I’m not gonna say never, because this planet’s got a few billion years left in it yet, and that’s a longass time, but I don’t think they’d resort to industrial technology in the next, say, ten thousand years. Industrial technology is only one branch of the “tech tree”, so to speak, and it’s not the direction Indigenous technology was headed.

Indigenous technology was already very advanced, with large scale sustainable agriculture systems that were deeply integrated into the environment. When the white colonists arrived, they said the land was “like a park estate”. They believed the land had randomly just grown into manicured grasslands ideal for hunting game. But a few decades after they prevented Indigenous people from practicing their traditional land management through controlled burns, the grasslands turned into rainforests. Turns out, they’d been using fire to prevent the growth of scrub and maintain a mosaic of grasslands and forests that made it maximally easy to hunt animals like the kangaroo, while maintaining the wild population. It was agriculture without domestication. And it was so efficient, Indigenous Australians only had to work a few hours a day. They spent the rest of their time relaxing, discussing philosophy and the arts, and performing ceremonies. I wish My life was that nice!

At the time of colonisation, the recent trend was the increasing cultivation and selection of Indigenous plants for better yields. They were increasing their agricultural capacity and their population. I don’t think this would have lead to industrialisation, because industrialisation was a very miserable state of existence, as you’d know from any Dickens book. The First Australians wanted technology that made life better, not worse. I think they were heading for technologies we have yet to discover, which would have further improved their daily living situation.

Also, they were the first to invent flying machines.