allow the formation of the new college passed Parliament in December 1937. Then all the machinery issues had to be addressed before building work could commence and staff  recruited. There were less than three months between the advertisement for staff and the start of lectures.

There were very particular reasons for this rush. The university college’s main proponents had all been involved in the creation of the Teachers’ College 10 years before. That, too, had been done in a rush and wisely so. Depression hit Australia 12 months after its creation. There were moves to close the college, but the project was too far advanced.

With that lesson in front of them, the university project was pushed hard and again wisely so. Had the opening been delayed even 12 months, the onset of war could well have closed the university college. As it was, it was to be a close fought battle with the army who wanted the site for a convalescent hospital in 1942.

The rush created its own problems. When 30-year-old Jim Belshaw arrived in February 1938, the first of the newly appointed staff, the workmen were still modifying Booloominbah.

There were five in that first academic staff group: Belshaw (economics and history), Duncan Howie (philosophy and psychology), Jack Somerville (mathematics), Ralph Crossley (French and German) and Frank Letters (classics and English).

As the only married staff member, Frank Letters, wife Kathleen and daughters were accommodated in the gatekeeper’s cottage, the Lodge. The four single men joined Warden Edgar Booth, Booth’s secretary Jean Dyce, the matron Sister Green and 15 of 16 full-time students in Booloominbah.

Booloominbah also included administration offices, lecture rooms, a dining room and a common room. The other 12 members of staff including a chef, a laundress, housemaids and gardeners.

The relative isolation and proximity of staff and students created a tight-knit community that studied and lived together. The result was an intense experience reflected in subsequent results.

Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express Extra on 28 February 2018. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because they are not all on line outside subscription. You can see all the Belshaw World and History Revisited/History Matters columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010, here for 2011, here for 2012, here for 2013, here for 2014, here for 2015, here for 2016, here  2017, here 2018 

Crowd research - seeking information on the Aborigines of South East Queensalnd

Meeting this morning with linguist Margaret Sharpe to talk about the Aboriginal history of New England. While both of us are conscious of how far we have come, more and more we can tell a story, so much remains to be done. There will always be gaps, but a many textured history is emerging.

Just a reminder on what I mean by New England. The history I am trying to write covers the Northern or New England Tablelands and the surrounding river valleys to the north, south, east and west. The focus of our discussions was on Aboriginal history up to European intrusion. To avoid the earlier history becoming entangled with later events, I am using 1788 as a cut-off point for the first part of the story.

Pretty obviously, the state boundaries as we know them today did not exist then. The subject area extended into what is now called Southern Queensland. I said pretty obviously, but in fact the later boundary created an effect that I call border myopia.The Aboriginal peoples who occupied South East Queensland and form part of my story are all seen as belonging to Queensland; their southern linkages are not focused on. A similar pattern holds south of the boarder.

This brings me to the point of this post. I am seeking your help to identify sources, evidence and subsequent analysis of the Aboriginal groups who spanned the border with a special focus on the Queensland side. The language groups include the inland riverine, tableland  and coastal language groups who extended into Queensland.

The evidence I am looking for includes archaeological studies, ethnological studies, historical or ethnographic memories, linguistic studies and Aboriginal oral tradition. Obviously I have some, but I am seeking more.

It's an experiment in crowd research.

Musing on Geraldine Doogue's new RN radio program on new genres in Australian history

Interesting program this morning from the ABC's Geraldine Doogue New genres in Australian history. The introduction describes it this way

Saturday Extra brings you in the month of March emerging and established historians who are embarking on studies of particular regions in Australia and using different means to trace the history such as literature and the environment. Eminent historian Tom Griffiths provides his take on this new genre.

As indicated, the program began with an interview with Professor Tom Griffiths whose most recent book is entitled The Art of Time Travel: Historians and their Craft.  I haven't read it yet. Clearly I must.

This was followed by an interview with Tony Hughes d'Aeth whose recent book, Like Nothing on this Earth: A Literary History of the Wheatbelt, studies the work of eleven writers to explore the experiences and feelings of living and working in West Australia's wheatbelt area, a region that is almost as large as Britain. I liked his approach.

I'm not sure about the new genre part, mind you  After all, historians such as John Ryan have been working in this space for many years. However, I was pleased to see a renewed interest in regional history as well as a focus on using different sources to explore different aspects of life.

I responded with a comment hoping that there would be some inclusion from the broader New England in the program. I gave a link to this blog as an example of the range of topics. However, reading the blog actually left me dissatisfied at several levels.

Because I write across a number of platforms, the blog does not properly represent the range of work that is around nor the different threads involved. Further, I am trying to write a history of the full North over 30,000 years so that I am constantly moving between topics, adding topics. In a way, it's a bit uncontrolled. Then, too, I write outside the academy so that I'm not aware of the range of work going on.

