The Aborigines of Australia

Many people think that Australia is a young country. But they are wrong, because The Aborigines, the native people of Australia, have been living in Australia for between 50.000 and 60.000 years. People have only lived in Scandinavia for about 12.000 years. So Australia has a very old human history, in comparison with Europeans countries.

The Aborigines believe that the natural landscape is created by the ancestors during the Dreamtime. Some of the ancestors were men and woman but others were animals and plants. The ancestors woke up from their sleep and they came up from under the earth and walked over the land. The ancestors walked and sang and in their way they created the landscape. After this the ancestors became tired and they went back into the ground. The ancestors asked the humans, who they had created to take care of the land and of all living things. The Aborigines take this very seriously and they believe that they should live in harmony. The ancestors’ journey is handed down to the Aborigines like songlines and the aboriginal children learn the songlines from an early age.

The first European contact with Australia started in 1606. A Spanish navigator named Luis Vaez de Torres, sailed through a strait, which today bears his name. The captain of ‘British Royal Navy’, James Cook, landed at Botany Bay in 1770. Eventually in 1788, eleven British ships arrived at Botany Bay with 1350 people. 736 of the people were criminals from England. Through the years England sent convicted people to prison colonies in Australia. The British people brought new diseases to Australia from Europe. The British people never understood the culture of The Aborigines and thousands of Aborigines were killed and their land was taken. So the contact with the whites from Europe was a catastrophe. Some of the aboriginal tribes thought that the Europeans were ghosts or the spirits of dead ancestors. After 1788 Australia became a British colony, but in 1901 it finally became independent. Until 1970 half-caste aboriginal children were removed from their families, because the white people tried to breed all the mixed-race Aborigines out. This was called ‘The stolen generation’ and it happened in the period 1869-1970. Today the Aborigines only compose two percent of Australia’s population.