Let me tell you a story about a wheel.
Around 3500 BCE, in the mud-brick workshops of Mesopotamia, somebody spun a lump of clay on a flat turning disc and made a nicer pot. That was the wheel's grand debut. A pottery gadget. It took roughly three hundred years before anyone thought to tip it on its side, bolt it to a frame, and hitch it to an ox. And that last word is the whole trick. Ox. Because a wheel without a big strong animal to pull it is just a heavy circle you have to drag through the dirt yourself.
Hold that thought. We'll come back to the ox.
In September 2025, Senator Pauline Hanson sat down for a chat on The JJ Podcast, an obscure little show that has a habit of hosting conservative politicians, former Liberal prime minister John Howard among them. Talking about teaching First Nations histories to schoolchildren, she called it a "complete waste of time." Then she really warmed up.
"What the hell have they done in this country for … supposedly 60,000 years?" she asked. "They'd never invented the wheel. There was nothing here. What are we actually holding up? A few, you know, rock paintings. Sorry, they're the most primitive race on Earth, and we're supposed to be holding up and saying what they've achieved. They've achieved nothing."
Nothing. In sixty-five thousand years.
Then, when the comments finally made the news, she walked it back. Sort of.
Speaking to News24 on 15 September 2026, Hanson said she'd "put my foot in my mouth." She wasn't talking about First Nations people today, she explained. She meant back then. "If we go back at the time of settlement in Australia, they were primitive compared to what the settlers that came out here from England, that type of thing." She regretted saying it, she added, because she didn't want to upset anyone.
That second version isn't an apology. It's the same insult in a nicer jumper. Because "they were primitive compared to the settlers" is not some fringe slip of the tongue. It's the quiet belief this whole country was built on, that the British arrived and brought civilisation to a blank and backward land.
I know a lot of people heard that and quietly nodded along. Not because they're cruel. Because nobody ever taught them otherwise. The version of Australian history most of us grew up with started in 1770 with a bloke and a boat, and everything before that got waved away as a footnote about spears and dot paintings. When a Senator says "they achieved nothing," and “they were primitive compared to what the settlers that came out here from England” it slots neatly into a gap that was left empty on purpose.
Let's fill that gap. Not with feelings. With eel farms, bread ovens, astronomical observatories, and about sixty-five thousand years of receipts.
The Eel Farm That's Older Than the Pyramids
Down in south-west Victoria, on Gunditjmara Country, sits a place called Budj Bim. If you flew over it you'd see channels cut through the volcanic rock, ponds linked by weirs, stone walls guiding water this way and that. It looks engineered because it is engineered.
The Gunditjmara people reshaped the lava flows into one of the world's oldest aquaculture systems, a network for trapping, farming and harvesting kooyang, the short-finned eel. They built channels to move water across the landscape, ponds to hold the eels, and woven traps to catch them at exactly the right moment in their migration. Then they smoked the eels in hollow trees to preserve them for trade. Around all this stood permanent stone houses. Not humpies thrown up overnight. Round stone dwellings people lived in, generation after generation.
Parts of Budj Bim have been dated to around 6,600 years old. The Great Pyramid of Giza went up about 4,500 years ago. When Egyptians were still a millennium away from stacking their first pyramid block, Gunditjmara engineers were already running an industrial-scale food operation out of solid stone. UNESCO agreed, listing Budj Bim as a World Heritage site in 2019, specifically for its Aboriginal cultural value. That's the same list Stonehenge and the Pyramids are on.
A society that "achieved nothing" built that.
The Fish Traps That Read the River
Travel north to Brewarrina, on Ngemba Country in New South Wales, and you'll find Baiame's Ngunnhu, the Brewarrina fish traps. Half a kilometre of stone walls laid across the Barwon River in the shape of a great fishing net made of rock.
They aren't a random pile of stones. The walls are curved and angled to work with the river's flow, funnelling fish into holding pens as the water rises and falls. Change the height of the river and a different set of pens does the catching. It's applied fluid dynamics, built by people reading water the way you'd read a book, and the design is robust enough to survive floods that would flatten a lesser structure. The traps are thought to be thousands of years old, and some researchers argue they may be among the oldest human-built structures anywhere on Earth. Custodians maintained and repaired them across countless generations, which is its own kind of engineering discipline.
Romans get statues built in their honour for their aqueducts, and rightly so, moving water is hard. The Ngemba and neighbouring nations were moving water and managing a living food supply with the same intellect, on the same planet, arguably earlier.
One gets a chapter in every schoolbook. The other gets called "a few rock paintings."
The Bread That Predates the Middle East
Now, the bread. This one's my favourite, and I'll tell you why in a second.
At Madjedbebe in the Northern Territory and at Cuddie Springs in New South Wales, archaeologists found grinding stones with the residue of processed seed still on them. People were collecting wild grain, grinding it into flour, mixing it with water and baking it. Bread. Made here. Up to 30,000 years ago, which puts it thousands of years ahead of the earliest bread-making evidence from the Middle East.
