Do any of the Aurian people's have a great flood myth that Christian crypto-historians could obsess over?
Lands of Red and Gold, Act II
- Thread starter Jared
- Start date
they probably have with the importance of the river Murray and the fact that a great flood is one of the most common myths around their were many variants around even before the christian version.
Sorry if it sounded condecending but their is a lot of different flood stories/myths http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_myth
Oh I know. Many historians around the 19th century looked round the world, saw that there were great flood myths everywhere and took it as proof that it actually happened. I'm wondering if they'll be able to look to Aurian civilisatiions for their 'evidence' too.
Not so much condescending as inaccurate. It's the Jewish (or Judeo-Christian, or Abrahamic, if you prefer) flood myth
There's a great many tales which involve floods in some form. Floods are part and parcel of Aururian life pretty much across the continent, and so naturally show up in the legends.
Calling them great flood myths would be really stretching things - but then crypto-historians can be good at stretching things. Potentially the closest is actually the Atjuntja, who have a vision of the world being created and recreated out of water. Not a flood, strictly speaking, but enough that someone who wanted to sell a "common Flood myth" origin could selectively read it and claim that there's parallels there.
It's the Sumerian flood myth originally.
(Utnapishtim, give the crowd a wave.) Variants of it flowed into the Abrahamic tradition.On another note entirely, I asked this in a previous post but it fell victim to the "bottom of the last page" syndrome. Is there anyone who could help designing a small-scale map for an upcoming post? I plan to show one of the Pakanga raids in action, and it would help to be able to visualise it. I have a couple of pdf maps available which would help in creating a base map.
mojojojo
Gone Fishin'
Will emus have spread to any places in Polynesia other than New Zealand or would the trip be too difficult for them?
mojojojo
Gone Fishin'
I know you mentioned earlier that European crypto-historians will consider the Rainbow Serpent to be a dragon
Not before 1619. The shipping technology was not really up to carrying emus alive for 3000+ km. Well, not all the way - some of them probably did become lunch along the way.
After 1619, and more precisely after the spread of Nuttana shipbuilding techniques and ironworking, things become more possible, although not necessarily very likely.
They could certainly consider it as one, although it's even less like the Western conception of dragons than the Chinese version.
Indeed it could.
And fun fact: for the Yadji, the flooding of Port Phillip could have happened during historical times. There's evidence that Port Phillip was mostly dry land (albeit below sea level) between about 800 BC and 1000 AD: see here and here.
This would have mattered little to the Yadji, since they lived further west and were not major seafarers anyway, but it would be interesting if some of their historical records captured this.
Lands of Red and Gold #92: A Tale Of Two Lands
Lands of Red and Gold #92: A Tale Of Two Lands
“Incens’d with indignation Satan stood
Unterrify’d, and like a comet burn’d
That fires the length of Ophiuchus huge
In th’ arctic sky, and from his horrid hair
Shakes pestilence and war.”
- John Milton, Paradise Lost
* * *
In one way or another, European contact changed life for everyone in Aururia. The tale of those changes was particularly marked in south-eastern Aururia, in the ancient heartland of indigenous agriculture and aquaculture. In the three states of Tjibarr, Gutjanal and Yigutji (collectively called the Five Rivers), and the fourth state which its inhabitants called Durigal, the Land of the Five Directions, but which to outsiders was most commonly known as the Yadji, after the name of its royal family.
Between them, these four states held a pre-European contact population of about 5 million people; approximately half of the agricultural population of the continent. Their societies had generally proven resilient to earlier plagues and, in the case of the Yadji, the first would-be European invasion. They endured the plagues, and continued their ancient pastime of fighting each other.
However, the Great Death [measles] marked the most severe blow which these states had ever faced. More than a quarter of their population was consumed by the pestilence, disrupting their societies far worse than any previous epidemics. They found themselves tested more severely than ever before...
* * *
In the lead-up to the Great Death, the Yadji state saw both productive reforms and significant challenges. The Regency was ruled by a class of priest-bureaucrats who both oversaw the religious justification for the Regent’s rule, and administered the planning and coordination of resources in their local communities; the Yadji economy functioned in a form of central planning and shared resources, and the priests played a significant administrative role.
Inspired in part by the example of the Church of England, the Regent Gunya Yadji significantly reformed the religious hierarchy. He moved many priests from central planning roles in the capital Kirunmara [Terang] to newly-created regional roles as bittops, where they oversaw the administration of broader regions, rather than the previous practice of priests looking after only individual communities.
The other productive reform which happened during the 1650s was a massive expansion of sweet pepper production. This spice had proven immensely valuable in both Asia and Europe, and so the Regency’s English trading partners greatly desired it. The Yadji planned economy allowed them to greatly increase sweet pepper production over the course of the decade, trading in exchange for ever greater volumes of English firearms, steel tools, textiles, and other goods.
Despite these gains, the Regency faced some challenges during this decade. Rebellions had hardly been unknown in Yadji realm, particularly in the eastern provinces, but this decade proved more than usually troublesome. Some subjects were inspired to revolt by a combination of increasing religious dissent, anger over highlander raids, belief that the Regency’s armies had been exhausted in Bidwadjari’s War, and arms and agents provocateur from the Dutch East India Company seeking to undermine their English rival.
The Kurnawal, in the farthermost east province that the Yadji called the White Country [1], were the first to revolt in 1653, but this was quickly quelled. A more serious revolt broke out in 1656-7, when the Kurnawal revolted again and were joined by the neighbouring Giratji. Several towns had to be besieged, and some sacked, before this rebellion was crushed.
