(Part 2) Reddit mentions: The best australia & new zealand history books

This is a subject I'm extremely interested in. I've actually been thinking about starting a subreddit with a focus on creating realistic, earth-like ecosystems—inventing individual animals and plants and their evolutionary histories, but maybe also trying to collect generalized rules to help with this aspect of worldbuilding.

I've been reading a book about Australian ecology, called The Future Eaters, and there seem to be some interesting patterns that allow for different kinds of animals to exist. Some things I've gleaned from the first few chapters:

• Highly productive environments (lots of water, lots of sunlight, and lots of soil nutrients—the latter of which tends to happen on younger landmasses, or areas where there has been a lot of volcanic activity) mean that there are more individual plants in a given area, and those plants don't have strong defenses against herbivory, since they can just grow new leaves as needed. These environments tend to allow for large herbivore and carnivore populations. Note that it typically takes thousands of herbivores to support 100 or so carnivores, depending on sizes and metabolisms of animals involves. Most animals you encounter in any given place won't be carnivores.
  
  
• When productivity is lower (usually due to too little water and/or periods with too little light—such as what you get into the arctic and antarctic circles), things change. Plants and animals become much more specialized, which means you may have greater biodiversity, but smaller and more thinly spread populations.
  
  
• When an ecosystem has enough water and light but few nutrients (such as in many rainforests), it can still be pretty productive by having a rapid rate of decay. Basically, these ecosystems recycle their nutrients very quickly.
  
  
• If there's not much water, though, nutrient recycling can't happen as quickly. This makes for very low-productivity environments, where plants are very tough and herbivore-resistant. In these ecosystems, both herbivores and carnivores are a lot more rare.
  
  
• In low-productivity environments, there several tactics animal species employ to keep their metabolisms low. They tend to be smaller. They tend not to be very intelligent. They tend to live a long time and reproduce very slowly (think pandas); or, alternatively, they die shortly after reproducing so that their babies have less competition. They tend to be in low-metabolism clades (e.g., marsupials rather than placental mammals, or reptiles rather than birds, or large insects rather than small rodents).
  
  
• Some animals get around metabolism constraints by migrating. You can get some pretty impressive migrations this way, like wildebeests or right whales.
  
  
• When nutrients are low, carnivorous plants proliferate. They kill for nutrients. Plants that parasitize other plants are pretty common, too.
  
  
• When plants are few and far apart, such as in deserts, they compete for pollinators. These plants tend to have particularly large and bright flowers, they produce a lot of nectar, and their flowering times are staggered throughout the year. This allows for some pretty high-metabolism pollinators, like possums or bats.
  
  
• When determining how productive an environment will be, you have to look not only at its average conditions, but also its most extreme conditions. For example, a place that has a wet season and a dry season won't have both dry-biome plants and wet-biome plants. Instead, it will have plants that must be adapted to both extremes (which tends to be lots of grasses, but not so many trees; trees need more consistent watering). This limits productivity, but it increases specialization—which promotes biodiversity.
  
  
• You also have to look at an environment's stability over long periods of time. If an ecosystem gets wildfires every few years, that's going to put constraints on what can live there. And even if an environment has major changes over really long time periods—e.g., it gets covered in a glacier whenever there's an ice age—that's going to cause mass extinctions every now and then. It takes a long time for an ecosystem to recover from mass extinction.
  
  
• Generally speaking, biodiversity is higher the longer a landscape goes without any major changes. If ice ages—or the periods between them—causes an area to get covered by ocean, it's going to have a lower diversity than a nearby area that doesn't get covered (e.g., Florida is much less diverse than Georgia). The same goes for places that get glaciers (e.g., the Northeastern US is much less diverse than the Southeastern US), or places that turn into deserts.
  
  
• Climate, above all else, determines what an ecosystem is like. Ice ages, ocean currents, rain shadows, El Niño, Hadley cells, and so on are highly worthy of study.
  
  
• Animals can be roughly categorized into guilds. A guild is like a niche or role that a group of species fills. Wolves, hyenas, and thylacines are in the same guild, even though they're not related to each other and don't (or didn't) live near each other. The same guild may occur in different ecosystem spatially, but it will also exist in different ecosystems temporally. For example, ichthyosaurs seem to be the Mesozoic equivalent of dolphins.
  
  
• In a given ecosystem, every niche should be filled by some kind of animal, but generally multiple animals won't fill the same niche (they compete with each other until one goes extinct—which is partly why invasive species are so harmful). Occasionally, new niches may be opened up; for example, when plants colonized land or when birds developed flight. When that happens, you get a sudden burst in evolution. The Cambrian explosion is a good example.
  
