The Nomadic Alternative – Page 144

Movement denies the possibility of storage. The minimal hunters rely on the resources of their lands to see them through the worst season of the year without their having to take active steps to propagate or preserve their food supply beyond the requirements of a few days. This optimism is not apathy. It is based on a series of exact calculations, and if their movements appear haphazard, one can rest assured they are not. While the economics of the nomad rest on a knife edge and the farmer's staple crop may fail, the hunter's results fully justify his apparent dilettantism.

The Australian anthropologist, Donald Thomson, illuminates the importance of diversity to the economics of the Aboriginal. The Wik Monkan live on the Cape York Peninsula of Queensland, and are split into land-owning clans which intermarry with one another.

"An onlooker", Thomson writes,

seeing these people at different times of the year, would find them in occupations so diverse, and with weapons and utensils differing so much in character that if he were unaware of the seasonal influence on food supply, and consequently upon occupation, he would be led to conclude they were wholly different groups.

The seasonal movements of the Wik Monkan followed traditional routes that were synchronized with fixed times of year and incorporated the wisdom of centuries. Their camps and even their occupations, at any month of the year, might, in a fully organized group, be foretold with reasonable certainty. So they assume a very different character from the random wanderings over an unbounded area of country by a people intent only on the needs of the moment, which they are in popular fiction ...

In the wet season the Wik Monkan congregated in fixed camps, where they built temporary huts of eucalyptus bark. At this time there were no vegetables to eat, so they took fish, shellfish, and the eggs of waterfowl, turtles and crocodiles. When the rains passed over, the waters receded; but long grass and mosquitoes made travel difficult so they moved into open ground and made sleeping platforms, lighting fires underneath, whose smoke kept the insects at bay. They ate mangroves, yams, water-lily tubers and arrowroot, and they speared fish, trapped in wiers as the waters dried up. But as the dry weather shrivelled the vegetation, food was less plentiful and the camps split up. Family groups made energetic migrations burning

*Donald Thomson, The Seasonal Factor in Human Culture, illustrated from the life of a contemporary nomadic group, in Proceedings of The Prehistoric Society, July-December, 1939, new ser., Vol V, pt. 2.