Meet the original owners of Australia!

 

Who are they? Interestingly they are called the aboriginals, who are the aboriginals? The Aborigines are Australia's indigenous people. They are the inhabitants of mainland Australia, referred to as the "first peoples". Today they make about 2% of Australia's total population. Believed to have been in the first group humans to migrate out of Africa around 60,000 to 70,000 years ago. They walked out of Africa, through India, Malaysia, Borneo, Papua New Guinea and Timor before they were confronted by an ocean that separated Australia from the rest of the world.

 

In 1787 a Fleet of eleven convict ships set sail for Botany Bay, arriving on 20 January 1788 to found Sydney, the first European settlement in Australia.
The colonists however were led to believe that the land was terra nullius (‘no one’s land’), which Lt James Cook declared Australia to be in 1770 during his voyage around the coast of Australia. Latter captain Philip would discover that Cook’s terra nullius, theory was not as so. “Sailing up into Sydney cove we could see natives lining the shore shaking spears and yelling.” It would not be an exaggeration to claim that the Island continent was owned by over 400 different nations at the time of this.

 

However the British arrival brought armed conflict and a lack of understanding, which heralded the demise of the northern Sydney clans, along with the other peoples of the Sydney basin, the Dharawal to the south and the Dharug to the west. Food shortages soon became a problem. 

Aboriginal people mainly lived as hunter-gatherers, living semi-nomadic life hunting and foraging for food from the land, moving according to the changing food availability found across different areas as seasons changed. The mode of life and material cultures varied greatly from region to region, high population density was to be found in the southern and eastern regions of the continent, especially in the River Murray valley. Having rich folk styles and unique musical instruments; the didgeridoo played only by the men and traditionally played by people of only the eastern Kimberley region and Arnhem Land.

Before European contact tools used were boomerangs, shelters, watercraft, and the message stick. Weapons included spears with stone or fishbone tips, clubs, and (less commonly) axes. Stone Age tools available included knives with ground edges, grinding devices, and eating containers. Fibre nets, baskets, and bags were used for fishing, hunting, and carrying liquids. Evidence suggests that before arrival of Europeans some Aboriginal populations in northern Australia regularly traded with Makassan fishermen from Indonesia. Shelters varied regionally, and included wiltjas in the Atherton Tablelands, paperbark and stringybark sheets and raised platforms in Arnhem Land, whalebone huts, stone shelters, and a multi-room pole and bark structure. Clothing included the possum-skin cloak in the southeast and riji (pearl shells) in the northeast.