"Those who lose dreaming are lost" – Australian Aboriginal proverb

Year of the World's Indigenous People Redfern Speech - 10 December 1992 by the Hon. Paul Keating, Prime Minister of Australia, 1991–1996. The Australian launch of The International Year of the World's Indigenous People, 1993 " …It is a test of our self-knowledge. Of how well we know the land we live in. How well we know our history. How well we recognise the fact that, complex as our contemporary identity is, it cannot be separated from Aboriginal Australia. How well we know what Aboriginal Australians know about Australia. Redfern is a good place to contemplate these things. Just a mile or two from the place where the first European settlers landed, in too many ways it tells us that their failure to bring much more than devastation and demoralisation to Aboriginal Australia continues to be our failure..." - Read the full speech

Pre-colonialism Human Phenotypes Interactive resources illustrating different anthropological types of the pre-colonial world. #1. Browse phenotypes in the world map... Maps and most descriptions refer to the distribution around the year 1500 before the processes of colonisation and globalisation...

Introduction
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"A hunter-gatherer lifestyle was dominant until the arrival of Europeans, although there is evidence of land management by practices such as cultural burning, and in some areas, agriculture, fish farming, and permanent settlements." - Prehistory of Australia Genetic Research Researchers have traced Australian settlement back more than 50,000 years. A study, published in Nature, March 2017, was jointly supervised by the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, School of Biological Sciences, and the Environment Institute at The University of Adelaide: "when people stopped moving they stayed put, putting down cultural roots that have weathered 50,000 years of significant cultural and climatic change." – Tobler, R., Rohrlach, A., Soubrier, J. et al., (2017), Aboriginal mitogenomes reveal 50,000 years of regionalism in Australia, Vol 544, p. 180–184: Abstract Aboriginal Australians represent one of the longest continuous cultural complexes known. Archaeological evidence indicates that Australia and New Guinea were initially settled approximately 50 thousand years ago (ka); however, little is known about the processes underlying the enormous linguistic and phenotypic diversity within Australia. Here we report 111 mitochondrial genomes (mitogenomes) from historical Aboriginal Australian hair samples, whose origins enable us to reconstruct Australian phylogeographic history before European settlement. Marked geographic patterns and deep splits across the major mitochondrial haplogroups imply that the settlement of Australia comprised a single, rapid migration along the east and west coasts that reached southern Australia by 49–45 ka. After continent-wide colonization, strong regional patterns developed and these have survived despite substantial climatic and cultural change during the late Pleistocene and Holocene epochs. Remarkably, we find evidence for the continuous presence of populations in discrete geographic areas dating back to around 50 ka, in agreement with the notable Aboriginal Australian cultural attachment to their country. South Pacific Trade Early trade between the South Pacific peoples, crossing over from the islands to the regions across northern Australia, is well documented. According to an April 2018 report from Kasih Norman, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Wollongong, "Island-hopping study shows the most likely route the first people took to Australia" Excerpt: The First Australians were among the world’s earliest great ocean explorers, undertaking a remarkable 2,000km maritime migration through Indonesia which led to the discovery of Australia at least 65,000 years ago. But the voyaging routes taken through Indonesia’s islands, and the location of first landfall in Australia, remain a much debated mystery to archaeologists. Our research, published earlier this year in Quaternary Science Reviews, highlights the most likely route by mapping islands in the region over time through changing sea levels. >>> more Makassan contact with Australia Introductory notes and links. Excerpt: Makassan Trepangers from the southwest corner of Sulawesi, Indonesia began visiting the coast of northern Australia sometime around the middle of the 1700s, first in the Kimberley region, and some decades later in Arnhem Land to collect and process trepang (aka sea cucumber), a marine invertebrate sea cucumber prized for its culinary value generally and for its medicinal properties in Chinese markets. The term Makassan (or Macassan) is generally used to apply to all the trepangers who came to Australia, although some were from other islands in the Indonesian Archipelago, including Timor, Rote and Aru.