History+-+Ingvild



Aborigines have lived in Australia for at least 40,000 years. Originally, they came from [|south-east Asia].

Although the Aborigines are humans, the biological isolation has meant that they are not closely related to other people. Because of their cultural isolation, the Aborigines were forced to develop their own solutions to their problems in the tough Australian environment. But they managed quite well and they got a stable way of life. Still, their society was slow to change, especially technology, because they had to make everything themselves. Some examples of this were the world’s first boomerangs and grindstones. Before the Europeans came and [|colonized] Australia in 1788 the Aboriginal Australians’ lifestyle was based on their dreams and beliefs. When the Europeans came, the Aboriginals had to change as people and they were forced to move from their homes, because they lived in areas that were being settled by the Europeans who developed towns and farms. When Europeans came to the area of a tribe, the Aborigines challenged them, but The Europeans usually responded by shooting them, so many were killed. When the settlers began to cut down trees and building farms they denied the Aborigines to move freely around in their own home area. They also destroyed their traditional food sources.

The settlers came to Australia to build a new life for themselves and their families and had therefore ‘no time for dreaming’. In other words they didn’t care for what they did to Aboriginals. Many Aborigines were killed by diseases such as [|influenza] which the Europeans brought with them. Thousands were shot to make way for farms and cities.

Many Aborigines were reduced to beggars, and some became addicted to alcohol and tobacco when they tried to customize the new society. Some were removed from their families and placed in institutions.

From the late 1830’s some of the Aborigines in the tribes that were left were moved to reserves where they were ‘managed’ by the settlers. There they were not allowed to teach their children their own language.

During the 1900’s the separation between families and [|tribes] was an official government policy. Today many Aborigines do not know which tribe they are from or the name of their parents, grandparents and siblings. They are a lost generation.

Australian Aboriginals are one of the best known and least understood people in the world. Since the 1900’s they have been described as the world’s most primitive culture and the living representatives of the ancestors of mankind. The Aborigines are therefore probably more familiar to the rest of the world than the white Australians who emigrated from Europe. Most people think of the Aborigines as a unified group, but the Aborigines never used one collective term to describe themselves. No individual Aborigine, before the colonization, would have known of the existence of many of the other Aboriginal people and regions in Australia, which covers nearly 3 mill square miles – almost the area of the [|United States].

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