(Part 2) Reddit mentions: The best australia & oceania 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.

I read almost no non-fiction, but I can definitely recommend this true adventure story:

Island of the Lost

Read the blurb and know it's just as good as it sounds.

That's really cool! So are you in the Australian mining industry? (I've a cousin at a mine near Alice Springs)

I did a quick look, and found this:http://www.amazon.co.uk/Burning-Bush-Australia-Weyerhaeuser-Environmental/dp/0295976772/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1373302801&sr=8-5&keywords=stephen+pyne+fire

I guess you guys don't have amazon down there, but at least you can identify the book this way. I didn't know Pyne had written a book specific to Australia, since in my courses we were assigned his Fire: A Brief History, which is sort of thematic world history of fire. I've also got his Vestal Fire, about the role of fire in the long-run of the European colonial encounter with the rest of the world. But, the guy wrote about this his whole career and he was quite prolific, so I guess it's no surprise that he's got something Australia-specific. I recall him being quite readable, so don't worry about it being full of jargon or anything.

And, lastly, it's great to have earth scientists around these parts, there's so much interesting stuff in those fields. If I hadn't gone into history (or one or two other things) I think I might have liked some kind of earth science.

Cheers

Chocolate fish £0.70

Penguin History of New Zealand £24.99

Silver fern cufflinks £12.90

Those'd be my recommendations, but without knowing him better there isn't much I could give you. Cufflinks may be better swapped out for something else but do consider the chocolate fish on top of a larger gift.

Samoan:
This book is good:
https://www.amazon.com/Gagana-Samoa-Language-Coursebook-Revised/dp/0824831314

This dictionary is good: https://www.amazon.com/Samoan-Dictionary-Samoan-English-English-Samoan-Milner/dp/0908597126

Would love a pdf copy of this HUGE 850-page Samoan Reference Grammar but it's hard to find: https://www.amazon.com/dp/8200216683

Alice in Wonderland is available in Samoan: https://www.amazon.com/Tafaoga-Alise-Nuu-Mea-Ofoofogia/dp/1782010238

On the other hand, with Hawaiian, in addition to a translation of Alice, you can get The Hobbit:
https://www.amazon.com/Ka-Hopita-Laila-Hobbit-Hawaiian/dp/1782010912

Australia's Dangerous Snakes: Identification, Biology, and Envenoming:, Scott Weinstein

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This is a detailed look at the history of venomous snakes in Australia, including medical significance, history of human interactions, details on who pioneered the field and made major contributions. Been reading the Look Inside on amazon, and it definitely seems like a strong contender for folks looking for a look into Aussie snakes.

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https://www.amazon.com/Australias-Dangerous-Snakes-Identification-Envenoming/dp/0643106731/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1541608568&sr=

The Guardian's reprint of this piece has the following addendum:

>John Pilger’s investigation into the coup against Whitlam is described in full in his book, A Secret Country (Vintage), and in his documentary film, Other People’s Wars, which can be viewed on http://www.johnpilger.com/

And his book on Amazon links to a Publishers Weekly review that says:

>Pilger's strong tone may alienate those who don't already agree with him, but he backs up his contentions with careful documentation.

Again, it encourages you to buy the book to find out more, as does his article. But it gives some credibility to it. Could be an interesting book.

Here are all the local Amazon links I could find:


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

Beep bloop. I'm a bot to convert Amazon ebook links to local Amazon sites.
I currently look here: 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, if you would like your local version of Amazon adding please contact my creator.

If you enjoyed it, may I recommend Jared Diamond's The World Before Yesterday. He's an author and anthropologist who spent time with many aboriginal people (in particular in Papua New Guinea). Note, it's not exactly a breezy reading; it can feel like a college textbook sometimes.

I think the video was interesting, and I thought many of their insights were spot-on. It was a good reminder that people who are from primitive cultures are not necessarily culturally or intellectually inferior. However, it's tempting to swing the other way and fall into the believe of the "noble savage." That's where I thought Diamond's book was so fascinating. Things that we do that horrify them (Diamond's book talks about how the West treats our elderly), there are things that other cultures do that would horrify us (he gives an example of how one tribe views self-reliance and children that was plain scary).

It's an interesting question. It reminded me of a book I bought at a Maritime Museum in Bath, Maine (USA).
https://www.amazon.com/Shipyard-Maine-Percy-Small-Schooners/dp/0884482731/

I think the bookstores of Maritime Museums are a really good place to start. I found this after looking at the Bath Museum's store page:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CNQ2W5A/

But there a ton of maritime museums out there. I have visited a bunch. Almost all had history books focused on local maritime subjects.

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

>Maybe one day it will be like Star Trek and. . .

Dude, have you read biographies or journals of history's explorers?

Star Trek was modeled after them.

This one is an easy read and is basically like reading Star Trek, only it really happened

> If you ever get a chance to look at the book "Buevers du Kava" (drinkers of kava) definitely flip through it (even if you don't read French

It's a bit pricey for a book I can't read so I'm really hoping they put out an English version at some point.

I'm halfway through The Sea & Civilization right now. The scope is amazing and it's a scrumptious read. http://www.amazon.com/The-Sea-Civilization-Maritime-History/dp/140004409X

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

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.