While it is true that the vast majority of modern peoples learned of tobacco from Europeans, the southwest Pacific has two special cases where Europeans had almost nothing to do with the spread of tobacco or indeed nothing at all to do with it. In the relatively simple case of central Australia in the dry country of the “outback” the native Australians chewed the native tobaccos or its lookalike(Duboisea hopwoodii) all quite unaffected by or uninspired by Europeans or those affected by them. In this one remote area of the world American tobaccos never penetrated in their modern forms and in alliance with the habit of smoking. To such tribes as the Aranda and their brothers goes the distinction of being like the South American Indians, unique originators of habits of using tobacco...
Based on land locations where the body art and object imagery were found, as well as the nature of the designs, Brady concludes that the Cape York residents were the hunter-gatherers, while groups in more northerly locations within Torres Strait appear to have been horticulturalists. Since imagery mixed and matched more among the early farmers, Brady concludes they enjoyed kinship links, and engaged in extensive trade, with Papua New Guinea groups.
In New Guinea the story is rather odd and difficult to explain. In this large island South American tobacco spread far and wide with tremendous rapidity immediately after it arrived. So far as we know, we have to say that tobacco was introduced to northwest New Guinea by the Moluccans shortly after their first contacts with Spanish and Portuguese sailors in greater Indonesia in some part of the 16th century, but not apparently as early as the time of Magellan (1519) or Albuquerque (1509 and later). It moved through a diversity of tribes, many of whom were in a chronic state of hostility with each other, and over several major changes in habitat, over the central mountain ridge to the tribes on the other side and along down to the south coast where Europeans in the first decade of the 17th century find themselves being offered tobacco in two different ports of call.