When your primary school taught you that "civilisation" began with agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, the oldest bread on the shelf was actually being baked on a fire in what's now the Top End. The recipe just never made it into the curriculum.
And the grinding didn't stop at bread. Early European explorers wrote down what they saw with their own eyes. Thomas Mitchell described riding through country where native grain grew in stacks "like hayricks," the ground tilled, the harvest gathered. Charles Sturt recorded fields of harvested grass-seed stretching for kilometres. These weren't wild meadows people stumbled through. They were managed crops, planted, harvested, and stored in clay silos. The Gurindji and others were farmers.
The colonisers who wrote the "hunter-gatherer" myth were often looking straight at Aboriginal farms while they wrote it.
The Fire That Farmed a Continent
Speaking of farming, let's talk about the biggest agricultural project in human history, and I'm not exaggerating for effect.
Aboriginal people managed the entire continent with fire. Cool, controlled, deliberate burning, done at the right time of year in the right patches, in a practice now called fire-stick farming or cultural burning. It cleared undergrowth so fresh green shoots would sprout and draw in kangaroo and other game to predictable spots. It opened pathways. And it prevented the monster bushfires that come when fuel is left to pile up for years, a lesson this country keeps relearning the hard way.
Think about the scale for a moment.
Europe irrigated fields you could walk across in an afternoon. First Nations Australians were actively shaping the ecology of an entire continent, reading soil, wind, season and species, and doing it sustainably enough that the land was still thriving when the First Fleet arrived.
That's not the absence of agriculture. That's agriculture operating at a scale Europe never attempted.
The World's First Astronomers
We hand Greece the crown for astronomy and cheer for Stonehenge as ancient genius. Fair enough, both are magnificent. But First Nations Australians are now recognised as the world's first astronomers, and there's stone on the ground to prove it.
At Wurdi Youang, near Little River in Victoria, the Wathaurong people arranged stones into an egg shape roughly fifty metres across. Sounds decorative until you track where the stones point. The outer rocks line up with the setting sun at the summer solstice, the winter solstice, and the equinoxes. It's a working solar calendar carved into the landscape, the same fundamental job Stonehenge does in England, doing it with the same precision.
Then there are the Songlines. Picture an encyclopaedia you can't drop because it lives in song and story rather than paper. Communities mapped the movement of the stars and tied that knowledge to routes across the land, so that singing the right sequence in the right order walked you across thousands of kilometres of desert, past every waterhole and boundary, safely. An auditory navigation system, memorised, sung, passed down.
GPS with a melody, running for tens of thousands of years without a single dead battery.
Let's Line Them Up, Side by Side
Because the trick that's been played on all of us works by keeping these things separate. Their achievements over here in the "primitive" box, everyone else's over there in the "civilisation" box. Put them next to each other and the whole illusion falls apart.
Same intellect. Same problems of survival. Different continent. And in more than one row on that chart, First Nations Australians did it first.
Right, Now the Wheel
You've been patient. Here's the ox again.
Hanson's proudest jab was the wheel. No wheel, therefore, no achievement. It sounds devastating until you know what the wheel is and what it needs to work.
The wheel is not a symbol of genius. It's a solution to one specific problem: shifting enormous heavy loads, tonnes of grain or timber, across flat, hard-packed ground. And it is completely useless without a motor. In Eurasia the motor was the ox, the horse, the donkey, the water buffalo, big muscular animals bred to haul. That's the ingredient that made the wheel worth having.
Australia has no such animal. Kangaroos hop, which is spectacular and hopeless for towing a cart. There were no native horses, no oxen, no cattle. A wheeled cart here wouldn't have been an invention, it would have been a punishment, a heavy wooden box for a human to drag through deep sand and spinifex and rocky range. Anyone who's bogged a four-wheel drive on a beach knows exactly how well wheels cope with soft sand.
In ancient Mesoamerica, the Aztecs and Maya did invent the wheel. We've dug up the little wheeled clay animals to prove it. They understood the physics completely. And they used it on children's toys and nothing else, because they too had no big draft animals and lived in terrain that made carts pointless. Knowing about the wheel and choosing not to haul freight with it isn't stupidity. It's someone doing the maths and getting the right answer.
First Nations Australians did the same maths. Where heavy transport was needed, along the Murray-Darling and the coast, they engineered light, fast bark and timber watercraft and used the rivers as highways. Their whole economy prized what was portable, efficient and light, because the culture was built on moving with the land and leaving it well, not on hoarding tonnes of stuff behind stone walls. A clunky cart was the opposite of everything that made sense here.
The engineering brain that other cultures poured into carts went somewhere else entirely. Into the aerodynamics of the returning boomerang. Into heat-treating stone to make sharper, stronger tools, which is applied chemistry. Into fish traps, eel farms, fire ecology and star maps. Same intelligence. Different problems. Better-matched solutions.
The wheel was never a scorecard. Anyone who tells you it was, is either mistaken or hoping you won't check.