I have the strong impression that the interest in the history of the broader New England has been in decline for a long time. The historians I do know who have done so much are dead or old now to the point that I am just about the youngest. The younger ones within academic life who are interested are so pressed by day-to-day pressures that they don't have time to write.

They also face a problem in that the KPIs that govern their life are structured in such a way that to be interested in local or regional history simply does not cut the mustard unless they have an institution that has it in its mission statement and is prepared to commit resources, to provide top cover, even though it gains no money.      .

Let me give a simple example. An article in say the Armidale and District Historical Society Journal is read by locals and then stays as a resource for broader interest. I use it all the time. I know others do. But it doesn't count because it's outside the KPIs.

I remember going into the University and asking what I might provide that would help them measure the UNE contribution. I was told that nothing I did could be counted because I was an adjunct, not a staff member. Further, all the stuff I did fell outside the parameters anyway.

I thought f...! Here's a place that was founded in part to serve New England, the university of the North. Here's a place that has had a dramatic influence on the texture of Northern life and well beyond. And now this is all written off as irrelevant to comply with certain imposed KPIs.

Then I thought, blow them  Each week I get to more people than read the standard academic article in twelve months. I know people are interested, although I struggle to respond to the feedback because I am working alone.

I may seem to have drifted. I have not. I am looking forward to following the series. If we have new work on regional history, if people are trying new things, I want to know about it, recognising that I am outside the academic loop.

For my part and looking at this blog, it is also time to draw together some of my writing even though it is far from perfect.

Terry Crowley and the story of the Anaiwan Aboriginal language

Last year I wrote a series of columns in the Armidale Express on Terry Crowley and the Anaiwan language spoken on the southern parts of the New England Tablelands.

The language was something of a mystery to linguists because it did not seem to be related to other Aboriginal languages. It was Crowley as a young postgraduate student who cracked at least part of the mystery by showing that it was related to coastal languages.

Moves are now underway to revive the language, something I covered briefly on Wednesday on my New England Australia blog in Australian National Indigenous Languages Convention - a New England perspective. There are two Facebook pages, one on the Anaiwan Language revival program itself, a second Friends of the Anaiwan Language Revival Program designed for non-Anaiwan people who want to support the campaign.

 The stories I wrote for the Express are on-line on this blog, but I thought that it would be helpful if I gathered them in a single place to make it easier to follow the story through. The columns are;
.

Column one The man who cracked the Anaiwan code 

Column two Terry Crowley's hunt for traditional languages

Column three Northern Tableland's rich tapestry of traditional languages

Column four Pioneering Anaiwan language studies

Column five Unravelling the Anaiwan language mystery

Column six Voices of cultural landscape

Column seven Climate plays role in Aboriginal resettlement

Column eight Forming the unique Anaiwan language

Was there a connection between India and Aboriginal Australia?

I had a brief discussion with regular commenter John on the evidence for possible DNA links between Australia and India. Checking, while I have briefly discussed this in the past, I didn't provide links. 

On 10 March 2016, Darren Curnoe had a useful piece in The Conversation, An Ancient Connection to India, summarising the evidence as it then stood. I have taken the liberty of reproducing the paper in full, in part because of the links. I have also added the full references attached to the main papers plus one additional reference that came out after Darren published.. 

As you will see from the paper, the question of a possible Indian connection is linked to disputes about the settling of the continent by the Aborigines, including the cause of what has been called intensification, changes in technology and population density that occurred some 5,000 or so years ago.

 My personal views conditioned by my New England thinking, by the evidence we have so far, can be summarised this way:

• There nothing in the archaeological record that I can see to support the idea of a sudden infusion of new technology associated with the arrival of a new group
• Aboriginal culture including the use of technology was not constant but changed over time depending on climate and resources
• To my mind, the most plausible explanation of the pattern of change that took place at the end of the Late Glacial Maximum is directly connected with population growth, new structures and new forms of working as the surrounding environment became more benign and favourable.

None of this means , however, that there was not some interconnection with, flow from, the Indian subcontinent that might have affected DNA structures. We will have to wait for the DNA experts to sort this out. .          

The paper

 

When was the remote Australian continent first settled? Where did these ancient Australians come from? Was the island settled once, or on multiple occasions? Is there a genealogical connection between the Indigenous people of Australia and India?

These are questions I’ve spent almost two decades cogitating, and some of them have been pondered now for almost 400 years by European scholars.

Way back in 1623, while on route through the Torres Strait, the Dutch explorer Jan Carstenz (or Carstenszoon) was the first to write about these issues in describing the physical appearance of Indigenous Australians.

He likened people in the north of the continent to so-called ‘Indians’ of the Coramandel of New Zealand, or Maori people of the North Island.