>>> more First discovered in 1891, the "Bradshaw Rock Art" reveal an exotic history of ancient South Pacific Island cultural exchange. 2023 study: Prehistoric human migration between Sundaland and South Asia was driven by sea-level rise. 04 February 2023, Nature Abstract Rapid sea-level rise between the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) and the mid-Holocene transformed the Southeast Asian coastal landscape, but the impact on human demography remains unclear. Here, we create a paleogeographic map, focusing on sea-level changes during the period spanning the LGM to the present-day and infer the human population history in Southeast and South Asia using 763 high-coverage whole-genome sequencing datasets from 59 ethnic groups. We show that sea-level rise, in particular meltwater pulses 1 A (MWP1A, ~14,500–14,000 years ago) and 1B (MWP1B, ~11,500–11,000 years ago), reduced land area by over 50% since the LGM, resulting in segregation of local human populations. Following periods of rapid sea-level rises, population pressure drove the migration of Malaysian Negritos into South Asia. Integrated paleogeographic and population genomic analysis demonstrates the earliest documented instance of forced human migration driven by sea-level rise. Introduction The transition from the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM; ~26,000–21,000 years ago) to the mid-Holocene (~6000 years ago) was the last major period of global warming in Earth’s history. ... >>>more "SOJOURNERS: Flowers and the Wide Sea; The Epic Story of China's Centuries-Old Relationship with Australia" (1992), University of Queensland Press, by Eric C. Rolls (1923-2007) - the first of a two part series tracing the first wave of Chinese migrants to Australia. "For generations the Chinese regarded themselves as the flowers of the Flowery Land while those across the wide sea were the barbarians." "Citizens: Flowers and the Wide Sea; Continuing Epic Story of China's Centuries-Old Relationship with Australia" (1996), the sequel to Sojourners, "includes discussion of very early Chinese contact with northern Australia; trade in trepang (beche-de-mer) between the Aboriginal people of east Arnhem Land, the Macassans and Chinese traders." "Australia and China lay side by side for 300 million years. They drifted apart for millions more, and now, so geologists believe, they are moving back towards one another at the rate of a few centimetres a year. Within imaginable time, some anthropologists believe, the slight, thin-boned Peking man sailed down to Australia in well-built rafts, mixed with a sturdy Indonesian people who were already here and engendered the Aborigine." – Eric C. Rolls (1923-2007), Sojourners, 1992, p. 2. 2017: Chinese translation of Sojourners: the epic story of China's centuries-old relationship with Australia, translated by Prof Zhang Wei, Director of Australian Studies Centre of Shantou University, published by Sun Yat-sen University Press, is launched in Guangzhou this summer. ... After 25 years, it has finally arrived in China to meet the Chinese readers.   It is the second part of a series which began with Citizens: Flowers and the Wide Sea, also translated by Professor Zhang. ... - Australian Consulate-General, Guangzhou, China. In 1992, Eric C. Rolls was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for service to literature and environmental awareness and, in 2001, he received a Centenary Medal. - National Library Catalogue Eric C. Rolls AM died in New South Wales in 2007. Excerpt from his ANU Obituary Eric Charles Rolls, who has died at 84, was born into a western NSW farming family and educated at home by correspondence. His promise as a storyteller emerged early. Every Friday afternoon his kindergarten teacher in Grenfell, Miss Postlethwaite, told stories to the class. Finding her rather dull, Eric put up his hand one day and said: "Miss Postlethwaite, I'd like to tell a story." He told about a grain of wheat, from sowing to harvesting, miming the process as he talked. When he started telling stories every Friday, adults came to listen. . . “Much of the game of writing history, is keeping it true.” - Eric Rolls Golden disobedience: the history of Eric Rolls by ANU Professor of History Tom Griffiths, 6 August 2016, Inside Story For Eric Rolls, historical writing needed to serve the future. Excerpt: It is the detail that matters, and it is getting it right that matters, too. “Much of the game of writing history,” he declares at the start of the book, “is keeping it true.” And keeping it true, for Eric, means not just finding out what happened, but also finding a sense of wonder about it, and understanding it in such detail and with such precision that he can make the story live. Use of the active tense – and his books bristle with it – requires quite specific knowledge. The passive tense, by contrast, allows slippage and can mask ignorance. Rolls’s