The first wave of Homo sapiens arrived in Australia somewhere between 40,000 and 65,000 years ago and did what humans have always done when they hit virgin territories: slash, burn, then chase and slaughter anything that couldn’t escape. When our ancestors crossed the land bridge that still connected it to Papua New Guinea, the local fauna didn’t know what hit them. With no time to evolve survival techniques to counter already well-honed hunting skills, species fell like ninepins.

By the time European settlers arrived, Australia’s First Nations certainly lived in close harmony with nature, but who knows how long it took to get to that happy state.
How long did reality take to sink in? At what point did it become obvious, in a verbal history with a ‘one, two, many’ counting system, that food stocks were not infinite and were in decline?

We can imagine a scenario where the extended family is still many but the game is perhaps not quite as many as before. The balance would shift slowly, with no way of keeping an accurate tally. An elder might remember that in his or her youth there were many kangaroos and many family members, but it would not have been possible to calculate the supply and demand until food sources became too scarce. A nomadic lifestyle probably masked the decline of larger species until it was too late, at least for the prey species in question.

Of course, a superior counting system doesn’t guarantee better land and wildlife management. ‘First-Fleeters’ ignored the hard-won wisdom of Indigenous Australians and instead tried to impose a system of European land management that was flawed from the start. Large-scale deforestation for agriculture, drastically reduced native habitats. Many invasive species spread aggressively, altering ecosystems and reducing native biodiversity.