Still, for all of these problems, the time of the Great Death made the volatile 1650s seem like a time of paradise.
The Great Death struck hard in the Regency, claiming a toll of about 27% of the remaining population. The immediate problems were predictable: mass death, psychological trauma of the survivors, social disruption, and competition over remaining resources.
The nature of the Yadji economy made the longer-term effects severe. The temples were responsible for coordinating the activities of their entire community, both the allocation of labour and collection, storage and distribution of resources. With so many priests killed during the Great Death, the Yadji command economy nearly disintegrated due to lack of planning and administration, and unrest amongst the traumatised communities. The recent institution of bittops ameliorated this lack of planning slightly, since a priest could be allocated or support provided from a local bittop rather than needing to send all the way to the capital for assistance. However, the sheer scale of the death toll meant that even the most capable bittops were overwhelmed.
The devastation of the Great Death also led to religious unrest. Or, more precisely, the disillusionment of many subject peoples with the Yadji religion, both in its overall worldview and in its application by local priests who relied on religious authority as part of their management of the community and economy. This did not immediately lead to major rebellion; with the bloody end of the last rebellions so fresh in memory, further revolts were initially limited to local unrest over particularly egregious or incompetent priests. But the dissatisfaction with the Yadji ruling religion grew ever stronger.
As the first hard years passed, the Yadji did what they could to rebuild their economy. New priests were appointed, some more devastated communities were abandoned entirely and their people relocated into more thriving centres, more marginal aquaculture was dismantled as the priests focused their efforts on the most productive activities. Sweet pepper production was largely curtailed; unlike some other Aururian states (such as the Atjuntja), the Regency found European trade goods to be convenient rather than required, and so left the resumption of spice exports until other affairs had been put in order.
While these efforts had some benefits, they were far from universally successful. Many of the new priests were inexperienced, and in some cases simply less competent, but appointed because there was no-one else available. In many communities, the replacement priests mismanaged the economy, and more ominously, were less adept at identifying and quelling discontent.
Inevitably, this meant that further revolts were only a matter of time.
* * *
Despite suffering a similar death toll to Durigal, the Five Rivers societies on the whole coped much better with the consequences of the Great Death. They suffered much disruption, as did everywhere in Aururia, but their economies and social order were more quickly restored to something resembling stability.
In part, this was due to the relative form of their economies. Where the Yadji had the most centrally planned, command-style economy on the continent, the Five Rivers states were much more decentralised. Tjibarr had its factions who competed vigorously with each other for economic and political gain; Yigutji and Gutjanal had no such formal systems of competition, but their aristocrats and mercantile classes were independent economic actors with relatively little central control. The decentralised economies of the Five Rivers were much less vulnerable to the loss of individual planners (i.e. priest-bureaucrats) and the survivors were better positioned to react to the changed circumstances of post-Great Death Aururia.
In part, the Five Rivers also fared better than Durigal because of the relative lack of subject peoples interested in revolt. The Land of the Five Directions had nearly half of its population of subject ethnicities, and many of those were still sullen imperial subjects. In the Five Rivers, the different ethnicities were more closely integrated into the political system, and revolt was relatively rare. Highlanders raided the eastern fringes of Gutjanal and Yigutji territory, and a few hunter-gatherer peoples displaced by the Great Death crossed from the desert into the western and northern fringes of Tjibarr and Yigutji lands. But most of the remaining Tjibarri subject peoples on the Copper Coast [2] were more wary of Yadji than Tjibarri rule, and so did not revolt. The one significant exception was the Abunjay people of the northwest, near Tanderra [Port Germein, SA], who were most distant from Yadji lands and so least concerned by them, but even their revolt was suppressed relatively easily.
The immediate social disruption of the Great Death was inevitably, tragically huge. In Tjibarr, the death toll included many senior aristocrats and other leading figures, although the relatively-new monarch Lyungong IV survived. In the Year of the Great Dying (1661), the Tjibarri monarchy took the unprecedented step of cancelling the annual football tournament, due to the death of so many players and administrators (to say nothing of spectators). But the football tournament resumed the following year; not even the pestilence could long quell Tjibarri football-fever.
The death toll and general disruption meant that the Five Rivers’ production of kunduri was severely reduced for a handful of years. This supply shock had economic consequences that were felt around much of the world; the Dutch, English and French East India Companies had been supplying increasing amounts of the drug into both Europe and Asia. This led to a rise in tobacco prices elsewhere in the world, as the nearest substitute available. The most significant long-term consequence, though, came when the chaos cause by the pestilence, and the additional motivation from supply shortages, meant that the Dutch East India Company successfully smuggled out seedlings of kunduri trees from the Five Rivers, and began cultivation of them around the Cape, in what was the beginning of kunduri plantations in Africa. The Aururian monopoly on kunduri production was broken.
Economically, the collapse in population led to a severe restructure of what remained of their internal trade networks. The Five Rivers economies had long maintained trade links with broader Aururia, but the fundamental strength of their economies had always been internal trade. This trade relied on their reasonably extensive natural waterborne transportation net, with a few supplemental canals, primarily small-scale ones built as part of their aquaculture and that allowed connection to the main rivers. Bulk commodities were not usually transported long distances outside of the Five Rivers, but were important to their local economy.