prose is bracing and vivid. “At times,” he says, “I can even smell what I’m writing about.” His books won many awards, but he was particularly proud to win the Braille Book of the Year and the Talking Book of the Year, for he often said, “I write to make people see.” There is also a “swagger” to his style – and he consciously cultivates it – because it enables him to tell a story with conviction. This careful accretion of authentic organic detail generates the power of his non-fiction. But Eric would have refused that division of fiction and non-fiction. As he put it, “There’s imaginative writing and pedestrian writing, that’s all.” . . . By the mid to late 1990s, the frontline of conservation battles had moved from the logging of old-growth forests on public land to the clearing of native vegetation for farming on private or leasehold land. In this new context, Rolls’s argument about the history of tree density was misinterpreted for political purposes by both farmers and scientists. There was also continuing scientific and cultural resistance to recognising the significance and sophistication of Aboriginal burning. As Judith Wright wrote in her 1982 review of A Million Wild Acres: It is as strange to me as to Rolls that some scientists and others still dispute the effect of Aboriginal fire-management, or even that there was such management. Again and again in my own reading of stock-inspectors’ reports in the Queensland of the sixties and seventies, there is reference to the change in pasture growth and shrub cover which followed the vanishing of the Aborigines and the fierce protectiveness of squatters for their timber fences, huts, yards and vulnerable slow-moving flocks of sheep. But no doubt such evidence is too much that of laymen to be trusted by academic ecologists. The politics of this issue are so embedded and have such a long history that they are often unconscious. Scientific disdain for Aboriginal ecological knowledge was once racist; now it is sometimes simply anti-humanist. In other words, the same scientific suspicions can apply to settler knowledge – indeed to local knowledge of any kind – because it is human, anecdotal and apparently informal. . . >>>more

Rewriting the history of Aboriginal land management
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2011 "One of the greatest books ever written" - Professor Marcia Langton Bill Gammage (2011) The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, Allen & Unwin Pre-Colonialism Australia: Natural Wilderness or Gentleman's park? Professor Marcia Langton tells why the book that rewrites the history of Aboriginal land management before white colonisation makes it to her list of the 10 greatest books ever written By Gabrielle Murphy, 25 Sept. 2015, Humanities, Melbourne University Excerpt: On publication in 2011, Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia won universal praise in political and literary circles, including the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. But it hardly caused a ripple – from then till now – in dislodging common assumptions long held by many Australians, first learned in the classroom and often trotted out since. Revealing pre-colonial Australia as a landscape of grassy patches, open woodlands and abundant wildlife, Gammage’s groundbreaking book details how Aboriginal people followed an extraordinarily complex system of land management. This system used fire and the life cycles of native plants to ensure plentiful wildlife and plant foods throughout the year, all based, says Marcia Langton, on an encyclopaedic knowledge of their environments, seasonal weather patterns and biota. Bill Gammage (2011) The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, Allen & Unwin Bill Gammage AM FASSA is an Australian historian, Adjunct Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University (ANU). ... Summary Explodes the myth that pre-settlement Australia was an untamed wilderness revealing the complex, country-wide systems of land management used by Aboriginal people. Across Australia, early Europeans commented again and again that the land looked like a park. With extensive grassy patches and pathways, open woodlands and abundant wildlife, it evoked a country estate in England. Bill Gammage has discovered this was because Aboriginal people managed the land in a far more systematic and scientific fashion than we have ever realised. For over a decade, Gammage has examined written and visual records of the Australian landscape. He has uncovered an extraordinarily complex system of land management using fire and the life cycles of native plants to ensure plentiful wildlife and plant foods throughout the year. We know Aboriginal people spent far less time and effort than Europeans in securing food and shelter, and now we know how they did it. With details of land-management strategies from around Australia, The Biggest Estate on Earth rewrites the history of this continent, with huge implications for us today. Once Aboriginal people were no longer able to tend their country, it became overgrown and vulnerable to the hugely damaging bushfires we now experience. And what we think of as virgin bush in a national park is nothing of the kind. >>>more

