Читать книгу Australian History For Dummies - Alex McDermott - Страница 32

Australia is the driest, flattest inhabited continent in the world. The country is a vast span of stony deserts with only a fringe of arable land clinging to the edges where the weather is milder and rain more reliable. But during the last Ice Age (around 40,000 years Before Present), the situation was much, much worse. Almost all the world’s fresh water was locked up in the enormous glaciers that covered the north of Europe, leaving scarcely any to spare for the Great Southern Land. The continent of Australia was a landscape desolate beyond anything we can picture now.

And yet — people lived here. These people had a complex culture, they traded, and they told stories and sang songs in hundreds of languages (see Figure 2-1). The people who sang those songs were masters of survival in the harshest landscape on Earth.