Aboriginal Australians
Overview
Earth's Most Ancient and Isolated Civilization: Aboriginal Australians
Far south of the equator rests Australia. The only country in the world to also be a continent and an island. Bordered to the west by the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific to the east, Australia is a distant continent rife with unique plant and animal life. The country’s distance from other continents and nations has led scientists and historians alike to speculate about how and when the country’s inhabitants, the Aborigines, first arrived on the hottest, flattest continent in the world.
Learning Objectives
Examine early Aboriginal life in Australia and understand why they are considered some of the oldest cultures in the world.
Key Terms / Key Concepts
Aborigine: broad term used to describe Australia’s many different linguistic and cultural groups who have inhabited the continent since the Pleistocene era
Australia: smallest of the seven continents, located in the South Pacific
Micronesia: subregion of Oceania east of the Philippines that includes hundreds of islands, including the Marshall Islands
Polynesia: subregion of Oceania east comprised of thousands of islands, including Hawaii and New Zealand
Arrival of the Aborigines
Aborigine is a broad term that describes more than over four-hundred linguistic and cultural groups whose ancestors predated white European settlement of Australia by nearly fifty thousand years. These groups were often as diverse as they were numerous, and traditions varied significantly. One question that has arisen about these ethnically and linguistically diverse peoples is, “How did they get here, and who were they before?” Scholars and research teams have produced several theories based on historical, archeological, climatological, and geographic studies. The most recent, and widely accepted theory is that Aborigines are peoples who originated in present-day Indonesia, Micronesia, and Southeast Asia. During a period in which sea levels fell, these groups crossed land bridges and shallow seas to Australia.
Oral histories passed down by the Yolngu tribe in present-day Arnhem Land in the Northwest Territory of Australia recount the migration of Aborigine clans who crossed the Sunda continental shelf from parts of Indonesia and Micronesia and then passed into the Australian continent. In the twentieth century, archeological evidence confirmed the theory of the migration of humans from Southeast Asia to Australia during the Pleistocene Era. Later they migrated into parts of Polynesia.
Aborigines Spread through Australia
Aborigines were communal peoples who practiced polygamy. Instead of a strict nuclear family, the family structure consisted of an extended tribal group that could include 100 – 2,000 people. Tribes were built from many of these groups coming together. Before European arrival in Australia, Aborigine tribes could reach populations of 300 – 500,000.
Most tribes shared some common features, but there were also significant differences as well. Aborigines were hunter-gatherers whose diets consisted of fish, shellfish, turtles, lizards, and a variety of plants. The centrality of hunting meant that territorial claims were fiercely defended, and intertribal warfare was not uncommon.
Reflected in the extensive symbols used in their cave art is the importance of spirituality to the ancient Aborigine peoples. Within their religious beliefs and practices is an ancient ritual called, The Dreaming. For the Aborigines, The Dreaming was a range of views about the connection of life, including human life, to nature and the world. Life emerged from earth and water, and an ancient kinship exists between people and ancestral creators.
Hundreds of languages evolved among the Aborigine tribes as they fanned out across Australia’s coastal regions, rivers, bush, and outback. The most often spoken languages belonged to the Pama-Nyungen language family of northern Australia. Like many early cultures, Aborigines valued oral traditions, stories, and customs over written words. Because of these practices, little written work about Aboriginal culture survives before European settlement. To understand their story, we instead turn to the wealth of surviving archeological evidence such as dwellings and cave paintings.
Lack of written sources produced challenges for scholars. Competing theories about Aborigine origins and histories have emerged. In many ways, the Aborigines are a broad group of people whose story, while ancient, is still being uncovered. What remains certain though is that they have occupied Australia for over 50,000 years. They remain one of the oldest, most isolated, and unchanged cultures in the world.
Attributions
Images from Wikimedia Commons.
Matsuda, Matt K. Pacific Worlds. Cambridge University Press, 2012. 162-163.
Welsh, Frank. Australia : a New History of the Great Southern Land. Overlook Press, 2006. 20-23.
Lilley, Ian. Archaeology of Oceania : Australia and the Pacific Islands. Blackwell, 2006. 60.