The descriptor ‘Indian’ was used widely in those days to refer to populations across the New World, and didn’t imply any genealogical relationship with South Asians as such; that connection would be made by Thomas Henry Huxley more than two centuries later.

Huxley was by far the most influential early European thinker about human origins. Champion of Darwin’s theory of evolution, as a young man Huxley visited Australia on the HMS Rattlesnake in 1847, 11 years after Darwin came here on the HMS Beagle.

While he showed little interest in anthropology at the time, he would subsequently go on to found human evolution science and strongly shape Darwin’s ideas about our origins.

In 1870, in On the Geographical Distribution of the Chief Modifications of Mankind, Huxley proposed that Indigenous Australians were closely related to the people of South Asia, confidently asserting:

‘the only people out of Australia who present the chief characteristics of the Australians in a well-marked form are the so-called hill-tribes who inhabit the interior of the Dekhan, in Hindostan.’

While based on speculation, rather remarkably, I think, his ideas would come to be influential up until the 1970s; only to be rekindled by geneticists in 1999.

One physical anthropologist who was especially influenced by Huxley’s musing was Joseph Birdsell. He worked in Australia from the 1940s, writing about the continent’s Indigenous people until his death in the 1990s.

Birdsell developed a model for the peopling of Australia proposing settlement in three waves; with people coming from Southeast Asia, followed by more people from Japan, and later from India; modern Indigenous people being a kind of mix of the three groups.

His model has been long discredited among anthropologists because it finds no support in fossilised human remains - the only physical evidence we have for the earliest people in Australia.

Moreover, his intellectual contemporary and rival, Andrew Abbie, failed to confirm Birdsell’s ideas during the extensive anthropological surveys he undertook with living Indigenous people across the continent.

Enter the geneticists Alan Redd and Mark Stoneking who in 1999 took a leaf out of Huxley’s writing and published evidence for a maternal genetic connection (1) between Australia and India.

1. Alan J.Redd, Mark Stoneking, Peopling of Sahul: mtDNA Variation in Aboriginal Australian and Papua New Guinean Populations, AJHG, Volume 65, Issue 3, September 1999, Pages 808-828

 

To bolster their ideas, they linked their findings to events seen in the archaeological record, especially the arrival of the dingo, as well as perceived language similarities and even Birdsell’s ideas about migration.

Redd and Stoneking suggested that people from India arrived in northern Australia sometime around three and a half thousand years ago and left a major genetic and cultural legacy with the Indigenous people of the Northern Territory today.

Their work deeply divided both the anthropological and genetic communities, opening old wounds and reviving discredited theories.

Some archaeologists had argued in the 1970s and 1980s that there was indeed a sudden change in the kinds of tools being made in northern Australia - known as the ‘Small Tool Tradition’ or ‘Backed Blades’ - broadly coincident with the arrival of the dog, and indicating the arrival of a new people.

Yet, Backed Blades were later shown to be present in archaeological deposits near Sydney dating back to about 8 thousand years old and in northern Queensland to around 15 thousand years old. The contradictory evidence was overlooked by Redd and Stoneking.

Their work was followed by more genetic studies supporting (2)  the hypothesis (3) and a range (4) of others seemingly (5) rejecting (6) it.

(2) Alan J.Redd, June Roberts-Thomson, Tatiana Karafet, Michael Bamsha, Lynn B.Jorde, J.M.Naidu, BruceWalsh, Michael F.Hammer, Gene Flow from the Indian Subcontinent to Australia: Evidence from the Y Chromosome, Current Biology, Volume 12, Issue 8, 16 April 2002, Pages 673-677

(3) Irina Pugach, Frederick Delfin, Ellen Gunnarsdóttir, Manfred Kayser and Mark Stoneking, Genome-wide data substantiate Holocene gene flow from India to Australia, PNAS 2013 January, 110 (5) 1803-1808. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1211927110

(4) Georgi Hudjashov, Toomas Kivisild, Peter A. Underhill, Phillip Endicott, Juan J. Sanchez, Alice A. Lin, Peidong Shen, Peter Oefner, Colin Renfrew, Richard Villems and Peter Forster, Revealing the prehistoric settlement of Australia by Y chromosome and mtDNA analysis, PNAS 2007 May, 104 (21) 8726-8730. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0702928104

(5) Brian P.McEvoy, Joanne M.Lind, Eric T.Wang, Robert K.Moyzis, Peter M.Visscher, Sheila M.van Holst Pellekaan, Alan N.Wilton,Whole-Genome Genetic Diversity in a Sample of Australians with Deep Aboriginal Ancestry,  AJHG, Volume 87, Issue 2, 13 August 2010, Pages 297-305