Of course, the Five Rivers did import and export some goods. They imported gum cider from the Cider Isle (via Jugara), gold from the Cider Isle and the Atjuntja lands (both also via Jugara), spices from the east coast and (to a lesser degree) the highlands. For exports, their main products were kunduri, incense, dyes, resins and perfumes, together with smaller quantities of other commodities and some fine manufactures such as jewellery.
Much of this import and export trade was destroyed by the Great Death, because of both supply problems outside the Five Rivers (such as for gum cider production) and because of the much smaller number of consumers. Overall internal trade also significantly reduced in most areas, although in practice the drop in production was usually balanced by the drop in demand.
The post-Great Death period saw the Five Rivers reorient much of its remaining economic activity on an expansion of kunduri cultivation. The effects of the Great Death had cost the Five Rivers its monopoly on production, but for a long time the region remained the world’s premier supplier. Their existing production, wide variety of cultivars, ideal climate, experienced workforce even after plague deaths, and natural transport network meant that they were much better-placed to ramp up production than any other location in the globe. The collapse of so much other trade meant that the remaining aristocrats reoriented much of their resources and capital to supplying the ever-increasing global market.
The consequences of this economic restructuring could best be summed up by this statistic: despite losing a quarter of their workforce to the Great Death in 1660-1661, by 1671 the Five Rivers were exporting twice the amount of kunduri which they had provided in 1659. Part of this increased export volume was due to lower domestic consumption, but most of it was due to increased production.
However, unlike some other Aururian societies, such as the Atjuntja and (to a lesser degree) the Yadji, the Five Rivers peoples had long learned the advantages of diversified production. In part this was because of their longer history of perennial agriculture and cash crop production, and thus having learned the consequences of relying too much on one crop, in case of drought, flood, fire, overproduction or other calamity. In part this was due to the longstanding commercial and knowledge-based competition between the factions; there was a very strong incentive to adopt any new crop, manufacture or other approach which might enhance one faction’s position over its rivals.
The knowledge-based competition between the factions contributed to the other aspect of the Five Rivers economy that increased after the Great Death: the use of domesticated animals. Horses and cattle, and to a lesser degree donkeys, had been present in the Five Rivers before the Great Death, but their use increased greatly in the aftermath. The abandonment of marginal agricultural lands meant that there were now suitable lands for grazing horses and cattle closer to their riverine transportation network.
The main early uses were for domesticated animals general transportation (both cattle and horses), additional fertiliser (also both cattle and horses), and meat (cattle), but the ever-curious Tjibarri soon found other uses for them. It did not take long for them to learn about cattle-powered gristmills which Europeans used to grind grain, and soon Tjibarri worked with European specialists to develop similar mills to grind wattleseeds.
The other significant use for domesticated animals was in the establishment of a horse-using postal system. Road construction had not historically been a strong practice in the Five Rivers. This gradually changed after contact with Europeans saw trade build up through Jugara from the 1630s onward. Aside from the immediate commercial benefits, this eventually gave access to European weapons and gunpowder.
Being acutely aware that Jugara would be on the frontlines in case of the war, Tjibarr set about building roads to the alternative ports of Taparee [Port Pirie] and Nookoonoo [Port Broughton]; this allowed trade to bypass Jugara, when needed. The original purpose of these roads was to ensure access to imported firearms, not to replace trade with the main port of Jugara. Bulk trade was still largely intended to flow via Jugara, albeit at slightly reduced prices for Tjibarri sellers; long-distance travel of goods across roads was much more expensive.
Once the roads were established, however, the endlessly-competing factions found more uses for them, in the eternal struggle of the Endless Dance. On good roads, horses could be used to bring information much more quickly than previous foot-based travel; this even applied to water-based travel in many circumstances, particularly when going upriver. Knowledge was power, as far as the Tjibarri were concerned. Knowledge mattered both for commerce (prices, relative demand, and other market information) and in competition between the factions.
So factions started establishing their own postal systems, that allowed regular changes of horses. Initially these were just between the new ocean ports and the Great Bend, the location where the Nyalananga [River Murray] turned south, and which had become the hub for ongoing trade with the Europeans. The advantages of the system were obvious, however, and gradually a postal system expanded to link all of the major towns and cities of Tjibarr. The other Five Rivers states also adopted such systems, following the Tjibarri example.
* * *
With the high death toll from the plagues, the economic chaos, and general exhaustion of the 1660s, neither the Yadji nor the Five Rivers states were truly interested in resuming warfare with each other. Some individual factions in Tjibarr were more sanguine, while a couple of religiously-motivated Yadji warmasters believed that the Great Dying marked the end of times, and tried to celebrate this by provoking war with Tjibarr and Gutjanal.
This meant that after 1665, border raids and skirmishes started increasing between Durigal and the Five Rivers. For several years, these did not lead to war between the two lands. The aging but still-astute Gunya Yadji negotiated peace and compensation, where required, to resolve these short of all-out war. On the Tjibarri side, the majority of the factions likewise favoured peace, and King Millewa of Gutjanal was not about to start a war against Durigal on his own.
The primary reason Gunya Yadji was so reluctant to get involved in further warfare with the Five Rivers was because he faced other problems. Some of these threats were external. In 1666, the Pakanga raids took on a worrying new direction when a group of Maori raiders conquered Mahratta [Mallacoota, Victoria]. Previously, Pakanga raids had been for wealth and glory only (in Aururia, that is). Now, a group of invaders had occupied land that was nominally part of the Yadji Empire. In truth, Mahratta was an isolated coastal village where the Regency had not exercised practical control in over one hundred years – and only sporadically even before then. But this attack, combined with ever-bolder raids by restive highlanders, led to a sense of the Regency being incapable of defending its own borders.
