A Brief History of Aboriginal Australia: The World’s Oldest Culture

From the times of the last Ice Age, when sea levels rose and virtually plunged Aboriginal peoples into a state of complete isolation, to the great upheaval caused by colonialism, Aboriginal culture has adapted and survived. It is estimated that in 1788 when the First Fleet landed on the shores of what is now Botany Bay, over 750,000 Aboriginal people inhabited Australia. The continent was not unoccupied, as colonial propaganda portrayed it. It was not terra nullius, a no man’s land that could be freely and legally taken and invaded, which was what the British Crown did after James Cook claimed it in 1770.

In 2011, a study led by Professor Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen confirmed what Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have always claimed, namely, that they have the oldest continuous culture on the planet, and that they have inhabited the same territory continuously, without any form of interruption, longer than any other populations outside of Africa.

The ancestors of the Aboriginal Australians left Africa between 64,000 and 75,000 years ago and first reached Australia around 58,000 years ago. The Australian continent was part of the so-called Sahul paleocontinent (also known as Sahul-land, Greater Australia, or Meganesia), a supercontinent in the southwestern Pacific Ocean that encompassed present-day Australia, Tasmania, New Guinea, and the Aru Islands. It is believed that humans reached Tasmania around 40,000 years ago.

The Australian mainland was separated from New Guinea around 8,000 years ago. Then it was the turn of Tasmania 6,000 years ago. The descendants of that first group who reached Sahul remained completely isolated for centuries, until about 4,000 years ago. It was around this time that the dingo reached Australia.

A study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics and led by researchers from the German Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the Harvard Medical School suggests that the ancestors of Aboriginal Australians might have interbred with the Denisovans from Siberia around 44,000 years ago, that is, long before Papua New Guinea separated from the Australian mainland.

Other studies have highlighted the similarity in the genetic makeup between the Warlpiri people in the Northern Territory and some Southeastern Asian groups. It is still not clear whether Aboriginal people today descend from a small group of explorers who left Africa to head west or from a series of larger migratory waves. What we can state for certain is that, unlike many other ancient cultures, Indigenous Australian cultures have persisted for millennia. They have been transmitted from generation to generation uninterruptedly because of the Aboriginal people’s ability to adapt to great climatic and environmental changes as well as because of the physical isolation of the Australian landmass following the rise of sea levels.

James Cook’s claim on Australia for the British Crown in 1770 and the First Fleet’s arrival at Port Jackson eight years later marked the beginning of the country’s European colonization. The year was 1788, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders were about to face the most drastic and devastating upheaval in their lives, one that almost wiped them out.

The First Fleet, which had sailed from Portsmouth, England eight months earlier, landed at Port Jackson on January 18, 1788. Aboard the Fleet’s eleven ships were more than 700 (predominantly) British convicts that Britain was determined to get rid of, along with sailors, masons, cooks, military officials, and their families. Given its remoteness, the Australian colony was a perfect open-air prison. Waves of convict transportation would last for almost a century, until 1868.

The Eora, the traditional owners of the area around the Sydney basin, reacted first with suspicion and then violence to the arrival of the British, whom they saw (understandably) as rude trespassers. Eora is the name the British gave to them: their self-assigned name is Yura.

In April 1789, the first catastrophic smallpox outbreak decimated the Aboriginal tribes around Port Jackson. Bodies were found floating in Sydney Harbor. Others were found in caves and crevices. Sadly, this was just the beginning. Smallpox, to which Aboriginal people had no resistance, followed European explorers and settlers wherever they went, past the Blue Mountains and into the Outback. Some Aboriginal communities called it “devil devil,” others “mysterious illness.”

Imported European diseases like smallpox, measles, influenza, and tuberculosis were just only one of the reasons that led to the dramatic decline in the Aboriginal population since contact. The so-called Frontier Wars did the rest.

Contrary to popular belief, the Europeans were not the first non-Indigenous people the Aboriginals had met in their long history. First, there were the Makassan (or Makassar) fishermen. Towards the middle of the 18th century, from at least 1720 (some sources indicate 1640 as the beginning of the Makassan trepang industry), fishermen from the southern Indonesian region of Sulawesi trading in trepang (sea cucumbers) began to visit the northern coasts of Australia, from the Gulf of Carpentaria to the Cobourg Peninsula in Arnhem Land, from Cape Leveque to Napier Broome Bay in Western Australia. They came into contact and regularly traded with the Yolngu, the Kwini, and the Maung people for decades before British settlement.

Friendly relations between the Makassan and the Yolngu continued until 1907, as testified by the influence of Makassan culture on Yolngu oral stories and myths. On the mainland, Aboriginal tribes were busy fighting the Europeans. Relying on their deep knowledge of the country, they would ambush British soldiers with guns, steal maize crops, and set fire to settlers’ huts and fences.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders fought hard to defend their land and culture, with some groups using dingoes to wreak havoc on cattle and sheep. This series of battles, ambushes, sabotages, and raids are now known as the Frontier Wars.

At the time, their leaders were well known, both among Aboriginals and Europeans. Pemulwuy (1750-1802) led the resistance of his people, the Bidjigal from the Botany Bay area. He was shot dead in June 1802 and his head was sent to England.

