Jan Motyčka

THE ABORIGINES

Origin
Natural conditions
Life
Isolation of Australia
Contacts with the outside world
European explorers

The original inhabitants of Australia were of Australoid stock not mingling with other races,
which made them the "purest" representants of this racial group. They had been coming from
Asia for many generations, sailing across narrow strips of sea and crossing the islands. Some
of these people settled on Indonesian islands and some went as far as New Guinea and
Australia. The first group probably got to Australia more than 50,000 years ago and the last
migrants arrived less than five thousand years ago.
At the glacial period, Australia had created one mainland with New Guinea and so the
newcomers probably landed on the west coast of what is now New Guinea rather than in
Australia proper. The shape of the continent was different from how we know it. The sea was
so shallow that most of the islands now lying about 60 kilometres from the coast could be
reached on foot. One could walk from New Guinea to Tasmania. About 30,000 years ago,
when the first people set foot on Tasmania, its mountains were covered in glacier.
The continent was much drier than the Indonesian islands. Settlers had to sample grains, yams
and fruits they had never before eaten. They encountered giant kangaroo, thylacine
(Tasmanian wolf), Tasmanian devil, giant wombat and many more now extinct species. While
the devil still survives on Tasmania, thylacine was last seen in the 1930s and is considered to
be extinct.
The first Australians were nomadic people. They did not gather much food, kept animals or
grew crops. They travelled light and carried very few possessions on them. They knew how to
weave practical nets and sacks for this. As for the children, women carried them in kangaroo
hides or gave them a piggyback. Women could even sew a furcoat in colder areas. Fire
usually travelled with the people in a form of a smouldering piece of wood. In flat areas
smoke was used as a means of communication between distant groups and fire also drove
game to the waiting hunters. Meat, fish and some plants were prepared in hot ashes. They
started fires in bush so as to be able to travel easily and in some areas bush fires had a serious
impact on the structure of vegetation.
Simple shacks were the most splendid abode they had. At the Lake Condah in west Victoria
stood clusters of stone huts with reed roofs and doorless entrances.
In most parts of the continents people didn´t wear any clothes. They were barefoot, except for
desert regions, where they sometimes used sandals. On Tasmania, animal fat was frequently
used as an insulation against cold.
Their Australians painted their naked bodies with red and white clay and ochre and adorned
themselves with feathers and necklaces. Their stone engravings, carvings and paintings testify
to the Aborigines´ ability to create complex and imposing symbolic art.
The profound knowledge of wildlife prevented these people from famine. Their diet consisted
of hundreds of green plants, nuts, seeds, yams and berries as well as various animals. Edible
plants were picked by women. Crustaceans and molluscs were staple on the coast. Women
dived to scrape them off the cliffs.
The indigenous people lived in small groups of several families where polygyny was not
uncommon. Marriages were agreed when the girls were still very young. Now and then the
people´s lives were marked by warfare, often followed by vengeance. Not even women and
children were spared in the massacres. Never ending circle of vengeance and enmity was one
of the reasons why the Australians could not unite and face their mutual enemy – the Britons.
Over generations, the people had developed methods and medicines for healing wounds and
curing diseases. Herbs, grasses, leaves and roots were used not only for treatment but also as
halucinogenic drugs.
People believed in mythic creation of the world and through various rituals they struggled for
winning the favour of the supreme powers. They also believed in miracles, for example, in
their own abilities to produce or to stop rain.
It is known that in 1800, about 250 languages were spoken in Australia. Most people could
speak several languages and dialects whose grammatical structure was difficult. Several
English loanwords such as koala, wombat, wallaby and boomerang come from Dharuk,
spoken around Sydney. The word "kangaroo" was taken over from a language used in north
Queensland. The Aranda people divided the time between sunrise and sunset into about 18
phases and had a special term for each of them.
The number of Australians living on the continent at the time of British arrival is estimated
between 250,000 and one million. There was a strict birth control. Infanticide prevented tribes
in poor areas from famine. Generally, mothers nursed their children very long, until the age of
three, which often saved them from pregnancy. This was because men were not allowed to
have sex with nursing mothers. A short lifespan of about 50 years of age, difficult conditions