Further Pakanga raids followed; the most visible was a great raid by two Maori iwi at Mambara [Lakes Entrance, Victoria] that succeeded in breaking into the local temple and carrying off a wealth of golden tapestries and other treasures. These raids only exacerbated the internal discontent over priestly mismanagement.
The problems came to a head in November 1671. The Bittop of Gwandalan [Bairnsdale, VIC], in the eastern reaches of the White Country, had proven even more incapable than the average new priest, and was blamed for unjust decisions, unfair allocation of labour, and other problems throughout his region. He was assassinated by unknown people who stabbed him while he slept, then escaped into the night. Rather than accept that the murderers were unknown, some local Kurnawal were judged guilty and executed for the murder, on the orders of the remaining senior-most priest in Gwandalan.
The result was a rebellion, the worst which had been seen in within the Regency during living memory. The rebels in Gwandalan started by massacring all remaining priests within the city, driving out the small garrison, and then encouraging their neighbours to join them. The rebels soon found firearms to aid in their rebellion – presumed to Dutch-supplied, although the VOC denied any knowledge – and began to march on other towns. The rebellion spread quickly, with the ruling elite of priests and soldiers being killed or driven out of the eastern half of the White Country.
The first army sent to defeat the rebels was ambushed and routed when travelling along the Royal Road near Yuralba [Moe, VIC] in February 1672. This marked the worst defeat which a Yadji army had suffered at rebel hands in nearly a century, and it only encouraged further rebellion throughout the White Country. Quelling the rebellion clearly required much larger armies than had been anticipated, and the Yadji needed time to mobilise them. The diphtheria epidemic which swept through the Regency in 1672 did not help these preparations.
Worse followed. In 1673, with a large part of the Yadji armies committed to fighting the rebellion – and mostly bogged down in sieges – the much-feared external threat reappeared. Not from Pakanga raids, but from the Five Rivers. For in that year, all three Five Rivers states declared war on the Regency.
The Yadji Empire had never been so hard-pressed; they needed to fight on multiple fronts. The Regency had no time to obtain support from its English allies, and in any event England was busy with warfare elsewhere. While its forces gave a good account of themselves, and some of their fortified towns took time to fall, inevitably the Regency was forced to concede territory.
Tjibarr essentially reversed the result of the Fever War, recapturing the lower Copper Coast and the vital port of Jugara. Gutjanal seized the gold mines around Djawrit [Bendigo], and agreed to provide a share of their gold to Yigutji, in recompense for that kingdom’s support during the war. For the Kurnawal in the east, they achieved half of what they wanted: de facto independence, but not de jure. With his army and economy in disarray from defeats and plagues, in 1674 Gunya Yadji agreed to a seven-year truce with the Kurnawal rebels. This provided no formal recognition of peace, but the Kurnawal were essentially left to themselves in most of the White Country, except for a few border regions where the Yadji retained control.
When it came time to set up their own government, the Kurnawal rebels nearly managed to turn victory into last-minute defeat. The near-annihilation of the previous governing class left a vacuum, and they did not have an aristocracy or other clear successor to rule them. Instead, they had a number of rebel leaders who had attained their rank through force of arms during the rebellion, with half a dozen of them believing that they were the natural choice to rule their new would-be state.
Small-scale skirmishes broke out between the rebels, and could have escalated quickly. Adept diplomacy from Tjibarr and Gutjanal settled the dispute, with the rebels being persuaded to accept a younger prince from the other Kurnawal state, the kingdom on the Cider Isle [Tasmania], to become their king. The new king still faced a difficult task trying to build a kingdom from former rebel leaders who were united only by their hatred of the Yadji, and who had accepted him only because he was seen as less bad as letting one of their rivals take control.
In the Five Rivers, Tjibarr resumed trade through Jugara even before peace had been formally concluded. As part of maintaining their alliance, Tjibarr permitted Gutjanal and Yigutji merchants to ship agreed quantities of kunduri through Tjibarri waterways to Jugara for foreign trade, in exchange for specified tolls, rather then requiring them to onsell the kunduri to Tjibarri buyers. Tjibarr also concluded a trade treaty which permitted some commerce with English merchants. The ostensible reason they provided to their Dutch partners was that the Dutch and English were still at war, and Tjibarr did not want Jugara to become a target of war, since that would disrupt their own commerce. Later, they developed other excuses for maintaining English trade, such as that they were honouring existing agreements. Tjibarr continued to sell the majority of its kunduri and spice production to the Dutch, but they also maintained trade with the English and French.
* * *
“If you shake hands with a Tjibarri merchant, count your fingers afterwards.”
- Pieter de la Court, quoting an anonymous Dutch merchant who had traded at Jugara, 1675
* * *
[1] The White Country corresponds approximately to the historical region of Gippsland, or, very roughly, all the parts of Victoria east of Melbourne and south of the Great Dividing Range.
[2] The fertile stretch of coastal land between Dogport [Port Augusta] and the Bitter Lake [Lake Alexandrina], long contested between Tjibarr and Durigal.
* * *
Thoughts?
“Incens’d with indignation Satan stood
Unterrify’d, and like a comet burn’d
That fires the length of Ophiuchus huge
In th’ arctic sky, and from his horrid hair
Shakes pestilence and war.”