In Van Diemen’s Land (the colonial name of Tasmania) Aboriginal resistance was led by a woman, Tarenorerer (1800-1831). In 1828, she trained a guerilla band of Aboriginal men and women in the use of firearms. Through their existence and their actions, the Aboriginal leaders of the Frontier Wars dismantle the myth of the passive Aboriginal people, too “backward” and “uncivilized” to have a say in their lives and future.

The history of Australia’s colonization is also one of massacres. In two months, between December 1837 and January 1838, two major massacres were carried out by armed pastoralists and settlers at the expanses of First Nations. They are now known as the Waterloo Creek and the Myall Creek Massacres. Both massacres were the direct consequence of settler expansion in the Gwydir region, in north-eastern New South Wales.

In December 1837, 50 Aboriginal men camped at Waterloo Creek, in the proximity of a water hole, were butchered by the punitive expedition led by Major James Nunn, the Commandant of the New South Wales Mounted Police. He encouraged stockmen and settlers to join them, and they did.

Another armed group arrived on Henry Dangar’s property at Myall Creek station near present-day Bingara just before sunset on June 10, 1838. By the end of the day, the corpses of 28 Wirrayaraay men, women, and children were piled up and burned. On the morning of December 18, 1838, seven of the British subjects who had partaken in the Myall Creek Massacre were publicly hanged at the Sydney Gaol.

The execution was unprecedented. No British man or woman had ever been hanged for killing Aboriginal people. Massacres of innocent Aboriginal people did not stop in December 1838, but the NSW Supreme Court had just set a groundbreaking judicial precedent no one could ignore.

Discrimination against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders continued with the residential school system. This time the attack was carried out not on their bodies, but on their culture and languages.

In 1886, the Victorian government passed the Half-Caste Act, which gave the authorities permission and indiscriminate authority to remove any Aboriginal child of mixed descent from their families. Today they are known as Australia’s Stolen Generations. Throughout the 20th century, the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders across Australia were controlled by the Aboriginal Protection Board, which was extremely powerful in New South Wales.

In Northern Australia, in Kimberly, and North Queensland, Aboriginal men and women survived on the outskirts of white society by living and working on cattle stations as stockmen and stockwomen. Most of the time they were not paid in wages. Most of them were physically and verbally abused. In Darwin, they were locked up at night. Some were also employed in the pearling industry.

After World War II, despite increased assimilation policies (Broome estimates that between 10 and 33% of Aboriginal children were affected by the residential school system between 1910 and 1970s), Aboriginal communities began to fight back. All across the nation, from Sydney to Brisbane, from Perth to Adelaide, Aboriginal leaders established a series of “advancement leagues,” which were represented nationally by the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAA). Established in 1958 in Adelaide, it was the first national federation to campaign for Aboriginal rights and welfare. For the next twenty years, it fought for “equal citizenship rights with other Australian citizens,” equal pay, “an adequate standard of living equivalent to that expected by other Australians,” “free and compulsory education for detribalized Aborigines,” and the (revolutionary) demand to obtain the “absolute retention of all remaining native reserves.”

This is not to say that Aboriginal activism began in the 1960s. In 1924, Fred Maynard (1879-1946) founded the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association (AAPA) in Sydney, the first politically organized Aboriginal activist group. Until the 1930s, the AAPA actively fought for Indigenous land ownership and citizenship and against the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families.

In 1937, Aboriginal activist and journalist Jack Patten (1095-1957) co-founded the Aborigines Progressive Association with William Ferguson (1882-1950). One year later the two organized the first Day of Mourning to raise awareness about the implications of the arrival of the First Fleet on Aboriginal peoples and protest the biased and one-sided approach of the Australia Day celebrations. In February 1939, Jack Patten led the so-called Cummeragunja Walk-Off, one of the first massive Aboriginal strikes to protest the horrible living conditions at the Maloga Mission.

Jack Patten, William Ferguson, Fred Maynard, and Pearl Gibbs (1901-1983) have inspired generations of Australians. In 1965, Aboriginal activist and University of Sydney graduate Charles Perkins organized the first Australian Freedom Ride. Just like the Civil Rights Freedom Ride campaign in the United States, it was met with violence by the local population.

Two years later, Perkins, the manager of the Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs, was involved in the 1967 Referendum, actively advocating for a Yes vote, along with Faith Bandler (1918-2015). The 1960s also saw the birth of the Aboriginal Land Rights Movement. The 1966 Gurindji strike (also known as the Wave Hill Walk-Off) in the Northern Territory, the 1982 Mabo Case (which saw the High Court dismantle the longstanding concept of terra nullius and guarantee the protection of the Australian law to Aboriginal people), and the 1996 Wik People v. Queensland Case represent important steps in the Aboriginal fight for their land rights.

This peaceful fight continues today, despite setbacks and prejudices. Through speeches, petitions, strikes, and meetings, and, most importantly, without ever resorting to violence or terrorist attacks, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have managed to assert their civil rights and ensure the survival of their traditions and their future as the descendants of the world’s oldest continuous culture.