those two big landmasses was restricted to those few small groups of Torres Strait islanders with a highly attenuated New Guinea culture, interacting with those few small groups of Cape York Aborigines. The latter groups' decisions, for whatever reason, to use spears rather than bows and arrows, and not to adopt certain other features of the diluted New Guinea culture they saw, blocked transmission of those New Guinea cultural traits to all the rest of Australia. As a result, no New Guinea trait except shell fishhooks spread far into Australia. If the hundreds of thousands of farmers in the cool New Guinea highlands had been in close contact with the Aborigines in the cool highlands of southeastern Australia, a massive transfer of intensive food production and New Guinea culture to Australia might have followed. But the New Guinea highlands are separated from the Australian highlands by 2,000 miles of ecologically very different landscape. The New Guinea highlands might as well have been the mountains of the moon, as far as Australians' chances of observing and adopting New Guinea highland practices were concerned. In short, the persistence of Stone Age nomadic hunter- gatherers in Australia, trading with Stone Age New Guinea farmers and Iron Age Indonesian farmers, at first seems to suggest singular obstinacy on the part of Native Australians. On closer examination, it merely proves to reflect the YALl'SPEOPLE • 317 ubiquitous role of geography in the transmission of human culture and technology. itremains for usto consider the encounters of new guinea's and australia's stone age societies with iron age Europeans. A Portuguese navigator 'discovered' New Guinea in 1526, Holland claimed the western half in 1828, and Britain and Germany divided the eastern half in 1884. The first Europeans settled on the coast, and it took them a long time to penetrate into the interior, but by 1960 European governments had established political control over most New Guineans. The reasons that Europeans colonized New Guinea, rather than vice versa, are obvious. Europeans were the ones who had the oceangoing ships and compasses to travel to New Guinea; the writing systems and printing presses to produce maps, descriptive accounts, and administrative paperwork useful in establishing control over New Guinea; the political institutions to organize the ships, soldiers, and administration; and the guns to shoot New Guineans who resisted with bow and arrow and clubs. Yet the number of European settlers was always very small, and today New Guinea is still populated largely by New Guineans. That contrasts sharply with the situation in Australia, the Americas, and South Africa, where European settlement was numerous and lasting and replaced the original native population over large areas. Why was New Guinea different? A major factor was the one that defeated all European attempts to settle the New Guinea lowlands until the 1880s: malaria and other tropical diseases, none of them an acute epidemic crowd infection as discussed in Chapter 11. The most ambitious of those failed lowland settlement plans, organized by the French marquis de Rays around 1880 on the nearby island of New Ireland, ended with 930 out of the 1,000 colonists dead within three years. Even with modern medical treatments available today, many of my American and European friends in New Guinea have been forced to leave because of malaria, hepatitis, or other diseases, while my own health legacy of New Guinea has been a year of malaria and a year of dysentery. As Europeans were being felled by New Guinea lowland germs, why were Eurasian germs not simultaneously felling New Guineans? Some New Guineans did become infected, but not on the massive scale that 3 I 8 •GUNS,GERMS, ANDsteel killed off most of the native peoples of Australia and the Americas. One lucky break for New Guineans was that there were no permanent European settlements in New Guinea until the 1880s, by which time public health discoveries had made progress in bringing smallpox and other infectious diseases of European populations under control. In addition, the Austronesian expansion had already been bringing a stream of Indonesian settlers and traders to New Guinea for 3,500 years. Since Asian mainland infectious diseases were well established in Indonesia, New Guineans thereby gained long exposure and built up much more resistance to Eurasian germs than did Aboriginal Australians. The sole part of New Guinea where Europeans do not suffer from severe health problems is the highlands, above the altitudinal ceiling for malaria. But the highlands, already occupied by dense populations of New Guineans, were not reached by Europeans until the 1930s. By then, the Australian and Dutch colonial governments were no longer willing to open up lands for white settlement by killing native people in large numbers or driving them off their lands, as had happened during earlier centuries of European colonialism. The remaining obstacle to European would-be settlers was that European crops, livestock, and subsistence methods do poorly everywhere in the New Guinea environment and climate. While introduced tropical American crops such as squash, corn, and tomatoes are now grown in small quantities, and tea and coffee plantations have been established in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, staple European crops, like wheat, barley, and peas, have never taken hold. Introduced cattle and goats, kept in small numbers, suffer from tropical diseases, just as do European people themselves. Food production in New Guinea is still dominated by the crops and agricultural methods that New Guineans perfected over the course of thousands of years. All those problems of disease, rugged terrain, and subsistence contributed to Europeans' leaving eastern New Guinea (now the independent nation of Papua New Guinea) occupied and governed by New Guineans, who nevertheless use English as their official language, write with the alphabet, live under democratic governmental institutions modeled on those of England, and use guns manufactured overseas. The outcome was different in western New Guinea, which Indonesia took over from Holland in 1963 and renamed Irian Jaya province. The province is now governed by Indonesians, for Indonesians. Its rural population is still YALI'SPEOPLE • 319 overwhelmingly New Guinean, but its urban population is Indonesian, as a result of government policy aimed at encouraging Indonesian immigration. Indonesians, with their long history of exposure to malaria and other tropical diseases shared with New Guineans, have not faced as potent a germ barrier as have Europeans. They are also better prepared than Europeans for subsisting in New Guinea, because Indonesian agriculture already included bananas, sweet potatoes, and some other staple crops of New Guinea agriculture. The ongoing changes in Irian Jaya represent the continuation, backed by a centralized government's full resources, of the Austronesian expansion that began to reach New Guinea 3,500 years ago. Indonesians are modern Austronesians. europeans colonized australia, rather than Native Australians colonizing Europe, for the same reasons that we have just seen in the case of New Guinea. However, the fates of New Guineans and of Aboriginal Australians were very different. Today, Australia is populated and governed by 20 million non-Aborigines, most of them of European descent, plus increasing numbers of Asians arriving since Australia abandoned its previous White Australia immigration policy in 1973. The Aboriginal population declined by 80 percent, from around 300,000 at the time of European settlement to a minimum of 60,000 in 1921. Aborigines today form an underclass of Australian society. Many of them live on mission stations or government reserves, or else work for whites as herdsmen on cattle stations. Why did Aborigines fare so much worse than New Guineans? The basic reason is Australia's suitability (in some areas) for European food production and settlement, combined with the role of European guns, germs, and steel in clearing Aborigines out of the way. While I already stressed the difficulties posed by Australia's climate and soils, its most productive or fertile areas can nevertheless support European farming. Agriculture in the Australian temperate zone
