This story is interesting, not least because the issue is such a sensitive one for those with an overly romantic vision of how aborigines lived in harmony for thousands of years with the Australian environment, looking after it until Europeans came and started the degradation that continues....etc etc.
I have always been of the view that it is rather pointless to give credit to a - um, how should I put this? - technologically challenged culture for not doing something that it just didn't have the technology to do anyway. So if the countryside when they ran the place was pretty pristine...well, it would be if you didn't have metal tools, guns, tractors or dynamite, wouldn't it.
Even so, they still made a significant change to the environment due to their burning practices, so the country they "lived in harmony with" was pretty different from the country they first walked into.
As to the megafauna's demise, this article seems to make it clear that the jury is very out on the precise role, if any, the early inhabitants had. Anyway, can't it just be a combination of humans eating them, changing the environment with fire, and natural climate change as well? And it may have been different factors in different degrees in different parts of the countryside. That would seem more likely to me than being dogmatically on one side or the other of the opposing camps.
By the way, I am sorta glad we don't have 200kg , 2.5 m tall flat faced kangaroos around anymore..imagine the dint they could put in your radiator!
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