(6)  Morten Rasmussen, Xiaosen Guo, Yong Wang, Kirk E. Lohmueller, Simon Rasmussen, Anders Albrechtsen, Line Skotte, Stinus Lindgreen, Mait Metspalu, Thibaut Jombart , Toomas Kivisild, Weiwei Zhai, Anders Eriksson, Andrea Manica, Ludovic Orlando, Francisco M. De La Vega, Silvana Tridico, Ene Metspalu, Kasper Nielsen, María C. Ávila-Arcos, J. Víctor Moreno-Mayar, Craig Muller, Joe Dortch, M. Thomas P. Gilbert, Ole Lund, Agata Wesolowska, Monika Karmin, Lucy A. Weinert, Bo Wang, Jun Li, Shuaishuai Tai, Fei Xiao, Tsunehiko Hanihara, George van Driem, Aashish R. Jha, François-Xavier Ricaut, Peter de Knijff, Andrea B Migliano, Irene Gallego Romero, Karsten Kristiansen, David M. Lambert, Søren Brunak, Peter Forster, Bernd Brinkmann, Olaf Nehlich, Michael Bunce, Michael Richards, Ramneek Gupta, Carlos D. Bustamante, Anders Krogh, Robert A. Foley, Marta M. Lahr, Francois Balloux, Thomas Sicheritz-Pontén, Richard Villems, Rasmus Nielsen, Jun Wang, Eske Willerslev, An Aboriginal Australian Genome Reveals Separate Human Dispersals into Asia, Science  07 Oct 2011:

Vol. 334, Issue 6052, pp. 94-98 DOI: 10.1126/science.1211177

Then last month, the latest salvo against the India connection was launched and, I must confess, I may have greeted it a little too enthusiastically.

The work, led by Anders Bergström of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, and published in Current Biology (7), fully sequenced and compared globally the Y-chromosomes of 13 Aboriginal Australian men.

(7) Anders Bergström, Nano Nagle, Yuan Chen, Shane McCarthy, Martin O.Pollard, Qasim Ayub, Stephen Wilcox, Leah Wilcox, Roland A.H.van Oorschot, Peter McAllister, Lesley Williams, Yali Xue. John Mitchell, Chris Tyler-Smith, Deep Roots for Aboriginal Australian Y Chromosomes, Current Biology, Volume 26, Issue 6, 21 March 2016, Pages 809-813

In a nutshell, their study found that Aboriginal men are descended from early modern human populations identified as living broadly across East Asia by at least 60 thousand years ago.

A subset of these people migrated to New Guinea and Australia, settling these areas by about 55 thousand years ago, according to genetic clocks.

The research has confirmed a large number of other genetic studies showing that soon after Australia was peopled, Indigenous New Guineans and Australians became isolated from each other, except in a few places in the north like the Torres Strait.

One paper published following publication of Darren's article also found no evidence of later Indian admixture. Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas, Michael C. Westaway[…]Eske Willerslev, A genomic history of Aboriginal Australia, Nature volume 538, pages 207–214 (13 October 2016) doi:10.1038/nature18299

 

A very ancient origin for Indigenous Australians is also supported by the human fossil and archaeological records showing an arrival at least 40-50 thousand years ago or more.

Even Redd and Stoneking and their subsequent supporters all agreed on these points.

Australia was also, according to last month’s research, peopled once, and only once, before Europeans came by the boat load from 1788. No signs of Indian gene flow here; contrary to Redd and Stoneking’s ideas.

Yes, there was certainly trade and contact with the outside world, such as with the Macassans from Sulawesi beginning in the 1600s. But it seems for the most part not to have left a genetic footprint among living Aboriginal people.

Now, all of this leaves really only the geneticists arguing over the India connection, and they seem to be coming at the question from quite different angles; despite using very similar kinds of evidence.

Why such strong disagreement? I think the simplest explanation is that we don’t yet have enough data to provide a clear answer, from the DNA or human fossil remains. Archaeology is clearly very important, but not the full picture.

Aboriginal Australians have without doubt been living here for tens of thousand of years, but whether they were completely (genetically) isolated until 1788 is not yet certain.

What about the dingo? The latest genetic research suggests it may have come from New Guinea or even directly from Taiwan by Austronesian speaking people, with no indications of India ancestry whatsoever.

The burden of proof lies with those proposing the idea of a link between some Indigenous Australians and far away India, because the alternative view is the one that receives support from other kinds of evidence.

Also, I think it’s way too easy to ‘cherry-pick’ the physical anthropology, linguistic and archaeological literature, as geneticists are prone to doing, when the picture emerging from all these areas of research is much more complicated than most geneticists would concede.

Still, we’ve come a long way since Huxley’s insightful speculation, and who know’s whether he’ll ultimately be proved right.