- John Milton, Paradise Lost
* * *
In one way or another, European contact changed life for everyone in Aururia. The tale of those changes was particularly marked in south-eastern Aururia, in the ancient heartland of indigenous agriculture and aquaculture. In the three states of Tjibarr, Gutjanal and Yigutji (collectively called the Five Rivers), and the fourth state which its inhabitants called Durigal, the Land of the Five Directions, but which to outsiders was most commonly known as the Yadji, after the name of its royal family.
Between them, these four states held a pre-European contact population of about 5 million people; approximately half of the agricultural population of the continent. Their societies had generally proven resilient to earlier plagues and, in the case of the Yadji, the first would-be European invasion. They endured the plagues, and continued their ancient pastime of fighting each other.
However, the Great Death [measles] marked the most severe blow which these states had ever faced. More than a quarter of their population was consumed by the pestilence, disrupting their societies far worse than any previous epidemics. They found themselves tested more severely than ever before...
* * *
In the lead-up to the Great Death, the Yadji state saw both productive reforms and significant challenges. The Regency was ruled by a class of priest-bureaucrats who both oversaw the religious justification for the Regent’s rule, and administered the planning and coordination of resources in their local communities; the Yadji economy functioned in a form of central planning and shared resources, and the priests played a significant administrative role.
Inspired in part by the example of the Church of England, the Regent Gunya Yadji significantly reformed the religious hierarchy. He moved many priests from central planning roles in the capital Kirunmara [Terang] to newly-created regional roles as bittops, where they oversaw the administration of broader regions, rather than the previous practice of priests looking after only individual communities.
The other productive reform which happened during the 1650s was a massive expansion of sweet pepper production. This spice had proven immensely valuable in both Asia and Europe, and so the Regency’s English trading partners greatly desired it. The Yadji planned economy allowed them to greatly increase sweet pepper production over the course of the decade, trading in exchange for ever greater volumes of English firearms, steel tools, textiles, and other goods.
Despite these gains, the Regency faced some challenges during this decade. Rebellions had hardly been unknown in Yadji realm, particularly in the eastern provinces, but this decade proved more than usually troublesome. Some subjects were inspired to revolt by a combination of increasing religious dissent, anger over highlander raids, belief that the Regency’s armies had been exhausted in Bidwadjari’s War, and arms and agents provocateur from the Dutch East India Company seeking to undermine their English rival.
The Kurnawal, in the farthermost east province that the Yadji called the White Country [1], were the first to revolt in 1653, but this was quickly quelled. A more serious revolt broke out in 1656-7, when the Kurnawal revolted again and were joined by the neighbouring Giratji. Several towns had to be besieged, and some sacked, before this rebellion was crushed.
Still, for all of these problems, the time of the Great Death made the volatile 1650s seem like a time of paradise.
The Great Death struck hard in the Regency, claiming a toll of about 27% of the remaining population. The immediate problems were predictable: mass death, psychological trauma of the survivors, social disruption, and competition over remaining resources.
The nature of the Yadji economy made the longer-term effects severe. The temples were responsible for coordinating the activities of their entire community, both the allocation of labour and collection, storage and distribution of resources. With so many priests killed during the Great Death, the Yadji command economy nearly disintegrated due to lack of planning and administration, and unrest amongst the traumatised communities. The recent institution of bittops ameliorated this lack of planning slightly, since a priest could be allocated or support provided from a local bittop rather than needing to send all the way to the capital for assistance. However, the sheer scale of the death toll meant that even the most capable bittops were overwhelmed.
The devastation of the Great Death also led to religious unrest. Or, more precisely, the disillusionment of many subject peoples with the Yadji religion, both in its overall worldview and in its application by local priests who relied on religious authority as part of their management of the community and economy. This did not immediately lead to major rebellion; with the bloody end of the last rebellions so fresh in memory, further revolts were initially limited to local unrest over particularly egregious or incompetent priests. But the dissatisfaction with the Yadji ruling religion grew ever stronger.
As the first hard years passed, the Yadji did what they could to rebuild their economy. New priests were appointed, some more devastated communities were abandoned entirely and their people relocated into more thriving centres, more marginal aquaculture was dismantled as the priests focused their efforts on the most productive activities. Sweet pepper production was largely curtailed; unlike some other Aururian states (such as the Atjuntja), the Regency found European trade goods to be convenient rather than required, and so left the resumption of spice exports until other affairs had been put in order.
While these efforts had some benefits, they were far from universally successful. Many of the new priests were inexperienced, and in some cases simply less competent, but appointed because there was no-one else available. In many communities, the replacement priests mismanaged the economy, and more ominously, were less adept at identifying and quelling discontent.
Inevitably, this meant that further revolts were only a matter of time.
* * *
Despite suffering a similar death toll to Durigal, the Five Rivers societies on the whole coped much better with the consequences of the Great Death. They suffered much disruption, as did everywhere in Aururia, but their economies and social order were more quickly restored to something resembling stability.
In part, this was due to the relative form of their economies. Where the Yadji had the most centrally planned, command-style economy on the continent, the Five Rivers states were much more decentralised. Tjibarr had its factions who competed vigorously with each other for economic and political gain; Yigutji and Gutjanal had no such formal systems of competition, but their aristocrats and mercantile classes were independent economic actors with relatively little central control. The decentralised economies of the Five Rivers were much less vulnerable to the loss of individual planners (i.e. priest-bureaucrats) and the survivors were better positioned to react to the changed circumstances of post-Great Death Aururia.
