Water: the one reason our first peoples should be glad for 1788

There are stories of Aborigines surviving by drinking animal blood and sucking frogs. That may be sufficient to get one through a day's journey to a water hole which has water in it. A drought where all the water holes are dry is another matter.

One myth is that they brought water to boiling point by dropping hot granite stones into a bucket of water made from an animal skin. (Do the myth-makers assume that out First Peoples knew about sterilisation before Louis Pasteur did?) If you would try this method yourself, you would discover how impossible it is to produce drinkable water.

You cannot lift the extremely hot stones out of the fire and drop them into the water without a mass of ash (which remains in continual suspension) going in. As the cooling stones have to be continually replaced if the bucket is not to become a bucket of stones rather than a bucket of water, over the time to bring to boil and then to sustain the boiling for a minimum of three minutes to bring the bugs down to an acceptable level of risk, the water gradually becomes a gluggy black soup.

Another myth is that water was boiled in large sea shells. A shell which will hold a litre or more would be a very rare find where such a shell could be found. It would not found at all along most of the coast. Also, the shell would be too thin to survive prolonged heat.

How close to extinction would the Indigenous have come?

Whenever and wherever Europeans touched the coast of this continent, they met natives. From this we can deduce that the population at most times would have numbered in the hundreds of thousands. It follows that over the past 50,000 years, there have been a number of very severe droughts in which, not hundreds, but hundreds of thousands of Aboriginal people died miserably.

We don't know how often the number in the entire continent may have dropped to a thousand or so. We know that population-falls down to the point of extinction do occur. DNA studies have shown that the entire human species once plummeted to about 2000 individuals before a change in luck allowed the species to begin building its number up again.

Thanks to the technology that Europeans have been developing over the past 10,000 years, while the Indigenous of this land were developing almost nothing, no aborigine dies of thirst today. All he has to do is turn on a tap or grab a can of his favourite beverage.

Finally:

The old hunter-gatherer lifestyle had a lot going for it which we non-aborigines today could learn from, but the Grim Reaper was always somewhere over the horizon waiting to take the entire community out. The question has to be asked: How many aborigines today would really want to return to the pre-1788 days?

If not many, then it would be helpful if the moderate black activists encouraged the more angry black activists to drop the word "invasion" from their rhetoric.