Well, my first effort to deepen my awareness of the former has led to a vicarious experience of the latter!I recently finished reading Charles C. Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus (Vintage, 2005), an important book which brings together decades of research on Precolumbian cultures which has somehow failed to find its way into common knowledge. Most Americans - including yours truly - still picture the Americas at the time of first contact (another Australian term, I think) as sparsely populated by hunter-gatherers, except for the improbable city-states of the Aztec and Inca, even if we sort of know that European diseases wiped out huge numbers of people. Well, how wrong can you be? The Americas were teeming with people, many in complex urban cultures, some of which built on urban traditions as old as if not older than the first urban cultures of the "old" world. And the landscape, far from being wild, was in many areas modified and maintained by human populations - just like in Australia. The ideal of wilderness so important in the US describes what happened to the land when the traditional custodians of the land (another Australianism!) had been wiped out by disease and displacement -
as much as a fourth of the Amazon turns out to have soil improved by human ingenuity, too, and to be so full of fruit trees because they were planted there. The book is an education! (There's a fairly detailed summary of the book in wikipedia.)I should have known all of this. Indeed, weirdly, I did know a fair amount of it piecemeal (my Japanese friends know all about American injustices to the Indians), but my overall picture hadn't really absorbed them. My paradigm hadn't shifted from the old one which was our version of the legal monstrosity invented to justify European claim on Australia, terra nullius. It has now. And I feel something like the cringe the Spaniards must have felt (at least some of them) arriving in Mexico or Peru, encountering cities grander and more populous and cleaner than anything in Europe. The continent's a graveyard. (Not that much didn't somehow survive anyway.)
And - this will sound strange, I suppose - there's nothing new about this world at all. Sure, human beings arrived here long after they had settled Africa, Eurasia and Australia - but at that time none of us were doing much of anything. The earliest city in human history may have been built in Norte Chico, north of present-day Lima, arising out of agriculture - yes - but from the domestication of cotton (for fishing nets and textiles), not food.
Over the course of my year in Melbourne I occasionally (more often than I admitted in this blog) felt that Australia was another planet, albeit one very successfully made over to feel just like home. Now it is my own continent (hemisphere!) which seems another planet, and we but adventitious interlopers... Erich van Daniken in reverse: the extraterrestrials who destroy civilization rather than bring it.