In part, the Five Rivers also fared better than Durigal because of the relative lack of subject peoples interested in revolt. The Land of the Five Directions had nearly half of its population of subject ethnicities, and many of those were still sullen imperial subjects. In the Five Rivers, the different ethnicities were more closely integrated into the political system, and revolt was relatively rare. Highlanders raided the eastern fringes of Gutjanal and Yigutji territory, and a few hunter-gatherer peoples displaced by the Great Death crossed from the desert into the western and northern fringes of Tjibarr and Yigutji lands. But most of the remaining Tjibarri subject peoples on the Copper Coast [2] were more wary of Yadji than Tjibarri rule, and so did not revolt. The one significant exception was the Abunjay people of the northwest, near Tanderra [Port Germein, SA], who were most distant from Yadji lands and so least concerned by them, but even their revolt was suppressed relatively easily.
The immediate social disruption of the Great Death was inevitably, tragically huge. In Tjibarr, the death toll included many senior aristocrats and other leading figures, although the relatively-new monarch Lyungong IV survived. In the Year of the Great Dying (1661), the Tjibarri monarchy took the unprecedented step of cancelling the annual football tournament, due to the death of so many players and administrators (to say nothing of spectators). But the football tournament resumed the following year; not even the pestilence could long quell Tjibarri football-fever.
The death toll and general disruption meant that the Five Rivers’ production of kunduri was severely reduced for a handful of years. This supply shock had economic consequences that were felt around much of the world; the Dutch, English and French East India Companies had been supplying increasing amounts of the drug into both Europe and Asia. This led to a rise in tobacco prices elsewhere in the world, as the nearest substitute available. The most significant long-term consequence, though, came when the chaos cause by the pestilence, and the additional motivation from supply shortages, meant that the Dutch East India Company successfully smuggled out seedlings of kunduri trees from the Five Rivers, and began cultivation of them around the Cape, in what was the beginning of kunduri plantations in Africa. The Aururian monopoly on kunduri production was broken.
Economically, the collapse in population led to a severe restructure of what remained of their internal trade networks. The Five Rivers economies had long maintained trade links with broader Aururia, but the fundamental strength of their economies had always been internal trade. This trade relied on their reasonably extensive natural waterborne transportation net, with a few supplemental canals, primarily small-scale ones built as part of their aquaculture and that allowed connection to the main rivers. Bulk commodities were not usually transported long distances outside of the Five Rivers, but were important to their local economy.
Of course, the Five Rivers did import and export some goods. They imported gum cider from the Cider Isle (via Jugara), gold from the Cider Isle and the Atjuntja lands (both also via Jugara), spices from the east coast and (to a lesser degree) the highlands. For exports, their main products were kunduri, incense, dyes, resins and perfumes, together with smaller quantities of other commodities and some fine manufactures such as jewellery.
Much of this import and export trade was destroyed by the Great Death, because of both supply problems outside the Five Rivers (such as for gum cider production) and because of the much smaller number of consumers. Overall internal trade also significantly reduced in most areas, although in practice the drop in production was usually balanced by the drop in demand.
The post-Great Death period saw the Five Rivers reorient much of its remaining economic activity on an expansion of kunduri cultivation. The effects of the Great Death had cost the Five Rivers its monopoly on production, but for a long time the region remained the world’s premier supplier. Their existing production, wide variety of cultivars, ideal climate, experienced workforce even after plague deaths, and natural transport network meant that they were much better-placed to ramp up production than any other location in the globe. The collapse of so much other trade meant that the remaining aristocrats reoriented much of their resources and capital to supplying the ever-increasing global market.
The consequences of this economic restructuring could best be summed up by this statistic: despite losing a quarter of their workforce to the Great Death in 1660-1661, by 1671 the Five Rivers were exporting twice the amount of kunduri which they had provided in 1659. Part of this increased export volume was due to lower domestic consumption, but most of it was due to increased production.
However, unlike some other Aururian societies, such as the Atjuntja and (to a lesser degree) the Yadji, the Five Rivers peoples had long learned the advantages of diversified production. In part this was because of their longer history of perennial agriculture and cash crop production, and thus having learned the consequences of relying too much on one crop, in case of drought, flood, fire, overproduction or other calamity. In part this was due to the longstanding commercial and knowledge-based competition between the factions; there was a very strong incentive to adopt any new crop, manufacture or other approach which might enhance one faction’s position over its rivals.
The knowledge-based competition between the factions contributed to the other aspect of the Five Rivers economy that increased after the Great Death: the use of domesticated animals. Horses and cattle, and to a lesser degree donkeys, had been present in the Five Rivers before the Great Death, but their use increased greatly in the aftermath. The abandonment of marginal agricultural lands meant that there were now suitable lands for grazing horses and cattle closer to their riverine transportation network.
The main early uses were for domesticated animals general transportation (both cattle and horses), additional fertiliser (also both cattle and horses), and meat (cattle), but the ever-curious Tjibarri soon found other uses for them. It did not take long for them to learn about cattle-powered gristmills which Europeans used to grind grain, and soon Tjibarri worked with European specialists to develop similar mills to grind wattleseeds.
The other significant use for domesticated animals was in the establishment of a horse-using postal system. Road construction had not historically been a strong practice in the Five Rivers. This gradually changed after contact with Europeans saw trade build up through Jugara from the 1630s onward. Aside from the immediate commercial benefits, this eventually gave access to European weapons and gunpowder.
