ABSTRACT
Buckets of ashes tipped from a fireplace every morning for ten years can create a large midden. Three pairs of leather-soled shoes scuffing the surface of the ground for forty years can dig a deep hole. Even imperceptible effects can start to assume great magnitude if repeated often enough through the long period of the average life, the great period since 1788, and the immense period since the first occupation of the Australian continent. The Australian government’s position at the Kyoto Greenhouse conference in 1998 outraged conservationists. Aboriginal people also wanted the maximum return from a piece of land, but the maximum return came from having maximum diversity. Because a group had to find almost all its requirements in its own country, it was utterly important to maintain the diversity that gave you red meat and cereal and birds and fruit and roots and shellfish, as well as spears and housing and clothing.
