Does Europa Universalis IV's approach to Australia in the Early Modern period do it justice?

I preface this firstly saying that I am a huge fan of Paradox, and I love the amount of effort and love they put into their games. I have 2000 hrs clocked on Steam, follow the EUIV dev diaries, and even made a mod a long time ago. That being said...

One issue of Australia's portrayal is that it has no history or individual character - it is just more land to be painted, in a way that the Americas and much of Africa are not. New Zealand and the Pacific Islands also suffer from this treatment. I do believe that the nature of this portrayal is somewhat explained by the purpose of the game (essentially a European Empire Simulator) and the nationalities of the creators (mostly Europeans with some North Americans), but also that their impressions of Australia come from public history that is largely ignorant of modern academic consensus. Most Australians are uninterested in the 'bland' colonial narratives of White Australia, and stick their heads in the hand when it comes to Indigenous Australian history - which leads to my second and more serious point, in that precolonial Australia's portrayal is highly dated and Eurocentric, and could be considered quite offensive and troubling. While some of these issues are handled the best way they can be in a game that covers an extreme diversity of cultures, locations, scale and time periods, it is (hopefully unintentionally) reinforcing serious historical falsehoods.

Australia is a colonial state, born of invasion by Europeans. It was born of war without treaty, and there is enormous evidence of guilt and justifications made to explain why Europeans deserved Australia more than the Australians did. European colonists attacked the character of Indigenous society from every side, and especially its intellect and sophistication. 'They do not use the land, they only live upon it'. 'They do not have governments nor leaders nor a sense of ownership of the land'. 'They are nomads, and have no claim to ownership'. 'They are little better than beasts picking what they can from the soil, and are doomed to die'. Indigenous use of the land was downplayed, and Indigenous resistance actively forgotten - what was once well by colonists on the frontier (war, atrocities and lies) became controversial issues of serious debate one hundred years later. This debate is mostly historians versus conservatives, but sadly most Australians prefer the older narratives of 'settlement without war' and 'simple Aborigines' to the incredibly confronting works of academics like Henry Reynolds.

Precolonial Indigenous Australia was a rich and diverse world. With over 500 languages and around 1 million to 1.5 million people, some of these cultures formed large 'nations', with strict rules on territory based on shared identities, for example, the Noongar nation of the southwest of Australia, of which the Wadjuk and Minang (represented in game with the names of provinces) are a part. The types of cultures you could find varied from the permanently settled (Torres Strait Islanders, Tasmanias and a few mainland cultures) to the highly nomadic (who predominantly lived in the central deserts). Our modern stereotypical idea of Indigenous Australian life is based on northern and central desert cultures, as recorded by highly biased anthropologists in the early 20th century who saw these people as culturally and racially 'pure', and exoticised their 'primitive' nature. The 'impure' Indigenous Australians were killed by disease, murdered, starved, imprisoned, raped, enslaved, forced onto reservations and nearly annihilated - most of this after several years of fierce resistance fighting across the entire continent.

Precolonial Australia was highly successful. Several forms of agriculture were practiced, even if unrecognisable or unsophisticated to colonisers, and food was extremely abundant, even in the harshest deserts. People made bread, wore elaborate body paint, wore cloaks, skirts or head-dresses, sang and danced. They educated their children on the rules of survival, like how to catch every kind of animal, forage for every kind of medicinal plant, or when and where to light fires for hunting or farming purposes. The needs for fresh water, environmental sustainability, trade routes and diversity of foods led to much of Australia developing strong religious practices regarding food taboos, animal totems and how to live, including the need to move between resource areas. Most lived in large family sized grass huts, which lasted several months, in groups that could range from tens, to hundreds or thousands. Swamps, lakes and rivers were incredibly important locations, especially in the south, and were where populations were their most dense.

The provinces made available to colonisers in game reflects inhabitability from a European perspective - the tropical north is certainly quite inhabitable, especially to a potential Asian coloniser from the north, and Indigenous Australians lived in all locations of Australia, adapting to local conditions.

Trade goods are also colonial in nature - were Indigenous Australians playable in game, their trade goods would not be wheat, wool or gold. Instead it would be items like red ochre, used in body paint, rock paint or as medicine; foods like fish and fruits; specialist rocks and woods for crafting; or the crafted goods themselves, like spears or boomerangs. Unlike the Americas, no native Australian flora or fauna became a global export - items from this continent were generally shunned as inferior or backward by colonisers, and they put little effort in to the necessary domestication of the good that other cultures had in other continents. That being said, in a game about alternate history, why must all colonials follow the path of bigoted British settlers in rejecting Australia's native plants and animals?

In this game, 'culture groups' are generally based on language families. The single 'Aboriginal' culture in game is grouped together with Papuans of New Guinea, who are not genetically, culturally or linguistically related to any group besides the Torres Strait Islanders, whose land and culture is apparently too small to be represented in game (which is sad, because they are often forgotten, but understandable). Indigenous Australians generally prefer not to be called Aboriginal, but rather instead have people use their tribal or regional names, for instance the Wadjuk Nyungar - Wadjuk country, part of the Nyungar nation. A shared Aboriginal identity is a colonial construct that is still significantly contested - the modern self-constructed identity of pan-Aboriginal Australia is mostly a result of activism, which went from mostly regional in the early 20th century to national in the 1970s. Isolating Indigenous Australian culture and having nations or tribes (or simplifications based on geography) would make more sense.

Regional identities are extremely important. In real life, an Indigenous person has a deep spiritual and social connection to their country - they will often introduce themselves by giving their name, country of origin, ancestry and ties to famous family members. In EUIV, Indigenous Australians are barely represented beyond the names of some tribes on provinces far too large to represent their territories, and this would likely be deeply offensive, especially in the modern context of the Indigenous struggle for land rights. In some areas of Australia, locals were totally wiped out through a combination of disease and massacre - in most, stolen land has never been returned, and legally cannot be.

Indigenous religion in-game is simply labeled 'animism' - this could instead be 'Dream Time' mythologies, a term that modern scholars use, but some Indigenous Australians reject. A Wadjuk man might call it the Nyitting, or 'Cold Time', and state that it is not myth, but rather a mix of culture, science and oral history, whereas others might not. Indigenous Australia is extremely diverse. To me, this is an easy fix, and suggests that the region is largely forgotten - it is not hard to mod in, and neither is a simplified 'mana' based religion for Polynesia. The game is Eurocentric and modelling non-Eurasian cultures can be difficult, but they should at least make the effort to do what is possible.