I will go to the ridge of Okawa
I will pluck out his liver
That will show these men
What I mean when I speak of revenge.
Where is the man that could kill you?
Where is the hand that defiled you?
No! the gods
willed you to die,
Tore out your heart and lungs,
Splintered bones and spattered brains like vomit,
ribs picked clean
And blood oozing through the stones
Of the feast.
Let your foul cousins taste
The sweetness of their ancestress
In thy breast. Mairie-i-rangi
Will lie like a stone in their belly.
-Makere of the Ati-Awa
Tim Flannery's biogeochemical history of Australasia is so masterful that he is able to provide an ecological explanation for Makere's powerful tangi that dates to the beginning of the eighteenth century. New Zealand and Easter Island are two of the more extreme examples on record of Pacific islands peopled to their carrying capacity that suffered from deforestation, ate their way through the moa, and finally turned to endemic cannibalistic warfare in order to sate their desire for protein.
Mr. Flannery traces the path of Gondwana from where it sat astride the South Pole at a warmer time in our past, with large-eyed dwarf T-rex stalking through the weeks of darkness. As Gondwana broke up, Meganesia and Tasmantis formed, the land masses that respectively incorporated Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea, while New Zealand, Stewart Island, and New Caledonia constituted Tasmantis. 'The Future Eaters' is one of Flannery's earlier works and presages his brilliant 'The Eternal Frontier,' an ecological history of North America and its peoples. But Flannery is Australian and hence brings a far more personal perspective to 'Future Eaters.' He tells of the planet's poorest soil producing an efficiency-driven ecology of marsupials, and later firestick farming by humans. His chapters on the early colonization of Australia, the Dreamtime, build a good case for 70 000 years ago, and his theories on the Indonesian Archipelago and the origin of black skin somewhere around the Wallace Line and a subsequent back-colonization of Africa through Madagascar are as delightful as they are speculative, controversial, and well reasoned. The more we study human evolution, the more baroque, indeed cyberpunk, it gets. Mr. Flannery's analysis includes the El Nino weather pattern that has framed the region's climate for millions of years, and becomes something of a psycho-history when he discusses how Australians have viewed themselves and their place in the world over the decades.
Dr. Flannery is a world-renowned marsupial expert and has discovered and named several new species in Australia and New Guinea. 'Future Eaters' dates from 1994 and does not have the flawless writing style of Flannery's recent books, the problem may be more in the editing, as the words "concern" and "concerning" appear maddeningly about five times per page. Other than this minor quibble, Flannery's work is a stunning multi-disciplinary synthesis in the same league as Jared Diamond's stupendous 'Collapse.'
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Top reviews from other countries
Oliver Fleming
Amazing Book and covers so many things
Reviewed in Australia on April 30, 2023robert wilson
A shocking story of human exploitation on a fragile continent.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 15, 2013R. W. Hughes
A follow up to Bill Brysons down under
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 14, 2015Mr J
Straightforward and as expected
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 10, 2019