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60,000+ years	Colonisation	Protection	Assimilation	Integration	Reconcilitation

60,000+ years ago to 1788

Australia’s first people

Australia’s first people were the Aborigines. When the British arrived in Australia in 1788 the Aboriginal population is estimated to have been between 300,000 and 1 million.

In 1788 it is thought the Aborigines spoke around 250 languages with up to 600 different dialects groups.
Aboriginal history dates back somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 years, and archaeological investigations and improved dating techniques promise further breakthroughs in our knowledge of this history...

Population figures in 1788 are estimated at 750,000, with dense populations in New South Wales and Victoria along the coast and rich water courses. The richness of this heritage is still largely ignored. The diversity of Aboriginal land-use patterns, food sources, technology, clothing, and shelter is little known.

For example, Aboriginal people in western Victoria wore fur cloaks and lived in more permanent villages with stone houses. In warmer resource-rich areas, Aboriginal people stayed for months at a time, though lighter shelters have weathered away, denying us much ancient evidence. Careful land-management techniques were applied to harvest food resources, and sensitive and skilful methods were used to hunt game. Great physical agility, dexterity and knowledge of animals and land were required to hunt wily game and gather inaccessible foods. Fishing from the rivers was widely practised. Aboriginal people had a balanced diet, and they had also been quarantined from many of the diseases which affected Europeans.

The social and economic organisation of Aboriginal groups varied greatly throughout Australia, but some general observations can be made.

• Aboriginal society had a relatively egalitarian social structure where age, gender, totemic and land affiliations were important demarcations.
• Women usually provided the staple food supply, and they owned and had special responsibilities towards sites in the landscape, associated song cycles and Dreaming stories. They had exclusive control of the secret ceremonies of reproduction, and their maternal function as child rearers was highly valued.
• Men hunted and also played an important role in nurturing and teaching children, and there were special responsibilities for a wide network of kin in relation to each child.
• When a baby was born, she or he immediately had a niche in a complex cosmology defined by Dreaming stories. Identity was secure, and the child had a variety of land relationships via its conception Dreaming, as well as inheritance through its father and mother.
• The child would gradually be introduced to responsibilities towards land and kin and the strict marriage rules.
• Values which were taught in traditional Aboriginal society included sharing, respecting the wisdom of age, looking out for the young, gentle treatment and close observation of plants and animals, and the fulfilment of kinship obligations.
• Families and clans travelled the land throughout the year. They harvested the land's resources when the opportunity was available, and looked after special sites to which they had responsibility.
• Men and women separately facilitated the reproduction of resources through ritual nurturing. They also spent much time working or negotiating business in the company of their own gender.
• Decision making and law enforcement were divided between men and women, and ultimate power was often accorded on the basis of custodial obligations towards relevant land or kinship obligations.
• The tablet of the law which was ensconced in the landscape itself was explained through Dreaming stories as people travelled. While women were in charge of their own business--sacred and secular-men' s power often appears to have been more highly valued in regard to law and punishment matters concerning the larger group. In some areas, women's law was more powerful than others and older women held high status.
• Gatherings of many clans took place from time to time to conduct social, marriage and religious business. Ritual confrontations were also staged to avenge wrongdoing, and other transgressions could be punished physically or through potentially fatal sorcery. Dancing and singing, story telling, drawing, painting and sculpture took place all year round, and through such entertaining means everyone learnt the law of their group.

Aboriginal groups often met other outsiders before the British arrived. In the Northern Territory and parts of northern Queensland, Macassan trepang gatherers had been interacting with Aboriginal people off the coast since at least 1700. Relatively harmonious relations existed, and they traded with and employed local Aboriginal people. Such items as glass thus filtered into Aboriginal tool-making. Macassan words have been incorporated into some Aboriginal languages. Some intermixing occurred, and the all-male crews had sexual associations with the local women.

Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody

Readings

Reading 1A Before 1788 (Aboriginal Australia Aboriginal People of NSW)

Reading 2A : Aboriginal Society Prior to the British Arrival (Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody)

Upper Hunter

Reading 11A Aboriginal people in the Hunter Valley

The term rock painting is used to describe Aboriginal art were materials have been applied to a rock surface to make a design or picture. These may be elaborate, multi layered and profuse or more simple, like the western concept of a drawing. Paintings and drawings on rock surfaces are found across Australia. There are numerous sites in the Upper Hunter:

Reading 12A Introduction to Rock Art
Reading 12B Hands on Rock
Reading 12C Biame

Tiddalik is the key character in one of the most widely related dreaming stories on the eastern seaboard of Australia.

Reading 12D: Tiddalik

Dates and events

1606 - The Spaniard, Vaez de Torres has explored the Strait which today bears his name.

Mid 1600s - Portuguese traders from Timor began raiding Melville Island, just off the coast of Darwin, to kidnap young male Tiwi for slaves. The Portuguese continue their raids until about 1800.

1688 - The first English visitor, William Dampier, arrived at Cygnet Bay on the West coast of Australia.

It was during his time here that he made the presumption that people seemed to have no tools other than wooden ‘swords and lances’, whilst recording also that they ‘constructed fish weirs and dug wells’. He described that local Djawi and Bardi as being, ‘the miserablest people in the world’. He visited nearby Roebuck Bay in 1698, his opinion of ‘much the same blinking creatures’ reinforced during his second trip. He also discharged his gun at one of them.

Dampier’s negative opinion was not insignificant in England’s decision to treat Australia as terra nullius when it occupied the east coast of the continent a century later.

Although intermittent, the visits by people from Melanesia and Asia are evidence that the original Australians did not live in complete isolation.

1694 - the English fleet blew up the port of Dieppe destroying many records of European exploration; although it is speculated that the Portuguese may have mapped as far as Australia’s southeast coast in 1522. Ultimately, it would be Spain who protested the British possession of the whole eastern coast of Australia, claiming it infringed the Spanish law of the Indies.

The Dutchman, Captain William Jansz recorded his visit, in the Duyfken, to about 200 miles off the coastline from the Pennefather River to Cape Keerweer on Western Cape York Peninsula in Queensland. Upon landing at Batavia river to make observations, ‘the crew was attacked and one mortality, speared’.
This act of resistance to European visitors, the earliest in written record, was by a number of Tjungundji people whose country is located several kilometres south of the former location of Mapoon and who were familiar with outside visitors.

The Tjungundji share songs with a number of groups in Cape York, which demonstrate ceremonial links to the peoples of Papua New Guinea. For thousands of years intermarriage, cultural and technological exchange was conducted along trade routes which threaded north from the mainland and through the Torres Strait Islands.

Source: Australian Museum

More Dates

More dates 60,000 years ago to 400 years ago Australian Museum Dreamtime web site

More dates 1550 to 1900 from the Australian Museum Dreamtime web site