A proper rephrasing of the question title now is of course: why didn't Australians invent Eurasian agriculture before the Europeans came to them?
Sounds non-sensical? It is not!
The obvious answer to the frame defining title in its rephrased form is of course that they weren't Eurasians in Eurasia.
That is the effect of not properly defining "what is agriculture?"
Is it characterised by herding milk-producing livestock, just something different than living the hunter-gatherer live-style? Is it inventing the most strange idea of "land can have individual ownership"?
The provocative thesis is:
Aboriginal Australians invented agriculture before anyone else on this planet. That is arguably a more valid direct assertion than the indirect assumption informing the title question.
A hunter-gatherer goes out hunting if she is hungry or collects seeds and fruist if she is in he mood when these can be harvested. When ressources run out both move on to greener non-pastures.
And what did Australians do? Naked barbarians living from nothing but what they find and from hand to mouth?
They manipulated the landscape and the flora and fauna for their own profit.
That is the exact equivalent to European harvest: making 'gathering' a more predictable thing within a smaller area to oversee. Then stockpiled this for future use. Near their houses.
We see in more detail the hallmarks of a culture and civilisation, if one goes back to universally applicable analytical definition that are not culturally dependent but operationalised.
The great advantage of Aboriginal crops is that they have been developed through seed selection, direct planting and weeding for the harsh conditions of Australia. Many of the grains grow on sand and require a minimum of irrigation. The good news is that the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation has been studying some of these grains with a view to incorporating them in the modern agriculture of Australia.
Latz says that, ‘the nutritional value of the seeds from the desert species is equal to or better than that of the cultivated grains’.95 These indigenous plants promise a huge economic bounty for the country and our future prosperity demands they be given serious consideration.
Many early observers commented on the aesthetic proportions, tasteful positioning and social harmony of the townships. Sturt described one town as evening fell:
the natives … sat up to a late hour at their own camp, the women being employed beating the seed for cakes, between two stones, and the noise they made was exactly like the working of a loom factory. The whole encampment, with the long line of fires, looked exceedingly pretty, and the dusky figures of the natives standing by them, or moving from one hut to the other, had the effect of a fine scene in a play. At eleven all was still, and you would not have known that you were in such close contiguity to so large an assemblage of people.137
The smaller huts attached to the dwellings of this and other clans were full of stored produce. Yards attached to these store houses were used as animal holding pens. People here were not clinging on to survival in the desert; they were thriving and engaged in a rich and joyful life.
Pottery is one of the tests applied by Western archaeologists to the developmental level reached by civilisations. Australian Aboriginals would, at first glance, appear to have failed this test. The superb glazed and kiln-fired pottery of China, Greece or Rome has not been found here; however, clay vessels were made. While most were relatively crude sun-dried bowls, some were baked beside the fire; others, particularly small clay figurines, were fired on charcoal beds and some were glazed with mineral washes.
The tests applied in this way simply test how similar a group is to European and Asian civilisations and may not reflect their success in other areas such as social cohesion, resistance to warfare or sustainable use of resources.
This chapter looks at elements of Australian pottery and food preservation because the perceived lack of them in Australia has been used as an indicator of social backwardness. This attitude prejudices opinion about the level of development of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. To point out that Indigenous Australia did indeed use baked clay vessels and preserved food is not an attempt to claim distinction for the First Australians, but simply to point out that if that were the only test for development it cannot be seen as completely absent from this country.
According to the earliest records, the use of clay to render houses or make storage vessels was witnessed in most parts of Australia although the crude drying and firing methods may have resulted in the remaining fragments being overlooked by later surveys. Stores of food were seen across the continent too; although most disappeared quickly, some ossified caches have been found in stone chambers, preserved by the tight fitting stone plugs.
Gerritsen suggests the storage of food surpluses is one of the indicators of agricultural nations and defines three types of food storage used in Australia: ‘caching, stockpiling and … direct storage’.
–– Bruce Pascoe: "Dark emu: black seeds agriculture or accident?", Magabala Books: Broome, 2014.
–– Rethinking Indigenous Australia's agricultural past
–– Evidence for Indigenous Australian Agriculture
–– Bush tucker
–– Bush bread
–– Indigenous Australian food groups
–– Australian Aboriginal plant foods: a consideration of their nutritional composition and health implications
–– Fire and Water: Aspects of Australian Aboriginal Management of Cycads
At face value it is therefore:
Q Why didn't Aboriginal Australians discover agriculture?
Because that wasn't allowed to have taken place in the grand narrative of European settlers. The Australians did discover agriculture, early and on their own, but the evidence that was available was systematically ignored.
As to what prevented 'them' from discovering "other technologies": nothing 'prevented' them. Technology gets invented and innovated upon by opportunity and necessity. That is the valid core of Diamond's hypothesis. If those two factors get low values, new technology simply isn't worth the bother.
And that seems to be the root of an egregious misreading of Diamond: That sweet grasses of Eurasia would be the great opportunity to start grain based civilisation not found elsewhere. But if you compare barley to teosinte and teff it should become clear that this is a greatly overgeneralised theory. The puny and meagre teosinte bred into impressive maize cobs shows that human ingenuity could achieve satisfactory results from the most unlikely starting point. Teff shows that the grains themselves could remain tiny, even difficult to handle from sowing to eating (teff meaning: easy to loose) and still form the staple food of a society.
Nothing in Diamond's theory affords to be used as a deterministic teleology
and no such generalisable effect can be applied to Australian populations. Only in retrospect we like to find and see certain path dependencies.
One example when both factors of opportunity and necessity did came together would be hunting equipment improvements:
–– Harry Allen: "Thomson’s Spears: Innovation and change in eastern Arnhem Land projectile technology", 2011.
–– Harry Allen & Kim Akerman: "Innovation and change in northern Australian Aboriginal spear technologies: the case for reed spears", 2015.