  
• All else being equal, amphibians can usually survive in cold environments better than reptiles can. We have a lot of reptiles today, but amphibians have filled those same roles. In a glacial or high-latitude environment, we should expect to see more amphibians filling those niches that reptiles have left vacant.
  
  
• Flying animals (birds and bats especially) are the first to colonize new islands and landmasses, and they tend to be the predominant lifeforms on isolated islands. The first animals to colonize a new landscape have a very good crack at filling all the niches before other animals can. New Zealand is a great example of this, with its very bizarre and diverse array of flightless birds.
  
  
• Marine ecosystems are very poorly understood. It sees some really important factors are nutrient levels, oxygen levels, water temperature, and water clarity.
  
  
• You get a lot of whales and large fish feeding wherever there are ocean upwellings. These apparently happen where wind blows surface water out of the way, drawing deep water (which tends to be cold) up to the surface. Cold water holds more oxygen, plus water from the deep ocean carries nutrients with it. This causes phytoplankton blooms in these areas, which means lots of animals get something to eat.
  
  
• In warm waters, phytoplankton can't grow as well. These leads to very clear waters, such as you often see in the tropics. Where the water is clear and sufficiently shallow, coral reefs can grow. Coral reefs, like many rainforests, have very few nutrients—but they make up for it by having very fast nutrient cycling. (Note, this is why overfishing around coral reefs is so damaging. It robs these ecosystems of precious nutrients that would otherwise get cycled back in.)
  
  
• When nutrients get added to these warm waters—such as from river runoff—you get algae blooms. Algae blooms kill coral, because coral needs very clear water in order to get enough sunlight. Areas around river mouths don't get coral so much, but they get a lot of other animals due to the presence of phytoplankton.

Here are all the local Amazon links I could find:


amazon.com

amazon.co.uk

amazon.ca

amazon.com.au

amazon.in

amazon.com.mx

amazon.de

amazon.it

amazon.es

amazon.com.br

amazon.nl

amazon.co.jp

amazon.fr

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It's a fantastic book if you're interested in the Harrier or want to know a lot about it.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sea-Harrier-Over-Falklands-PAPERBACKS/dp/0304355429

That's also good if you want to read a pilots account of flying one in combat.

My grandparents were also '£10 poms' . It would appear that your (edit, relative) grandparents were overcharged! There's a good book about it..

Ten Pound Poms: Australia's Invisible Migrants https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/071907133X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_g0cHyb75WPEKR

Big love x

I had a professor in college whose research focused on the formation of federal systems. He looked at Australia at the turn of the 20th century as one example, noting that vulnerable actors in the potential federation demand "costly signals" of intent by the stronger actors to ensure a mutually beneficial arrangement. I'd have to go back and read whether the Perth–Sydney railroad was one of those "costly signals" he was talking about, but it seems to fit the bill.

http://www.amazon.com/Federations-The-Political-Dynamics-Cooperation/dp/0801475244

OK, I'm not a qualified genealogist or an anthropologist, so I don't really feel comfortable getting into a serious academic debate about this, and I'm willing to concede that you might know more about this topic than I do, but I went and dug up that book anyway and had a look at the first few chapters that discuss the migration out of Asia.

I'll quote you a part of the relevant passage of the book (which, incidentally, I very much recommend if you're interested in this topic), which concludes the part where the authors discuss the evidence for different theories about where the Lapita and later Polynesian peoples originally came from:

>It is difficult to predict how the complex debate about human migration and language dispersal will conclude, but imagining that a largely Taiwanese population emarked on a long journey toward destinations that could not have been known is manifestly teleological. No such linear, Taiwanese, migration into the Pacific is apparent, and even genetic markers thought to have close associations with Austronesian language dispersal are proportionately more common in western than eastern islands of Southeast Asia. Neolithic populations with agricultural economies lived in island Southeast Asia long before southward movement from Taiwan. They came from multiple mainland sources, and were continually mobile in any direction, depending on local opportunity.

>Rather than thinking of Polynesian origins in Taiwan, it is more realistic to regard them as the result of a conjunction of Asian and Pacific genetic contributions, material culture assemblages, and economic commodities and strategies that coalesced in or around the Bismark Islands about 3,500 years ago.

Gallipoli by Peter Hart 100%%%%%!!!!!

https://www.amazon.com/Gallipoli-Peter-Hart/dp/0199361274

Great book about the Eastern Front of WW1.