Part 1
The Age of Discovery: Explorers, Traders, Settlers
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The Age of Discovery A prelude to the Age of Discovery was a series of European land expeditions across Eurasia in the late Middle Ages. These expeditions were undertaken by a number of explorers, including Marco Polo (1254-1324, Venice Italy), who left behind a detailed and inspiring record of his travels across Asia. >>> more 1421, the Year China Discovered The World by Gavin Menzies, 2002 Gavin Menzies was a member of the British Royal Navy, and had the advantage of being able to read naval charts. Menzies claims the founder of the Qin dynasty and the first emperor of a unified China, Ying Zheng's vice-admirals, Hong Bao and Zhou Man 'discovered' Australia almost 350 years before Captain James Cook's first landing. The GAVIN MENZIES website provides a wealth of insights, references: “. . . created by Gavin Menzies and his research team. The site serves as a focal point for ongoing research into pre-Columbian voyages to the New World. The research team was set up to receive and disseminate all information received via this website” Abstract “…On the 8th of March, 1421, the largest fleet the world had ever seen sailed from its base in China. The ships, huge junks nearly five hundred feet long and built from the finest teak, were under the command of Emperor Zhu Di’s loyal eunuch admirals. Their mission was ‘to proceed all the way to the end of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas’ and unite the whole world in Confucian harmony. The journey would last over two years and circle the globe. When they returned Zhu Di lost control and China was beginning its long, self-imposed isolation from the world it had so recently embraced. The great ships rotted at their moorings and the records of their journeys were destroyed. Lost was the knowledge that Chinese ships had reached America seventy years before Columbus and circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan. They had also discovered Antarctica, reached Australia three hundred and fifty years before Cook and solved the problem of longitude three hundred years before the Europeans…” >>> more The Mahogany Ship controversy An 'ancient' shipwreck - “a three hundred ton vessel” - discovered buried under sand west of Warrnambool in southwest Victoria, Australia, was, according to Gavin Menzies (2002), a modified Chinese junk: "it was made of a 'dark wood' and was 'of an unconventional design'. He also cited claims that local Aborigines had a tradition that "yellow men" had at one time come from the wreck." The controversy continues . . . >>>more By the mid-1500s, China had withdrawn from world trade in order to focus on internal border protection. In 1557, Portugal was given permission to ‘rent’ land on Macau in return for help in safeguarding China's coastline against piracy. See Columbia University's Asia for Educators The First Europeans in the Antipodes In 1595, the Portuguese navigator in the service of Spain, Pedro Fernandez de Quiros (1563?-1615) was appointed chief pilot of an expedition of four ships leading Spanish voyages of discovery in the Pacific Ocean. The first records of European mariners sailing into 'Australian' waters occurs around 1606, and includes their observations of the land. Prior to Captain Cook’s voyage, both Antarctica and Australia were regarded as one combined land mass known as Terra Australis Incognita, Latin for “unknown southern continent”. Terra Nullius (Latin: “land belonging to no one” ) The English applied this principle to claim possession of the Australian continent after Captain James Cook, accompanied by Botanist Joseph Banks, undertook the first British south Pacific expedition from 1768 to 1771: Because they saw few 'natives' along the coast, they assumed that there would be fewer or none inland. Terra Nullius came to mean territories inhabited but "devoid of civilized society." Terra nullius: Council of Aboriginal Reconciliation Excerpt: British colonisation policies and subsequent land laws were framed in the belief that the colony was being acquired by occupation (or settlement) of a terra nullius (land without owners). The colonisers acknowledged the presence of Indigenous people but justified their land acquisition policies by saying the Aborigines were too primitive to be actual owners and sovereigns and that they had no readily identifiable hierarchy or political order which the British Government could recognise or negotiate with. The High Court's Mabo judgment in 1992 overturned the terra nullius fiction. In the same