Australia: The Land Where Time Began |
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Aboriginal History of Australia
Aboriginal people have lived in Australia for at
least
60,000 years,
arriving by boat from south Asia by about that time. Very controversial
dates from
Jinmium
in the Northern Territory place the early arrivals at the site by
116,000 +/- 12,000 years ago. These dates have been strongly disputed,
60,000 BP being the date generally accepted as the most likely time of
the first arrival. The site has been re-dated using TL and the results
suggest the site is actually no older than about 10,000 years.
It has been suggested that the first arrivals were
coastal people, basing their economies on the sea and river mouths,
originally spreading around the coast then up the rivers. If this is the
case, the mouths of the rivers they would have been entering for the
first time could have been hundreds of kilometres seawards of the
present coastline. If this is the case, how long did they spend on the
coast and river mouths before spreading to the earliest known sites on
present-day dry land? The dates that have the first arrival in Australia
around 60,000 years ago from occupation sites on present day land.
Presumably the first landing would have been on part of the continental
shelf that is now submerged, an unknown number of years earlier than the
known dated sites. The Berndts have suggested the first arrival may have
been about 75,000 BP or even earlier (Berndt & Berndt, 1988).
If the ancestral Aboriginal People were indeed coastal
dwellers, what was the incentive to expand inland? In
southwestern Tasmania
the people lived almost exclusively on the coast for 30,000 years, based
on the dating of the known sites, apparently rarely venturing into the
thick rainforest. At the time of first European contact they were still
living in a narrow coastal belt between the horizontal rainforest and
the sea. While they lived well on the coast, with plentiful and easily
available food, why would they want to move to a habitat that was more
difficult and where food was less plentiful and required more time and
energy to collect? When the continental shelf was exposed there would
have been rivers, possibly with deltas, lakes and swamps, as well as the
nearby sea, where they could get all the food they needed, and with very
little effort.
The evidence of the possible occupation of the area
around
Lake George
in New South Wales, a long way from the points of entry into Australia
in the north, prior to 100,000 years ago has been rejected.
At the time of the arrival of Europeans in Australia
it was declared an unoccupied land, as the Aboriginal People didn't practice
agriculture, so the colonists could take over without even consulting
the locals.
The Aboriginal People were believed by some of those
Europeans to be at best, like children, who needed to be protected from
themselves as well as everyone else. Others regarded them as sub-human,
so there was no problem treating them as though they were animals,
especially when colonisation got under way and colonists wanted to take
over their hunting territory for raising cattle and sheep, or farming.
They were mostly tolerated as long as they didn't try to stop
pastoralists taking their land, when they got in the way, they were
often treated like animals that ate the colonists' crops or killed their
cattle for food.
It has since been realised that they did indeed farm
the land, even the parts that were unusable by the colonists, and for a
very long time. It has been called
fire-stick farming. During their long
period of occupation they developed a system of burning off limited
areas at certain times of the year, that encouraged the grass growth
that supported the animals they hunted. So while they lived by hunting,
over large parts of the continent it was in effect managed hunting. In
fact, they were possibly the first farmers.
It has been said of the Aboriginal People that 'they are
unchanging people in an unchanging land', implying that they didn't
adapt so were somehow less worthy than the very adaptable people who
took over their country. One of the world's best known, and highest
regarded anthropologists, Claude Levi-Strauss, called them 'intellectual
aristocrats' among early peoples. Once overlooked features of Aboriginal
culture include sophisticated religion, art and social organisation, an
egalitarian system of justice and decision-making, complex far-reaching
trading networks. And they adapted to and survived in the some of the
world’s harshest environments for survival, which demonstrated that they
did indeed adapt very well.
Another way the Aboriginal People, especially in the driest
areas of the inland, adapted to the very arid conditions was
neighbouring groups often allowed each other to hunt in their territory
when their neighbour's territory was more affected by drought, which
occurs at unpredictable times and for varying lengths of time.
Archaeologists have also found that their stone
tools have evolved over the time of their occupation. Like elsewhere in
the world, the earliest known tools were heavy, simple tools, the later
ones getting progressively smaller and finer, and eventually to more
complex composite tools, that are mounted or hafted to a handle for
better leverage. At the time of European colonisation most tools were of
the composite, hafted type.
