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David Whitley takes a look at the 50,000 year old history of Aboriginal Australia and the issues that still face the country’s indigenous population today.
It is often said that Australia lacks culture. This is rather ironic, as it’s home to the longest continual human culture on earth. It is thought that Australia has been inhabited for over 50,000 years by Aboriginal groups, and the indigenous way of life continued largely uninterrupted until European colonisation. Since then, a series of cultural differences and questionable decisions have created a number of issues for the Aboriginal community that still resonate today.
Before the Europeans
It is thought that Aboriginal Australians first arrived on the continent in around 50,000BC. There’s no absolute consensus on how they got there, but it is thought that a land bridge connected Australia and New Guinea, and that people island-hopped their way across from either Timor or Sulawesi in modern-day Indonesia. There is a tendency to associate Aboriginal Australians with the Outback, but most settlement occurred in fertile areas, such as the Murray River along the NSW/ Victoria border. Indeed it’s important to realise that the country’s indigenous people are ‘Australian’ in the same way that we are ‘European’. Different tribes had (and have) different languages, beliefs and ways of doing things. |
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