Representations of Indigenous Australians (original) (raw)
Related papers
Early European interaction with Aboriginal hunters and gatherers on Kangaroo Island, South Australia
Aboriginal History Journal, 2011
The earlier written history of European settlement in Australia generally portrays the Aboriginal inhabitants as being at best inconsequential or at worst a hindrance to the development of a Western nation. For instance, early this century, Blacket gave his impression of the role of Aboriginal people in the early years of European settlement in South Australia by saying These children of the bush...gave the early settlers much trouble.'639582*l1 Similar opinions of South Australian history were later provided by Price and Gibbs." However, elsewhere modern scholars, such as Baker and Reynolds, are putting forward views that Aboriginal people had important roles in the setting up of the British colonies across Australia.' They demonstrate that the contribution of Aboriginal people to the colonising process has been an underestimated aspect of Australian history. Following this argument, I am concerned here with assessing the importance of Aboriginal hunter/gatherer knowledge and technology to the early European settlement of South Australia. Kangaroo Island is where the first unofficial settlements were established by European sealers, who brought with them Aboriginal people from Tasmania, and obtained others from the adjacent coastal areas of South Australia. This is an important region for the study of the early phases of European interaction with Aboriginal people. Thus, this paper is primarily a discussion of how and what European settlers absorbed from Aboriginal people and their landscape. The period focussed upon is from the early nineteenth century to just after the foundation of the Colony of South Australia in 1836. European expansion into southern Australian waters In 1791, vessels returning to England from New South Wales took word of schools of 4
1998
The purpose of this paper is to consider the ways in which traditional Aboriginal spatial organization influenced how western Victorian Aboriginal people understood Europeans. To come to terms with this understanding, it is essential to explore notions of violence and invasion in traditional Aboriginal formations. For example, if a history of invasion within and between Aboriginal groups can be shown to have existed, then the question of the relevance of the ethnic origin of the invader must be examinedpresumably, whether the invaders were foreign and enemy Aboriginal people, or foreign and enemy non-Aboriginal people, would not be of any particular consequence to the dispossessed clan. Regarding European associations with 'tenure' of Aboriginal land, western Victorian clans had to come to terms with three classes of Europeans: sea sojourners; land sojourners; and settlers. Clans attempted to understand their experiences of these three different classes of Europeans within a framework of traditional thought, and it is worth exploring these classes to uncover differences in the way they were perceived.
Conciliation has not received the same degree of scholarly attention as other justifications of colonial expansion such as conquest and consent, and yet it has a long conceptual history and features regularly in colonial correspondence. In
Perspectives on the Mission of European : Rethinking the History of Indigenous Australians
It has been suggested that Prehistory of Australia and Australian archaeology be merged into this article. (Discuss) Proposed since December 2020. An engraving from the late 19th-century depicting Gweagal men confronting a British landing party in 1770. British Migration to Australia The history of Indigenous Australians began at least 65,000 years ago when humans first populated the Australian continental landmasses.[1] This article covers the history of Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander peoples, two broadly defined groups which each include other subgroups defined by language and culture. The origin of the first humans to populate the southern continent and the pieces of land which became islands as ice receded and sea levels rose remains a matter of conjecture and debate. Some anthropologists believe they could have arrived as a result of the earliest human migrations out of Africa. Although they likely migrated to the territory later named Australia through Southeast Asia, Aboriginal Australians are not demonstrably related to any known Asian or Melanesian population, although Torres Strait Islander people do have a genetic link to some Melanesian populations. There is evidence of genetic and linguistic interchange between Australians in the far north and the Austronesian peoples of modern-day New Guinea and the islands, but this may be the result of recent trade and intermarriage.[2] Estimates of the number of people living in Australia at the time that colonisation began in 1788, who belonged to a range of diverse groups, vary from 300,000 to a million,[3] and upper estimates place the total population as high as 1.25 million.[4] A cumulative population of 1.6 billion people has been estimated to have lived in Australia over 65,000 years prior to British colonisation.[5] The regions of heaviest Aboriginal population were the same temperate coastal regions that are currently the most heavily populated, the Murray River valley in particular. In the early 1900s it was commonly believed that the Aboriginal population of Australia was leading toward extinction. The population shrank from those present when colonisation began in New South Wales in 1788, to 50,000 in 1930. This drastic reduction in numbers has been attributed to outbreaks of smallpox and other diseases to which the Indigenous peoples had no immunity,[6][7] but other sources have described the extent of frontier clashes and in some cases, deliberate killings of Aboriginal peoples.[8] Post-colonisation, the coastal Indigenous populations were soon absorbed, depleted or forced from their lands; the traditional aspects of Aboriginal life which remained persisted most strongly in areas such as the Great Sandy Desert where European settlement has been sparse. Although the Aboriginal Tasmanians were almost driven to extinction (and once thought to be so), other Aboriginal Australian peoples maintained successful communities throughout Australia.