Australia has an abundance of iron and other metals, is a vast area, and it's inhabitants were no stranger to fighting and clashes of culture. Why, when this mixture in Europe, the Middle East and Asia prompted their civilisations to develop new and increasingly complex technologies and understandings of physics and mathematics, did the Australian Aborigines never do so?
Is it because of their nomadic lifestyles? I'm often told it's because the land was too harsh, but that doesn't describe all of Australia - much of the South and East is lush and full of life. I know it's terribly incorrect of me to suggest, so I'm not quite sure how to word it, but why didn't the Aboriginal peoples see upward development in the same way as much of the rest of the world?
As far as I am aware, there is no definitive answer as to why Aboriginal Australians did not develop what a layman would consider 'civilisation', though many attempts have been made across history to explain the perceived imbalance in 'development' across different societies and cultures. As to the factors that you seem to think are ones that induce technological development (and I do not think that you are necessarily right or wrong in this regard), perhaps you should personally examine whether these were as widespread or as imposing on Aboriginal Australians as it was of those cultures in the Old Worlds. Especially consider that Australia is a vast country, and has always had a very low population density.
I would like to qualify the following statement with the fact that I am not of Aboriginal Australian descent, and in no way do I mean to speak for the traditional custodians of the land. I say this in the context of academic enquiry and thought. As for the fact that you think it is terribly incorrect, I genuinely believe that it is not. The issue is that you must show a great deal of respect when asking these forms of questions, avoiding any insinuations of racial inferiority.
This isn't a historical answer but more of an anthropological one, but such situations are not really surprising and don't generally imply a situation of inferiority or superiority.
What's important to keep in mind here is that "progress" or technological advancement is a rather exponential process, and human development has played out over a very long period of time (hundreds of thousands of years). What that means is that even a very minor difference in the pace of technological development between two separate civilizations can easily result in enormous differences when comparing both at the same time frame.
If you look at human history you see vast expanses of time when technology was changing slowly and then a very rapid progression from the onset of agriculture through the iron age and the scientific/industrial age to now. The paleolithic age lasted from 2.6 million years ago until only around ten thousand years ago. Imagine observing that period, checking in every 5 thousand years to see how things were going. You'd see things nearly unchanged time and time again as you checked in hundreds and hundreds of times. Then suddenly everything changes at the last second. If you looked at humanity at 2.5 million years into the paleolithic age then you'd see a very "primitive" people and you could easily ask this same "why aren't they technologically advanced?" question about humans in general at that point. But in that remaining 0.1 million years (really in much less than that) humans go from stone age hunter-gatherers to building micro-chips and landing on the moon.
In the case of Aboriginal Australians vs. Eurasians you have a difference in pace of development which is at most maybe 20% different, but even that is enough to result in people with gunpowder and steam engines interacting with people who use stone tools.
But that's actually the expected case. It would be extraordinarily unusual for two different separate civilizations to develop at precisely the same pace. And indeed historically you have seen significant differences in technological development between different cultures and civilizations. The main advantage that Eurasia/North Africa had over the rest of the world was that it experienced long lasting trade and cultural exchange with one another for millenia, so that regions that were behind the development curve could catch up and the entire region could benefit from the innovations coming from elsewhere. The development level of Indigenous Australians and Indigenous Britons, for example, was roughly comparable around 5000 years ago. But the technological development of the British Isles benefited greatly from mediterranean trade through the bronze age, roman occupation, the advent of gunpowder in china, and so on. Had the British Isles been as isolated as Australia it's quite probable the pace of technological development there would have been drastically slower.
r/AskAnthropology might be a good place to ask this. Not that there's any problem with it being posted here too.