The
Djanggawul, or Djanggau, Sisters, usually in
conjunction with their brother, are 2 principal
Fertility Mothers in north-eastern Arnhem
Land. They are said to have crossed the sea from the northeast, resting
for a while at
Bralgu (after
the Dreamtime it was said to be the
Land of the Dead of the Dua moiety), an
island in the Gulf of Carpentaria, before following the path of the sun
to the east coast of the Mainland.
Another dreamtime ancestor,
Chivaree the seagull, paddled his canoe from the
Torres Islands to
Sandy Beach on the west
coast of
Cape York. Here his canoe turned
into stone. Dreamtime stories from all across northern Australia have
various ancestral beings coming to the northern Australian coast from
the north, in
Arnhem Land
the Gunwinggu people tell
of an
ancestral mother,
Waramurungdju (Waramurungundji),
who came across the sea from the north-west in the direction of
Indonesia to the northern coast of Australia. One feature all the
Dreamtime origin stories have in common is the arrival from across the
sea in canoes.
As with
Homer's story of the
Iliad, evidence being found by archaeologists, beginning with
Heinrich Schliemann, backed up the oral history, previously thought
to be totally mythical. Archaeological research in the
Middle East has found
some evidence for stories in the
Old Testament. Now archaeologists have come to the same
conclusion as told in the Dreamtime stories, the Aboriginal People arrived in
canoes along the northern coast.
So it seems the Aboriginal oral history should be
taken more seriously, at least as to the arrival in Australia, and
possibly with regard to the supposedly mythical creatures that inhabited
the continent at the time they arrived. There were still many of the
marsupial megafauna, some like the
marsupial lion and carnivorous
kangaroos,
Propleopus oscillans,
that survived until the Late
Pleistocene, after the arrival of
the first ancestral Aboriginal People.
Archaeology has shown from digs in the Northern
Territory that human history in Australia began sometime before 50,000
years ago. The Aboriginal People obviously could not have evolved in Australia,
as the earliest human ancestors were present only in Africa, long after
the 2 continents had split from Gondwana, so there was no land
connection between the continents during the time of their evolution.
It is known that early people were present in
Southeast Asia for more than a million years, so the only thing stopping
some from crossing to Australia was the ocean barrier, so they needed to
develop some sort of sea-going craft before they could begin the
migration, probably by island-hopping as the Polynesians did many
thousands of years later when they spread across the islands of the
Pacific, probably from southern China. The closest Australia came to
connecting to Asia by land was at the height of the Last Ice Age, but
even then there was still a gap of about 90 km separating the 2
continents by the ocean.
Since the studies of Alfred Russell Wallace in the
19th century it has been know that there is a distinct, dramatic
transition between the faunal types to the north of the zone called
Wallacea, and that of the southern side. The oriental faunal region, to
the North of Wallacea, the no man's (or no animal's) land is separated
from the Australian faunal region to the south of Wallacea. The
boundaries of the oriental region coincide with the edge of the Asian
continental shelf, and the Australian region coincides with the edge of
the Australian continental shelf. It was precisely this gap between the
faunal regions where the land between the 2 continents didn't join, even
at the height of the Ice Age.
At the time of lowest sea level, - 60 m, at the
height of the Ice Age, there would have been a chain of islands parallel
to, and visible from, Timor, on the northern side of Wallacea, about 90
km from the Australian islands. Once they reached the first island they
could have island-hopped to the Australian mainland, though they
probably didn't realise they had reached another continent when they
arrived.
There would also have been broken tongues of land
jutting out from north-western Australia and from Joseph Bonaparte Gulf
on the east. Between the outer islands and the tongues of land there
were stop-overs at Ashmore Reef, Cartier Islet and Maurice and
Troubadour Shoals.
The only other non-flying animals to reach Australia
from the oriental faunal region were dingoes, which came across with the
Aboriginal People, and rats and mice. The latter 2 could have travelled by
rafts of tree trunks, etc. from the Asian area.
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Author: M.H.Monroe Email: admin@austhrutime.com Sources & Further reading |