Being acutely aware that Jugara would be on the frontlines in case of the war, Tjibarr set about building roads to the alternative ports of Taparee [Port Pirie] and Nookoonoo [Port Broughton]; this allowed trade to bypass Jugara, when needed. The original purpose of these roads was to ensure access to imported firearms, not to replace trade with the main port of Jugara. Bulk trade was still largely intended to flow via Jugara, albeit at slightly reduced prices for Tjibarri sellers; long-distance travel of goods across roads was much more expensive.
Once the roads were established, however, the endlessly-competing factions found more uses for them, in the eternal struggle of the Endless Dance. On good roads, horses could be used to bring information much more quickly than previous foot-based travel; this even applied to water-based travel in many circumstances, particularly when going upriver. Knowledge was power, as far as the Tjibarri were concerned. Knowledge mattered both for commerce (prices, relative demand, and other market information) and in competition between the factions.
So factions started establishing their own postal systems, that allowed regular changes of horses. Initially these were just between the new ocean ports and the Great Bend, the location where the Nyalananga [River Murray] turned south, and which had become the hub for ongoing trade with the Europeans. The advantages of the system were obvious, however, and gradually a postal system expanded to link all of the major towns and cities of Tjibarr. The other Five Rivers states also adopted such systems, following the Tjibarri example.
* * *
With the high death toll from the plagues, the economic chaos, and general exhaustion of the 1660s, neither the Yadji nor the Five Rivers states were truly interested in resuming warfare with each other. Some individual factions in Tjibarr were more sanguine, while a couple of religiously-motivated Yadji warmasters believed that the Great Dying marked the end of times, and tried to celebrate this by provoking war with Tjibarr and Gutjanal.
This meant that after 1665, border raids and skirmishes started increasing between Durigal and the Five Rivers. For several years, these did not lead to war between the two lands. The aging but still-astute Gunya Yadji negotiated peace and compensation, where required, to resolve these short of all-out war. On the Tjibarri side, the majority of the factions likewise favoured peace, and King Millewa of Gutjanal was not about to start a war against Durigal on his own.
The primary reason Gunya Yadji was so reluctant to get involved in further warfare with the Five Rivers was because he faced other problems. Some of these threats were external. In 1666, the Pakanga raids took on a worrying new direction when a group of Maori raiders conquered Mahratta [Mallacoota, Victoria]. Previously, Pakanga raids had been for wealth and glory only (in Aururia, that is). Now, a group of invaders had occupied land that was nominally part of the Yadji Empire. In truth, Mahratta was an isolated coastal village where the Regency had not exercised practical control in over one hundred years – and only sporadically even before then. But this attack, combined with ever-bolder raids by restive highlanders, led to a sense of the Regency being incapable of defending its own borders.
Further Pakanga raids followed; the most visible was a great raid by two Maori iwi at Mambara [Lakes Entrance, Victoria] that succeeded in breaking into the local temple and carrying off a wealth of golden tapestries and other treasures. These raids only exacerbated the internal discontent over priestly mismanagement.
The problems came to a head in November 1671. The Bittop of Gwandalan [Bairnsdale, VIC], in the eastern reaches of the White Country, had proven even more incapable than the average new priest, and was blamed for unjust decisions, unfair allocation of labour, and other problems throughout his region. He was assassinated by unknown people who stabbed him while he slept, then escaped into the night. Rather than accept that the murderers were unknown, some local Kurnawal were judged guilty and executed for the murder, on the orders of the remaining senior-most priest in Gwandalan.
The result was a rebellion, the worst which had been seen in within the Regency during living memory. The rebels in Gwandalan started by massacring all remaining priests within the city, driving out the small garrison, and then encouraging their neighbours to join them. The rebels soon found firearms to aid in their rebellion – presumed to Dutch-supplied, although the VOC denied any knowledge – and began to march on other towns. The rebellion spread quickly, with the ruling elite of priests and soldiers being killed or driven out of the eastern half of the White Country.
The first army sent to defeat the rebels was ambushed and routed when travelling along the Royal Road near Yuralba [Moe, VIC] in February 1672. This marked the worst defeat which a Yadji army had suffered at rebel hands in nearly a century, and it only encouraged further rebellion throughout the White Country. Quelling the rebellion clearly required much larger armies than had been anticipated, and the Yadji needed time to mobilise them. The diphtheria epidemic which swept through the Regency in 1672 did not help these preparations.
Worse followed. In 1673, with a large part of the Yadji armies committed to fighting the rebellion – and mostly bogged down in sieges – the much-feared external threat reappeared. Not from Pakanga raids, but from the Five Rivers. For in that year, all three Five Rivers states declared war on the Regency.
The Yadji Empire had never been so hard-pressed; they needed to fight on multiple fronts. The Regency had no time to obtain support from its English allies, and in any event England was busy with warfare elsewhere. While its forces gave a good account of themselves, and some of their fortified towns took time to fall, inevitably the Regency was forced to concede territory.
Tjibarr essentially reversed the result of the Fever War, recapturing the lower Copper Coast and the vital port of Jugara. Gutjanal seized the gold mines around Djawrit [Bendigo], and agreed to provide a share of their gold to Yigutji, in recompense for that kingdom’s support during the war. For the Kurnawal in the east, they achieved half of what they wanted: de facto independence, but not de jure. With his army and economy in disarray from defeats and plagues, in 1674 Gunya Yadji agreed to a seven-year truce with the Kurnawal rebels. This provided no formal recognition of peace, but the Kurnawal were essentially left to themselves in most of the White Country, except for a few border regions where the Yadji retained control.
