The Pocketbook of Aussie History by Brendan Gullifer

Author:Brendan Gullifer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS004000, book
ISBN: 9781921870200
Publisher: Schwartz Publishing Pty. Ltd
Published: 2011-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

1. Terra Australis

Aborigines … had vital knowledge which Europeans, when they arrived, rarely tried to acquire.

—GEOFFREY BLAINEY

Popular understandings of the place of Aboriginal history in Australian history remain unsettled and deeply divided. —ANN CURTHOYS

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Aboriginal tradition holds that Aboriginal people have occupied this country since the beginning of time. Generally accepted scientific knowledge suggests an occupation dating as far back as 60,000 years. Some experts believe Aborigines to have been Australia’s first boat people, arriving here in small canoes or rafts. But because Aboriginal culture and history was not written down, we can only rely on Dreamtime and other stories, archaeology and scientific speculation.

The historian Geoffrey Blainey says that long before the rise of Babylon and Athens, Aborigines had made impressive achievements as explorers, discoverers of new medicines and drugs, manufacturers and survivors in the harshest of countries. They were possibly the first people in the world to grind and sharpen stone to create tools and weapons, were adept at finding food and water, and recognised the usefulness of fire for cooking, keeping warm, driving out game and sending signals.

While they were discounted by early Europeans as uncivilised and savage, Aborigines actually had a highly regulated social life which covered all aspects of their society and every person in it. They developed stories and created artworks that explained the country’s creation by spiritual beings, and their continuing influence. Responsibility to country was a two-way relationship between the land and its human guardians who, through renewal and ceremonies, protected the wellbeing of the land and the spirit ancestors.

Aboriginal cultures, languages and rituals differed greatly among the many groups across the continent, and across Tasmania. And, as new discoveries are made, we continually revise our theories about human origins in Australia. Archaeologists now believe there may have been more than one type of early settler, that perhaps two different races of people may have come here.

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