In this paywalled piece, I discuss quite a few controversial issues about the history of Australia’s aboriginal peoples and the reasons for some of their most salient features, historically speaking, such as a high propensity for cannibalism.

So, just to provide a glimpse of my method, I would like to describe the kind of sources I’m relying upon for my discussion on aboriginal cannibalism.

It would be very daring to state that Australians of the 1st millennium ate human flesh like their descendants did in the 19th century: what it’s clear is that, as separate observers like P. Foelsche (”Notes on the Aborigines of North Australia”, in Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia, vol. 5, 1882) and the missionary Louis Schulze (in “The Aborigines of the Upper and Middle Finke River: Their Habits and Customs”, in Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia, vol. 14, 1891) noted, Australian aborigines just before they were absorbed into the Australian state were enthusiastic cannibals who particularly enjoyed killing and eating children as young as two, sometimes their own or members of their own families and tribes, as well as enemy warriors in the American manner – a custom that also appears to have been commonplace, in the 2nd millennium, in Maori New Zealand.

Perhaps 30% of Australian aboriginal children were killed and often eaten, particularly illegitimate or deformed children. As William D. Rubinstein wrote in Quadrant (“The Incidence of Cannibalism in Aboriginal Society,” Sep. 25, 2021)…

“…there are literally hundreds of accounts of Aboriginal cannibalism, dating from the first European settlement in Australia to the 1930s or even later. These accounts were made in all the states and territories of Australia with the possible exception of Tasmania. They were written by witnesses and commentators from a wide variety of backgrounds who wrote in many genres—newspaper articles; autobiographies, many not meant for publication; court reports; scholarly proceedings, as in the accounts quoted above. The accounts were written by persons not in contact with one another, often hundreds of kilometers apart, and having no knowledge of the accounts made by other white Australians, and whose veracity, when they wrote on other topics, would not be questioned.”

There still are contrarian views, cited for example by Timothy Bottoms in his paper “Murdering Point and Indigenous Cannibalism.”

However, even these contrarians do admit at the very least a degree of ritualistic cannibalism (far from a rare occurrence among primitive tribes of any continent), while repeating tired accusations that anyone who ever accuses anyone else of cannibalism is motivated by racist agendas – going as far as providing the example of Spanish reports of Native American cannibalism as such a claim, even though such reports are supported by a huge amount of evidence.