The History Stolen from All of Us
Most people repeating "First Nations Australians achieved nothing" aren't monsters. They're working from an empty file. Australian history was taught to generations as a story that begins in 1788, with everything before it compressed into a vague, timeless "before." When your education deletes the eel farms and the observatories and the oldest bread on Earth, of course a Senator's insult sounds plausible. The gap was dug long ago, and comments like Hanson's just pour more concrete into it.
This is exactly what Hanson reached for when she "clarified." Not "they achieved nothing," but "they were primitive compared to the settlers." It sounds more reasonable. It's the same story wearing a tie.
There's a genuine difference between two versions of this country's past. One is the colonial story, tidy, recent, flattering to the newcomers, built partly on the legal fiction of terra nullius, the claim that the land belonged to no one. That fiction was only formally overturned in 1992, in the Mabo decision in the High Court of Australia. The other version is the evidence: dated, excavated, stone-solid, running back sixty-five thousand years and written into the land itself.
You don't have to choose the comfortable story just because it was handed to you first.
The ‘Civilised’ Society Lie
Hanson's clarification rests on one word doing all the heavy lifting. Primitive. The settlers were civilised, the locals were primitive, so the story goes. The First Fleet dropped anchor in January 1788. Picture Britain in that exact moment, and not the powdered-wig, teacups-and-Jane-Austen version. The real one.
London in 1788 was one of the filthiest places on Earth. Raw sewage ran in open channels down the middle of streets. Human and animal waste piled in courtyards because there was no sanitation system worth the name. The Thames, the city's proud river, doubled as its toilet and its drinking supply at the same time. Cholera and typhoid swept through regularly, because nobody yet understood that the water was killing them. Life expectancy in the city hovered around the mid-thirties. Children died in numbers that would break you. Gin was cheaper than clean water, so a good portion of the population stayed drunk to cope, and the streets of London were genuinely dangerous after dark.
Hold that against the continent those "primitive" people were living on. Aboriginal Australians drank from clean waterways they'd managed for millennia. They ate a varied, fresh, nutrient-rich diet of fish, game, seed and plant, not the mouldy bread and gin of the London poor. They understood that fouling your own water meant death, so they didn't do it. There was no smallpox here until the ships brought it. No cholera. No plague. No slums. The land was clean because the people kept it clean, on purpose, as a matter of law and lore. They built hundreds of distinct Nations that lived in harmony with the land and each other, they respected kinship and the connection of all living things, rarely seen in many societies around the world.
Which one is primitive? A society living in its own sewage, dying of diseases it created and didn't understand? Where human life meant nothing? Or a society that had solved sanitation, diet, and sustainable land use and human connection so completely that the problems crippling London simply didn't exist here?
Strip the fancy clothes, the class system, the coins and the cathedrals off eighteenth-century Britain and you're left with a crowded, sick, violent, hungry place. "Civilisation" was largely a costume. Underneath it, by the measures that keep people alive, clean water, safe food, low disease, social order, First Nations Australians were doing considerably better than the people who came to look down on them.
And the biggest falsity that Australians love to gloss over, The First Fleet wasn't a shipment of Britain's finest minds and gentlest souls. It was a prison transport. The bulk of the roughly 1,400 people aboard were convicts, hundreds of them, sent here because Britain's own society had chewed them up and spat them out for crimes often as small as stealing food. Add the soldiers sent to guard them until they died.
This was not the Royal Society arriving to enlighten the natives. It was Britain emptying its overcrowded jails onto the far side of the world, onto land that had been lived on, farmed, and cared for, for sixty-five thousand years.
One person's "civilisation" is another's savage land. It was only ever a matter of who was holding the pen and writing the story. And for a very long time, that wasn't us.
What You Can Do with All This
Next time you hear "First Nations Australians never even invented the wheel," you'll know the wheel was a pottery tool that needed an ox, and that the Aztecs binned it for toys. Next time someone says, "First Nations Australians achieved nothing in sixty-five thousand years," you can quietly mention the eel farms older than the Pyramids, the bread that beat the Middle East by millennia, and the stone calendar that keeps the same time as Stonehenge.
And the next time someone stands proudly and says, "without the United Kingdom there would be no civilisation in Australia," you can remind them that the civilisation in question was drinking from the same river it used as a toilet, buried its children by the thousand, and sent its citizens halfway across the world to die.
The First Fleet was a prison ship, not a university, there was no Wi-Fi, no cars, no computers, no retail, no hope. They landed on land with clean water, fresh food, and no plague, because the people already here had spent sixty-five thousand years working out how to live well on it.
That's the whole point of learning this. Not to win an argument at a barbecue (though you will). It's so that the oldest continuing culture on Earth, right here under our feet, our brothers and sisters, finally gets counted properly in the story of what humans have achieved.
Because First Nations Australians didn't achieve nothing.
They achieved almost everything the history textbooks celebrate. They just did it here, and often first, and that’s something every Australian should be proud of.
Go be dangerous with that knowledge.
