4 - The Aboriginal legacy

Summary

Aboriginal people are largely ignored in conventional economic history of early colonial Australia. The Aboriginal legacy is largely evident today through surviving Indigenous knowledge retained in the growing population of Indigenous Australians. 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. Noel Butlin radically altered the debate about the pre-colonial Aboriginal population size and brought both economic and demographic techniques to understanding of whole Australian economy in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The chapter revisits Butlin's analysis in the context of more recent literature. It then, discusses the economic prehistory of Aboriginal Australia in the early colonial period. The first contact between Aboriginal people and the outside world are also described. The total Australian population was still less than the pre-contact Aboriginal population until the gold rush brought a threefold increase in the number of colonists.