judgment, however, the High Court accepted the British assertion of sovereignty in 1788, and held that from that time there was only one sovereign power and one system of law in Australia. The Freycinet Map of 1811 was the product of centuries of the charting of Australia’s coasts by Dutch, English and French navigators. "Nicolas Thomas Baudin (1754-1803) and Louis-Claude Desaulses De Freycinet (1779-1842) worked together as cartographic surveyors and naturalists." – Australian Dictionary of Biography and on TROVE: National Library of Australia While precedence of discovery of Australia has been claimed for Portugal and Spain, Netherlands, China, France, and more, records show that 54 European ships from a range of nations made contact between 1606 and 1770. The Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon, (1570-1630), aboard the Duyfken, was the first to chart the Australian coast and meet with Aboriginal people. Following Willem Janszoon’s maps of the north, west and south coasts, Captain James Cook explored the east cost in 1770, and charted the east coast of Australia, which he named "New South Wales". ~ National Library of Australia: Who was the first European to land on Australia? ~ Maritime Exploration in the Age of Discovery, 1415-1800, page 87 ~ YouTube: replica of Dutch VOC vessel Duyfken - the first European ship to reach Australia in 1606 From from 1768 to 1771, Captain James Cook undertook the first British voyage - an astronomical and botanical expedition – to explore the south Pacific, on the HMS Endeavour, accompanied by three scientists: Joseph Banks (1743-1820, England), Herman Spöring (1733-1771, Sweden), and Daniel Solander (1733-1782, Sweden).  View an interactive retelling of the history: Explorer, navigator, coloniser: revisit Captain Cook’s legacy with the click of a mouse April 29, 2020 The Conversation "threads together dozens of perspectives to trace Cook’s journey through the Pacific and his interactions with Indigenous peoples. It also explores how – 18 years after the Endeavour left – Australia came to be the site of a new British penal colony." In addition: Captain Cook ‘discovered’ Australia, and other myths from old school text books Louise Zamati, University of Tasmania April 29, 2020 “To find out how the teaching of Captain Cook in Australian schools has changed, I examined textbooks used in the 1950s until today.” >>>more

Part 2
A pristine new world
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There were approximately eight hundred languages spoken by a population estimated at 700,000 indigenous people across many tribal communities throughout the Australian continent. Under British settlement, Aboriginal people were removed from their traditional lands, massacred, enslaved, and segregated, while Aboriginal people are renowned for their compassion in rescuing and 'taking in' ex-convicts who could never return to their homelands. Once their prison sentence was served, they were fortunate to be able to enjoy freedom in a pristine new world. Indigenous Languages Today: AIATSIS ~ More than 250 Indigenous Australian languages including 800 dialectal varieties were spoken on the continent at the time of European settlement in 1788Today, approximately only 13 Indigenous ~ Australian languages have a sufficient number of young people speaking them to sustain the language into the future. ~ Approximately another 100 or so are spoken to various degrees by older generations, with many of these languages at risk as Elders pass away. >>> more

Discoveries continue
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Human occupation of northern Australia by 65,000 years ago Clarkson, C., Jacobs, Z., Marwick, B. et al. Human occupation of northern Australia by 65,000 years ago.  Nature 547, 306–310 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature22968 Nature, 20 July 2017 Abstract The time of arrival of people in Australia is an unresolved question. It is relevant to debates about when modern humans first dispersed out of Africa and when their descendants incorporated genetic material from Neanderthals, Denisovans and possibly other hominins. Humans have also been implicated in the extinction of Australia’s megafauna. Here we report the results of new excavations conducted at Madjedbebe, a rock shelter in northern Australia. Artefacts in primary depositional context are concentrated in three dense bands, with the stratigraphic integrity of the deposit demonstrated by artefact refits and by optical dating and other analyses of the sediments. Human occupation began around 65,000 years ago, with a distinctive stone tool assemblage including grinding stones, ground ochres, reflective additives and ground-edge hatchet heads. This evidence sets a new minimum age for the arrival of humans in Australia, the dispersal of modern humans out of Africa, and the subsequent interactions of modern humans with Neanderthals and Denisovans.