and wars also limited the growth of population.
About 18,000 years ago the climate began to warm and this led to Australia becoming an
isolated island. The natives preserved the memory of rising waters in their minds. The story of
advancing coastline had been passed over generations. Rising sea-level had made many
people flee and move inland. About 4,000 years ago, the domesticated dingo arrived with
some of the last waves of migrants and gradually spread all over the continent.
The Australian contact with the outside world had been resumed in about 15th century when
the Macassans from Sulawesi were sailing to the tropical northern coast. They fished for
trepang and brought is as far as China where it was used as an afrodisiac. The Australians got
on well with the fishermen (although some bloody conflicts occurred) and some were even
going to Indonesia with them. Sometimes the Aborigines were confronted with materials such
as iron and shards of glass provided to them by fishermen. These were much sharper than the
stone and horn tools, but there was never enough of them to change the traditional way of life
dramatically. A few Australians even enjoyed the luxury of having a smoke from the pipe of
tobacco or taking a sip of alcohol.
Some researchers suggest that Chinese may have been the first non-Australoid visitors in the
early 15th century. This hypothesis is supported by finds of a small Chinese statuette in
Darwin in 1879 and of a shard of Chinese pottery on the beach in the Gulf of Carpentaria in
1948. These finds are said to belong to the Ming period but they could have been brought
much later. No archæological evidence supports the possibility of Arab present in Australia
although they are known to have visited the Aru Islands, only about 480 kilometres from
Australian beaches. But there is evidence that Portuguese seamen explored the northern and
eastern coasts about 250 years before James Cook did in 1770. This can be substantiated by
the "Dieppe Maps". These maps, made in France between 1536 and 1567, show a southern
continent with its northern and eastern coasts roughly in their true positions. The "Dieppe
Maps" must have been copied from Portuguese charts as they were the only Europeans in the
East Indies at the time.
In 1605, a Portuguese navigator in the service of Spain, de Quiros, landed on one of the
islands of what is now the New Hebrides. He believed he had found the great south land and
named it La Austrialia del Espiritu Santo. His fellow, Luis Vaez de Torres, sailed southwest
to continue the search and got close to the Great Barrier Reef. Then he passed to Manila
through the strait now bearing his name.
When the Dutch replaced the Portuguese in the Eastern seas, it was time for Captain Willem
Jansz of the East India Company to discover the Nova Guinea and sail along the western coast
of Cape York Peninsula. There was a bloody clash with the natives on the way back. Anyway,
little was achieved until Abel Tasman´s two voyages in 1642 and 1644. On his first voyage
from Mauritius, Tasman discovered Van Diemen´s Land (or Tasmania), New Zealand, Fiji
and Tonga but he cared little about mapping and exploring the new lands. By the end of the
seventeenth century the Dutch produced quite accurate maps of the entire coast except for
what lay in the east between Cape York and Tasmania.
James Cook´s time came in 1768 when he was put in charge of His Majesty´s barque
Endeavour. The Endeavour left Plymouth for Tahiti to carry out some astronomical
observations. After that Cook sailed south and spent six months exploring New Zealand. Then
it was decided that they would steer westward and on 28th April, 1770 the Endeavour entered
a fine sheltered bay and anchored close to the beach. While the sailors were looking around,
they were surprised to see the Aborigines. Their behaviour puzzled them. Some of the natives
ignored them, others ran away and still others were threatening them with spears.
Cook named this place the Botany Bay. After the exploration mission around the Botany Bay,
the barque sailed to the Great Barrier Reef. As the vessel got damaged, it had to be repaired at
the mouth of the present Endeavour River. The Aborigines there were shy but friendly but
some of the Englishmen did not respect their laws of hospitality and took some of the
communal property. In anger, the Aborigines set fire to the surrounding bush and to some of
the English stores on the river bank.
In August 1770 Cook landed on an island off the tip of Cape York. There he laid claim to the
whole of eastern Australia under "the name of New South Wales". Cook´s experience with the
Aborigines led him to writing a statement that strongly influenced the philosophy of
Enlightenment. A notion of the "noble savage" unspoilt by class society and inequality
became a subject of admiration and respect. Ironically, Cook, who had shown so much
understanding for the indigenous, primitive cultures, fell victim to his ideals. He was killed by
the Hawaiian Islanders when he was trying to retrieve a stolen boat peacefully. But that is
another story.