When it came time to set up their own government, the Kurnawal rebels nearly managed to turn victory into last-minute defeat. The near-annihilation of the previous governing class left a vacuum, and they did not have an aristocracy or other clear successor to rule them. Instead, they had a number of rebel leaders who had attained their rank through force of arms during the rebellion, with half a dozen of them believing that they were the natural choice to rule their new would-be state.
Small-scale skirmishes broke out between the rebels, and could have escalated quickly. Adept diplomacy from Tjibarr and Gutjanal settled the dispute, with the rebels being persuaded to accept a younger prince from the other Kurnawal state, the kingdom on the Cider Isle [Tasmania], to become their king. The new king still faced a difficult task trying to build a kingdom from former rebel leaders who were united only by their hatred of the Yadji, and who had accepted him only because he was seen as less bad as letting one of their rivals take control.
In the Five Rivers, Tjibarr resumed trade through Jugara even before peace had been formally concluded. As part of maintaining their alliance, Tjibarr permitted Gutjanal and Yigutji merchants to ship agreed quantities of kunduri through Tjibarri waterways to Jugara for foreign trade, in exchange for specified tolls, rather then requiring them to onsell the kunduri to Tjibarri buyers. Tjibarr also concluded a trade treaty which permitted some commerce with English merchants. The ostensible reason they provided to their Dutch partners was that the Dutch and English were still at war, and Tjibarr did not want Jugara to become a target of war, since that would disrupt their own commerce. Later, they developed other excuses for maintaining English trade, such as that they were honouring existing agreements. Tjibarr continued to sell the majority of its kunduri and spice production to the Dutch, but they also maintained trade with the English and French.
* * *
“If you shake hands with a Tjibarri merchant, count your fingers afterwards.”
- Pieter de la Court, quoting an anonymous Dutch merchant who had traded at Jugara, 1675
* * *
[1] The White Country corresponds approximately to the historical region of Gippsland, or, very roughly, all the parts of Victoria east of Melbourne and south of the Great Dividing Range.
[2] The fertile stretch of coastal land between Dogport [Port Augusta] and the Bitter Lake [Lake Alexandrina], long contested between Tjibarr and Durigal.
* * *
Thoughts?
I'd like to know more about this "football". For example. What are the rules? Is there a set number of players per team or is it as many as you can muster? How does one score and how many points is each score worth?
twovultures
Donor
And what is the ball made of?
Great update! It's interesting to see the gains made in the post-plague states, and the increased incursions by Maori. Will these be used as an excuse by European states to increase their control?
On the whole, the Five Rivers have certainly come off much better. A consequence of the advantages of decentralisation when trying to manage plagues of this sort, together with having more homogenous populations in each state.
There are two main challenges from here. The first will be managing the English/Yadji fightback. The English will certainly try to prop up the Yadji once they can spare the resources from their wars with the Dutch. The Yadji also have the advantage that a command economy can marshal its resources very quickly if it needs to, particularly if the priest-bureaucrats gradually learn how to do their job properly.
The second challenge is that if the Yadji are no longer deemed a threat, then the older hatreds may come back to the fore. The Five Rivers states have fought each other almost as much as they have fought the Yadji. If they no longer view the Yadji as the biggest threat, well, they may well start fighting each other instead. Tjibarr has done its best to patch together a solid alliance, but that mostly works because of the perceived Yadji menace.
Five Rivers football looks a bit like what Marn Grook might have evolved into in an agricultural society. The full rules - especially around fouls - are complex enough to give the Byzantines headaches, and indeed rule interpretations are an endless source of arguments amongst Gunnagal.
But in essence, it is a ball game played with options for both kicking and throwing the ball. The ball may be caught in both hands from a kick, but only one hand from a throw. It can only be thrown one-handed. Once a ball is caught a player may not advance their position (i.e. toward the nearest goal) if they are making a throw or a kick with a held ball. Players do have the option of dropping the ball to the ground, and once on the ground they can kick it at will, but not pick it up. Where a kicked ball is caught before it touches the ground, then the opposition players may not advance any closer toward the catching player (with a set time limit).
There are four sets of goalposts, one in each quarter. Each team is aiming for two opposing sets of goalposts. A goal can only be scored from a kick, not throwing. A kicked goal where the ball touches the ground first is worth one point; a goal kicked on the full is worth two points; a goal kicked on the full and caught cleanly by the "keeper" behind the goalposts (one per team per set of goals, and one "interferer") is worth three points.
There are a set number of players per team, with an equally complex set of rules about when and how many substitutions can be made during the game.
The ball is made of possum skins - possums which are generally captive-bred, but not domesticated in any true sense.
European companies will be looking for any opportunity to wield greater influence over the main native states. However, generally speaking, they are not aiming to take over the major native states just for the hell of it. A protectorate status, perhaps, but not full takeover. (Not worth the cost, basically, so long as they can trade effectively and maintain monopolies over rival European companies). If a major state starts to disintegrate, all bets are off, of course.
Four goals?
So... Four teams?
How many players are allowed to be on the field at a time, per team?
What does the pitch look like?
So... Four teams?
How many players are allowed to be on the field at a time, per team?
What does the pitch look like?
Two teams. Each team has two potential goals they can score at, on opposite sides of the field. Four goalposts in total. The field itself is a circle, and just covered in grass. There aren't much in the way of special markings on the field, other than the centre point (with a small circle) used for restarting after goals.
There are 27 players per team allowed on the field at once; 23 on the main field itself, and four (two keepers, two interferers) behind the goalposts.