Fish Omelettes

The various guesstimates, by the usual suspects, of the population of Australia before 1775 vary between 200,00 - 700,000. No basis for these numbers is ever given but one may make certain assumptions.
Like innumerate journalists, politicians who've never had a job in the real world and ethics free economists, they wot not of what they speak and compare apples with oranges, or free range macropod with maggotty salted pork.
To European, esp British eyes, the east coast regions were barely adequate for settlement. Within months of the First Fleet arriving/invading they had fished out the easily accessible areas of Sydney harbour and had seriously dented macropod numbers, mostly to feed their dogs.
They recorded the indigenes as few in number and assumed that was due to the meagre carrying capacity of the land. The original population then decreased more rapidly than Watkin Tench could record in his poignant journals.
The later settlers, once beyond the Great Dividing Range in NSW (that it took them more than a generation [1788-1815] to even manage that suggests a mindset not notable for its ability to adapt), found a sparsely inhabited landscape which they assumed, in arrogant ignorance, to be the natural state of the miserable inhabitants, fostering the myth/legal fiction of Terra Nullius.
It never occurred to them, nor most of the current 21M inhabitants of the Great South Land, that the coastal dwellers were far less well off than the, erstwhile, residents of the moist, treed and bountiful inland.
By the time whites & their hard hoofed herds reached the Darling and points west, they saw apparently empty plains, grasslands which could support a ewe & lamb on about 10 acres. Now that same region needs 25+ acres per ewe and is increasing rapidly, thanks to scientific animal husbandry and agricultural expertise.
The strangely ubiquitous & prolific lines of obviously heaped stones, stretching for hundreds, even thousands of square kilometres, didn't provoke a moment's thought, as far as records recount.
It never entered their european consciousness that inland Australia, now the semi-desert lands beyond the Darling were, barely 200 years ago, a fecund region of swamps and lakes and rivers and billabongs, whose inhabitants lived mostly on fish, water fowl & eggs. The occasional roasted 'roo was mainly for variety or ceremonial purposes and the inevitable, possibly genetic but more likely cultural, need of the testosterone crazed to kill something, apart from other blokes.
The women controlled the Inland, their stone fish traps, nulla nullas & light spears providing a cornucopia for their children and the occassional male, judged civilised (or sexy) enough to be allowed ingress to that Blessed Land.
Smallpox, courtesy of La Perouse's post Enlightenment scientific mind, wrought havoc on a population, between 10-20M, to judge from the carrying capacity of the then well watered Interior. In the same Enlightened spirit of enquiry, he had his men shoot into the crowd that met them on the shores of Botany Bay to demonstrate their superiority; only a couple of Indians were reported to have been seriously wounded.
The new diseases spread via the extensive trade & ceremonial network between the coast & the interior. Epidemiologically speaking, using the Black Death/Plagues of mediaeval Europe as criteria, 10% may have survived the French gift.
Several thousand generations of knowledge, tradition and land management experience erased in a decade.
By the time the British arrived in Sydney, barely 10 years after Cook & La Perouse, the few remaining survivors were struggling, virtually from scratch given the loss of so much knowledge, to rebuild their shattered societies.
In 200 years white Australia is well on the way to destroying the land itself.
It would cost less than half last year's tax surplus (<$5B) to restart the hydrological cycle destroyed by cloven hoof and axe, by simply channelling sea water 175 kms from Port Augusta, into Lake Eyre, which is 15 metres below sea level. In 1906 a larger volume of water was piped 600kms, using cutting edge 19th century technology such as steam pumps, from Perth to Kalgoorlie for the vital purpose of gold mining.
The Snowy Hydo scheme led the world in boring 10mt tunnels in the 1950s when the Oz population was barely 7M, after an exhausting, costly war effort; the idiocy of using the redirected water to turn the MIA into a salt sodden wasteland is a political failure, rather than a technical mistake.
Along the way autonomous ecovillages could evolve, generating their own electricity from supersaline ponds and PV, not to mention free fresh water, from simple solar distillation, for lawns, swimming pools, washing 4WDs and maybe even the odd veggie garden..
The (endless attempt at) flooding the 15,000 sqkms of the Lake Eyre salt beds, would cause, if not rain initially, heavy precipitation/dew in NW Qld. CSIRO research shows this occurred after previous fillings.
Lake Eyre has filled, completely, about every 20-30 years, in the 20thC and is currently on the way to partial inundation, which happens about every decade, not from local rainfall but errant monsoons dumping a fraction of their load on the western side of the GDR. Read BJ Patterson's "Clancy of the Overflow", aka the Channel Country where Qld,NT & SA meet. The paleodrainage river system there is almost as extensive as the Mississippi/Missouri but, with only a tiny fraction of the water volume, the beds are shallow and quickly overflow which then spreads for hundreds of square kilometres.
About 1/7th of OZ, known to hydrologists as the Lake Eyre Division, is a vast drainage basin tilting inexorably down to a single plug hole, Lake Eyre. If you spit west of the GDR, the liquid would try to roll 1,500 kms south, or it would have if the soil hadn't been compacted to hardpan by cloven hooves in the last century...
For real rain to fall in NW Qld, the requirements are water vapour (the evaporation rate in the Lake Eyre region is 10 cubic metres per square metre pa) and a prevailing wind to carry it to uplands.
Next time you watch the ABC TV weather, note that 70-80% of our winds come in from the Great Australian Bight, blowing SW-NE across the Lake Eyre region towards the western slopes of the GDR and the Barkly Ranges in the north of Queensland.
All that is needed for rain to fall on the uplands is for the water vapour in those winds to have combined with dust particles. Now where can we find air borne dust particles in the Inland?
Does anybody care?