These two ethnographies are easy/pleasant reads, frequently used in undergraduate courses:

• Marjorie Shostak, Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman
  
• Jean L. Briggs, Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family
  
  Ethnographies written almost solely for the purpose of introducing hunter-gatherer societies to college freshmen/sophomores include ...
  
  
• Richard B. Lee, The Dobe Ju/'Hoansi
  
• Colin Turnbull, The Mbuti Pygmies: Change and Adaptation
  
• James F. Downs, The Two Worlds of the Washo: An Indian Tribe of California and Nevada
  
• E. Adamson Hoebel, The Cheyennes: Indians of the Great Plains
  
• N. A. Chance, The Iñupiat and Arctic Alaska: An Ethnography of Development
  
• Hart, Pilling, & Goodale, The Tiwi of North Australia
  
• Robert Tonkinson, The Mardu Aborigines: Living the Dream in Australia's Desert
  
  These teaching ethnographies have been around for decades, so while they don't reflect current scholarship, it should be possible to pick them all up for a couple of bucks each, and I think you'd get a lot out of browsing them that's lost in comparative work.

Most books about Maori focus on their relationship with Europeans, political history etc. and/or they're general histories of New Zealand. They're not really stand alone books on pre-European Maori culture. The ones that do focus on Maori culture, like Elsdon Best's Tuhoe were written in the late 1800s but they have to be taken with a grain of salt.

Some of the better ones if you're looking to focus on Maori culture and history are James Belich's Making Peoples (my favourite), Ranginui Walker's Ka Whawhai tonu matou, and Anne Salmond's Two Worlds.

Well, have fun.. I mean there are articles in stuff but if you really interested there you go. Thats the go to book. Kinda long but then again its about the entire history of humankind.

I think it's more of a tightrope walk. The following book from the Labor ex-Finance minister is a good read. You can agree or disagree about some of his views but there's a lot of truth in it: http://www.amazon.com.au/Sideshow-dumbing-democracy-Lindsay-Tanner-ebook/dp/B005Z6YHKS/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1416463050&sr=8-1-fkmr0&keywords=Lindsey+tanner+sideshow

An excellent book on there matter is Sea Harrier Over the Falklands by Commander "Sharkey" Ward.

Big ears.

Oddly enough I work at a Zoological library. We had a kiwi research scientist use our archives for a week a couple of years ago; Bob Paddle, co-author of 'The Tasmanian Tiger: Extinct or Extant?' going through our records when we had them at the zoo. On the last day He was in the library I asked him if he thought there was a surviving population, somewhere. He refused to give me a yes or no answer and simply replied if there was it was probably in Papua New Guinea; not Tasmania or Australia. He said he had colleagues adamant they are extinct and others convinced they are out there.


https://www.amazon.com/Tasmanian-Tiger.../dp/0646926349

I just finished Peter Fitzsimmons Batavia and I enjoyed it.

On Settler Colonialsim
Patrick Wolfe - Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology
http://www.amazon.com/Settler-Colonialism-Writing-Past-Imperialism/dp/0304703400

An article my friend wrote: http://www2.humboldt.edu/hjsr/issues/issue%2036/07_HURWITZ_Got_Land_Thank_an_Indian.pdf

On Critique of Development:
Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Prakash - Grassroots Postmodernism

Sea Harrier over the Falklands, by Sharkey Ward. Not just for the GR.3 and FRS.1 performance in the conflict itself, but for the evaluations in the late 70s / early 80s in which Harriers got the better of USAF F-15s among other types.

Recently read this book, and the author describes how the entirety of Australia was described by the first colonists as looking like English gentleman's parks, with very abrupt differences between perfect almost manicured grassland and dense forest. The aboriginals made funnels to push kangaroos down into ambushes, and fields with crops that animals loved but were environmentally? kept away from, all made by using fire. Blew my mind.

This one might fit the bill? https://www.amazon.com/dp/1869530314/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_IpYKybW342Z09

Ok. Interesting. Here's the memoir I read - by Sharkey Ward. There's a passage in it where low on fuel he has to make the snap decision to fire cannons at an argentinian hercules flying a mission back to Argentina.

https://www.amazon.com/Harrier-Falklands-Cassell-Military-Paperbacks/dp/0304355429

He blew the wing off, sending it down. Then 20 years later he gave an extraordinary interview with the son of the hercules pilot, very emotional -

https://perros.metro951.com/2011/04/27/malvinas-para-siempre/

A comprehensive yet accessible book on this subject is The Biggest Estate on Earth.