ABC-RN Awaye! Following the above July 2017 report, published in Nature: Excavating deep time Presented by Daniel Browning 13 January 2018 6:07PM Listen or download audio: You may not know the name of Madjedbebe, but you will. It's a rock shelter that sits atop one of the world's largest uranium deposits - the Jabiluka mining lease wholly surrounded by Kakadu National Park. ... The analysis dates the first occupation of the site at 65,000 years - making Madjedbebe the oldest site of human occupation on the Australian continent. Guests - Justin O'Brien, Chief executive officer, Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation - Bruce Pascoe, writer, editor and publisher - Professor Zenobia Jacobs, Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, University of Wollongong, specialising in geochronology - Associate Professor Chris Clarkson, archaeologist from the School of Social Science at the University of Queensland, led the most recent excavations at Majdedbebe Excerpt: (14:15) Daniel Browning: For the Mirarr, and no doubt Aboriginal people all over the country, 65 thousand years is a long time. But it's the scientific community, the archaeologist that get caught up in the dates. Here’s Justin O’Brien from Gundjeihmi. [Chief executive of the Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation] 14:40) Justin O’Brien: … Aboriginal people here will say the sense of deep time is lost to all people I think. In practical terms. If we say to Mirarr traditional owners, we’re talking about a difference of, you know, 47 to 65 thousand years, it’s almost like a ‘so-so?’. Now you can discount that as being - oh, people don’t understand deep time. First of all, who does? And whether its 35k or 47 or 65 thousand years - that IS ‘time immemorial’. That’s time beyond the reckoning of memory - cultural memory - it’s except these guys here. (15:21) Bruce Pascoe: Since I was at school, its gone from 5 thousand years to 80 thousand years - probably 125 thousand years or greater - of occupation, which takes us beyond “out of Africa” so when’s the siren going to go off and people will say ‘Oh! they have always been here.’ Exactly what those old people were saying and I often think about those old people and the pain they must have felt at being doubted. And being insulted. And being treated as children. And in there mind - in there heart - they knew exactly what they were talking about. And they were talking to heathens. And that must have hurt them.” (16:04) Daniel Browning: The writer and historian Bruce Pascoe who has spent a lot of time finding historical evidence for Aboriginal agriculture. Evidence of complex systems of land management existed here for thousands and thousands of years. (16:18) Bruce Pascoe: That’s why I’m happy today because I think we can start this conversation. And it’s not ‘good fella black fella’ conversation. It’s about humanity. And how we manage humanity. Our shared humanity. So, I’m excited. I’ve already had a dozen fantastic conversations today. And I’m very hopeful. Hopeful that we can continue this conversation because it’s a conversation of real intelligence. A searching. And a craving for more information. If we start doing it together, then I’m hoping our people will benefit from it. And not be dispossessed again. Intellectually, this time. This is a fabulous continent. The continent wants to talk to us. Has been trying to talk to us. And ‘white’ Australia’s been deaf to it and, now, today, when we see this news coming out, maybe we can start to listen. Maybe this is one of the ways we turn the corner in our appreciation of where we live. –Note: In Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture Or Accident? (2014), Bruce Pascoe documents accounts of grain cultivation, flour, wells, and dams, controversially contradicting pre-colonial claims that Australian Aboriginal peoples were hunter-gatherers.

MESSAGE STICKS:
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Rich ways of weaving Aboriginal cultures into the Australian Curriculum by Nerinda Sandry, Strategic Learning In terms of classroom learning and the Australian Curriculum, the exploration of message sticks brings together history, science, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures, literacy and art. . . Australia is a vast land. Not surprising then that it is home to a large number of different indigenous cultural groups. Over tens of thousands of years, “a rich diversity of tribal groups, each speaking their own languages and having a variety of cultural beliefs and traditions” has emerged (Hill, C. 2004). It is estimated that around 250 distinct indigenous languages were spoken in 1788 with around 600 dialectal variations. Message sticks have played an important part in communication between Aboriginal groups across the immense Australian landscape. In our classrooms, message sticks offer a way of understanding the diversity of indigenous cultures in a way that most students can relate to. Whilst the diverse oral culture of Aboriginal people is well-known, message sticks may not be something teachers are familiar with, hence this background briefing blog. Message sticks are a form of communication between Aboriginal nations, clans and language groups even within clans. ... Message sticks helped support the oral message that the carrier would provide, especially when languages of groups were very different. But there were enough marks to ensure that the original message would not be misinterpreted. More importantly, the message stick itself was a ‘passport’ which gave the carrier protection. When someone carrying a message stick entered another group’s country, they announced themselves with smoke signals and were then accompanied safely with the message stick to the elders so that they may speak their verbal message. Group members would then accompany the carrier safely back to where they came from with a reply. The message stick also helped to secure safe passage across long distances and through many groups. This was because each time the messenger was directed to meet the elders to show the stick and request permission to pass through and deliver the message to its final destination. >>>more