WHITE CONTACTS

The British came up with a legal doctrine (terra nullius) that denied that Aborigines had any
rights to ownership of land because they did not build permanent houses or practise
agriculture. The first British settlement, which served as a penal colony consisting mainly of
convicts and soldiers, was founded in 1788 in the newly claimed territory.
The British immediately disrupted Aboriginal life, took over good sources of water,
productive land, and fisheries. Aborigines reacted in many different ways to the presence of
Europeans. Some welcomed and some fought them but had a disadvantage of not having
rifles. Illnesses such as smallpox and influenza devastated Aboriginal groups, who lacked
immunity to these diseases. The introduction of new animals to Australia, including wild
rabbits, cats, cattle and sheep, made life even harder for the Aborigines. Newly introduced
species preyed on native animals or fed on native vegetation and this led to depleting of
traditional resources of food.
In 1803, a group of British settlers entered Tasmania. By 1820 they had eliminated most of
the native inhabitants.
Over several decades, the British established colonies across the continent. The governments
of these colonies granted settlers pastoral leases that formally recognized their right to
occupy, farm, and graze livestock on the land.
Aborigines increasingly attempted to resist the taking over of their territories by the British
colonists. As a result, many Aborigines died in skirmishes with the colonists. As settlements
expanded, the colonists destroyed natural resources to the point that Aboriginal groups could
not survive practicing their traditional hunting and gathering ways.
Fighting broke out between Aborigines and British settlers along most parts of the expanding
boundary of white settlement. In some areas, white farmers took matters into their own hands
and formed vigilante groups. These groups often responded to the killing of sheep and cattle
by murdering Aboriginal women and children. Colonial settlers also organized forces of
unofficial law enforcement called Native Police. These forces would regularly ride out on
horseback to the fringes of settlements to kill Aborigines.
In a few places, however, Aboriginal people came into settlements seeking work from cattle
and sheep ranchers in order to earn rations and living quarters. Whites also sought out
Aborigines and brought them to settlements to work.
As European colonies expanded in Australia, they began to exert more forced control over
Aborigines and to exploit them for various kinds of slave labor. The colonies established
missions to which they sent as many Aborigines as they could support. A primary goal of the
missions was to convert Aborigines to Christianity. Some Aborigines readily accepted
Christianity, but many others did not and often fled back to the wilderness if they could find a
way to escape.
Some missions had an active policy of destroying Aboriginal culture—they outlawed
Aboriginal languages and ceremonies and prevented Aborigines from maintaining kinship
ties. Missionaries also often dressed Aborigines in European clothing and made them work
for no pay as servants or on farms. Some missions, however, tolerated traditional culture and
adapted religious teachings and practices to suit local conditions. In a few regions, Aborigines
managed to maintain a hunter-gatherer existence.
In the 1850s a gold rush began in Australia. Prospectors indiscriminately destroyed
Aboriginal sacred sites, and defiance against miners often resulted in massacres of
Aborigines. In southern Australia, whites working as seal hunters stole Aboriginal women and
killed men and children. In the north, pearl divers abducted young Aboriginal boys and forced
them into dangerous labor, making them dive for long periods in deep and treacherous waters.
White men also coerced or forced many Aboriginal women into providing sexual services.
Between 1850 and 1900 all of the Australian colonies established parliamentary governments
and constitutions with firm policies aimed at controlling their Aboriginal populations. New
laws restricted the movement of Aboriginal people to official government-controlled
reservations by the late 1800s. These reservations were small, circumscribed territories in
which groups could usually practice at least a little of their traditional way of life. But white
officials oversaw the reservations, and many Aborigines were still subject to strict control and
repressive policies.
The colonial governments also instituted policies of Aboriginal child removal. Child-removal
policies grew out of the desire of the governments to assimilate mixed-race individuals into
white society and prevent Aboriginal families from staying together. The ultimate goal was to
destroy Aboriginal culture and eventually the entire race. Many Aboriginal children were
taken away from their parents and housed in faraway dormitories. Officials also removed
light-skinned children from their parents and put them up for adoption by white families.
Many of these children came from relations between white slavemasters and their Aboriginal
slaves.
In 1901 the Australian colonies became states and territories of a federated nation called the
Commonwealth of Australia. Both the state governments and the new Commonwealth
government enacted legislation that restricted the rights of Aborigines and dispersed the
Aboriginal population in order to gradually reduce its size. From 1886 to 1911 the states
created laws called the Aborigines Protection Acts, which based the treatment of Aborigines
on how much white ancestry they had. Only so-called full-blooded and half-caste (half white
and half Aboriginal) Aborigines could remain on reservations. Others moved off reservations,
and many became homeless, but laws also denied them rights to welfare support. Government
policies became harsher through the 1930s and were exacerbated by difficulties related to
economic depression in the 1920s and 1930s. Conditions on Aboriginal reservations
deteriorated, and more and more people with Aboriginal heritage lived in destitution in urban
areas. These poor, uprooted Aborigines often became alcoholics, and new laws were
established to return them to reservations.

LAMONA – PAINTED, FLAT PIECE OF WOOD ON A STRING; BUZZING SOUND

WOOMERA – STICK FOR THROWING SPEAR (DHARUK)
TAIPAN – VENOMOUS SNAKE
BUDGERIGAR – SMALL, BRIGHT COLOURED PARROT (YUWAALARAAY)
BILLABONG – SEMICIRCULAR POND CONNECTED WITH A BROOK
BOOMERANG – CURVED PIECE OF WOOD, WEAPON THAT IS DESIGNED TO
RETURN TO THE PERSON WHO THROWS IT
DIDGERIDOO/DIDJERIDOO – MUSICAL INSTRUMENT WITH A LONG THICK
WOODEN PIPE THAT IS BLOWN TO CREATE A DEEP REVERBERATING
HUMMING SOUND