Australian Aborigines Essay Research Paper Until this

Australian Aborigines Essay, Research Paper

Until this paper, I never even knew there was such a word as “Aborigine” let alone it being a race of people dating back to the prehistoric times. I thought that all Australians were of Anglo decent, but I was wrong about that assumption. The Aborigines were the first and only inhabitants of Australia, until the late 18th century when European settlers came. Because of the Europeans, the Aborigines lives would change drastically. In this paper, I am going to talk about the Aborigines, describing their origins up to the present.

The Aborigines came originally from somewhere in Asia and have been in Australia for at least 40,000 years. The first settlement occurred during an era of lowered sea levels, when there was an almost continuous land bridge between Asia and Australia, allowing them to cross over between the two continents. By 30,000 years ago most of the continent was occupied, including the southwest and southeast corners as well as the Highlands of the island of New Guinea (Mulvaney, 55-56). Archaeologists have found that much of the interior of Australia was abandoned due to severe climatic conditions between 25,000 and 15,000 years ago and reoccupied after the conditions improved. Up until the time the European settlers came in 1788, the Aborigines occupied and utilized the entire continent and had adapted successfully to a large range of ecological and climatic conditions, from wet temperate and tropical rain forests to extremely arid deserts. Population densities ranged from about 1 to 8 square miles per person in the more fertile and coastal areas to more than 35 square miles per person in the deserts. Estimates of the Aboriginal population vary from 300,000 to more than 1,000,000 (Kepars, 15).

The Aborigines were hunter-gatherers and because of this, they were dependent on their environment. They did not grow crops or domesticate animals so whenever food was scarce, they were forced to move in order to find more (Blainey, 20). They were nomads who traveled from site to site within their home territories. Most of the time they hunted and gathered in small groups. When the food resources were high, though, they would organize large gatherings. At these gatherings is where social and religious business of the society would be transacted over a two- to three-week period of intense social activity. This pattern of aggregation and dispersal was fundamental, but because of the living conditions, they had no choice but to follow this pattern. Their food supply was not always abundant (Tindale, 31).

Even though they were the only ones inhabiting Australia, the Aborigines spoke more than 200 different languages. Most of the Aborigines were bilingual or multilingual. Both languages and groups of people were associated with stretches of territory. There may have been as many as 500 such named, territories (Broome, 27-28). Their members shared similar cultures and interacted more with one another than with members of different groups. These groups were not, however, politically or economically tied to each other. While language groups as labels may have commonly used names for one another, individual and group identity differed greatly from how they were labeled by other groups. The Aborigines were not aware that they shared a national identity. However, the Aboriginal worldview tended to be expansive, with a perception of “society” as a community of common under-standings and behaviors shared well beyond the confines of the local group (Broome, 30).

“Aboriginal society was the outcome of interplay between economic, ecological, social, and religious forces” (Goldberg, 144-5). The territories that the different groups of Aborigines occupied were called estates. The estate group was the group that shared ownership of a territory. These groups consisted of people who traced connections with one another by decent through males (Goldberg, 147). Members of an estate were scattered in bands across their territory. A band consisted of two or more families. Each family cooked and camped separately from the others in their estate. Even though they could function alone, they preferred to live and travel together in bands, probably for survival.

The Aborigines religion was centered on Dreamtime. They saw their way of life as already ordained by the creative acts of the Dreaming beings and the “blueprint” that was their legacy, so their mission was simply to live in agreement with the terms of that legacy (Flood, 7). Because of this, there was no room for competing dogmas or rebellion against the status quo. Everything that now existed was fixed for all time and all that they were asked to do, in order to guarantee the continuance of their world, was obey the law of the Dreaming and correctly perform all the rituals. Human creativity was not excluded but was explained away. The Dreaming legacy was not a static, dead weight of tradition but was forever being added to and enlivened, despite an ideology that proclaimed non-change and the need only to reproduce existing forms (Flood, 10). This view of the world gave precedence to spiritual powers and explanations over human intellect, and it placed everyone squarely under the authority of Dreaming rather than that of other people. Because of this, there were no leaders in the Aborigine society. Aborigines were constantly surrounded by proofs of the existence