Also for those interested, this is his book about his experiences operating the Harrier FRS1 in the Falklands conflict.

Not a new idea. This was a central pillar of Tim Flannery's 1994 book The Future Eaters, and the 1998 doco series of the same name series he wrote and featured in. It generated a bit of debate then, though his conclusions (while similar) were based on different evidence.

I actually have, as part of a school trip to study the ecosystem. I really wish I still had that book, so I could give better examples than just an overview, but essentially the author's argument was that life on Australia evolved to deal with its rather resource poor ecosystem. So while you do still have predators, you don't see the large mammals that evolved on the more resource rich continents like Asia and Africa. The largest predators are the crocodiles, which have much lower energy requirements being cold-blooded lizards (plus they can hunt in the water), and after that you have dingoes, which are much smaller than the wolves and tigers of Eurasia on top of being not native to Australia (there is no archaeological record of them before humans arrived on the continent). Most other native fauna and flora have adapted low energy means to survive. The kangaroo's hop, for instance, is much more energy efficient than walking on four legs like most marsupials/mammals. And when you look at the environment as a whole, there is this rather strange symbiosis to it (the author compares it to the evolutionary arms race that defines the species of Eurasia/Africa, who are not as constrained by resources).

The reason why I brought all of this up is in answer to OPs question: the Aborigines never adopted a sedentary, agricultural lifestyle because they were limited by their poor environment. They instead adapted to their environment by living a lower energy hunter gatherer lifestyle. Incidentally, as part of my trip we spent a weekend with an aboriginal elder. He taught us basic things about their culture (including how to properly throw a boomerang :D) and I remember thinking about how in tune with nature these people really seemed. They had to be, or else they would exhaust the environment and die.

Anyways, the book is The Future Eaters by Tim Flannery (Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0802139434). If you are into evolutionary biology or just wonder why Australia has so many unique species, check it out.

Yes. That is: I recall there were two - fundamentally different - schools of thought within the RN/FAA's SHAR-units as of 1982.

• Skipper of HMS Invincible-based NAS.801, Nigel 'Sharkey' Ward, was convinced the SHAR is fully developed and an excellent platform, and taught his pilots to make use of its nav/attack system - including the Blue Fox radar. They acted correspondingly. They also flew CAPs at low altitude, where the Argentinean fighter-bombers operated. Correspondingly, they repeatedly caught and destroyed entire formations of incoming Argentinean fighter-bombers before these could cause any harm.
  
  
• Most of other RN/FAA officers haven't held the SHAR FRS.1 in high esteem. Indeed, it seems there was deep mistrust for its nav/attack systems within the HMS Hermes-based NAS.800 (to which Dave Morgan was assigned, too). Between others, SHARs from that squadron flew their CAPs at medium altitude - which is one of reasons why they missed the first formation of the Skyhawks that 'caused' the 'Catastrophe of Bluff Cove', and why Morgan then missed the second one too (arguably, he and his wingman then at least killed three from that second formation, 'but only after' these could've caused even more damage to British naval and ground units).
  
  For related discussions, see Ward's Sea Harrier over the Falklands.
  
  Curiously, Morgan didn't even try to discuss this issue in his Hostile Skies.

There are so many things wrong in this I don't know where to start. Your knowledge of specifics is dreadful.

> we handed over enough intelligence for the Brits to sink the ARA General Belgrano, killing 323 sailors. Thankfully they did that as a WWII light cruiser would be devastating...to a pack of kittens in a life raft.

It was armed with the same Exocets that sank HMS Glamorgan and outgunned the British fleet. It was hardly benign.

> including failing to press the advantage they had with anti-ship missiles

They used all the air launched ones they had, and made valiant efforts to convert the ship based ones to fire from land, holing HMS Glamorgan in the process. What do you mean?

> it is hard to sink a ship when you don't attach fuses to the damn explosives

They had fuses; they were fused incorrectly.

> Not only did the Brits lose a destroyer to a Navy that could not fuse an explosive

The British lost 7 ships, including 2 destroyers.

> routinely couldn't use their harrier jets for day missions as the Brits balked at the cost of replacing them should they get shot down, and couldn't use them at night

That's simply incorrect. The Sea Harrier was used for night missions throughout the war. See Sea Harrier Over the Falklands by Sharkey Ward.

> Brits handed off Victoria Crosses like they had just rebuilt the Empire to its heyday

Only 2 were awarded.

> Thatcher got to show the boys that a woman can waste humans lives to distract from pressing issues on the home front as good as the boys

She didn't start the war.

> There is a lesson somewhere in all this.

Do your research.