Key Historical References
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– AUSTLANG: Aboriginal Languages Database – Bradshaw Rock Art collection – ANU Biography: Norman Barnett Tindale, AO (1900-1993) Norman B. Tindale was an anthropologist, archaeologist, entomologist, a WW2 code breaker, and an expert on the Pleistocene geology of Australia. Tindale began his work with the South Australian Museum in 1921. He recorded vast amounts of genealogical information about Indigenous communities from all over Australia. Over 50,000 Indigenous people are included in the genealogies, as well as thousands of named photographic portraits. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Aboriginal tribal groups and consistently refuted the notion that Aboriginal people, being nomadic, had no enduring relationship with the land. Tindale was among the first to challenge the orthodoxy that Aboriginal presence in Australia was relatively recent. His 1929 excavation with Herbert Hale of a rock shelter at Devon Downs on the Murray River demonstrated prolonged Aboriginal presence and their changing strategies for subsistence in response to environmental change. In 1974, Tindale’s indigenous map of Australia was published and 50 years of work recognised. At the same time, a new method of dating called carbon dating proved beyond all doubt what he had argued for decades; that the Aborigines had inhabited the Australian continent for tens of thousands of years. Norman Tindale’s indigenous map of Australia - Download large format map ANU Obituary - Norman B. Tindal Excerpt: At the age of sixty-six, and after a professional career of forty-nine years spent in the service of the South Australian Museum, Norman Barnett Tindale received an honorary doctorate from the University of Colorado in 1967. . . that such an award was being contemplated by an American university did not reflect well upon the lack of initiative of Australian institutions in this respect. Tindale was eventually honoured with a doctorate by the Australian National University in 1980. But none of those letter writers, assessing the contribution of an anthropologist and scientist in the twilight of his career, could have predicted that Tindale would continue to publish and undertake research for another quarter of a century. Tindale was an early starter as well as a late finisher. . . . At this stage no Aboriginal objects from the island were preserved in any museum. Tindale's Director, Edgar Waite, recognised the ethnographic potential of the expedition and directed the young entomologist to visit the doyen of Australian anthropologists, Baldwin Spencer, at Melbourne's National Museum, for advice. Spencer's advice was simple; to follow the directions for field observation laid out in 'Notes and Queries in Anthropology' (he gave Tindale his own copy) and to keep a field journal with a daily record under every circumstance, even if the following day's events invalidated a previous entry. Spencer also introduced Tindale to the Geographic I method of language transcription, the basis for Tindale's unique collection of more than 150 parallel vocabularies across Aboriginal Australia. . . . During 1942 Tindale joined the R.A.A.F. and was assigned the rank of Wing Commander in England before being transferred to the Pentagon to advise on strategic bombing. There he headed the military intelligence unit charged with deciphering Japan's military codes. . . Closing paragraph: Professor W. V. MacFarlane, in praise of Norman Tindale: It is not common in our time to find men with the skills and insights which Mr Tindale has shown through his active and productive life. He is basically a scientist, while skills with language and human relations fit him for anthropology. His special interests in entomology, geology and botany broadened the scope of his ethnographic studies. As the use of film, tape, carbondating and blood grouping came into anthropological work he readily made use of these for the data that they could bring towards his final synthesis of the cultural history of the Aboriginals in time and space. In addition, Mr Tindale has shown throughout his work a tolerance, humility, honesty and adaptability which made it easy for him to find collaborators amongst both black and white men. (MacFarlane 1966)  Indigenous Australian Languages Fact Sheet (pdf) "Language is our soul." - Aunty Rose Fernando, Gamilaroi Elder, 1998) Excerpt: There are many Indigenous cultures in Australia, made up of people from a rich diversity of tribal groups which each speak their own languages and have a variety of cultural beliefs and traditions. Many Australians are unaware of this cultural and linguistic diversity, and often believe that there is simply one Aboriginal culture and language. It is very difficult to know how many language and traditional social groups existed before European contact, especially in areas affected early on by the forces of colonisation. Many linguists estimate around 250 distinct Indigenous languages were spoken in 1788 (Henderson and Nash 1997; Angelo et al 1998, Walsh 1993); however, it is important to note that views regarding the number of pre-contact languages vary widely. Many of these languages have a number of dialectal variations. A dialect is not a separate language but it can be very different to other dialects of the same language; for example, Scottish and Jamaican English are vastly different (Walsh 1993). A good starting place to develop an understanding of the rich diversity of Australian Indigenous culture and language is by examining Norman Tindale’s (1974a) map of Aboriginal tribal and language territories at the time of European contact. The South Australian Museum holds the original map in their collections, and their website (http://www.samuseum.sa.gov.au/) explains that in the earlier 20th Century when Tindale begun work on this map it was commonly held that Indigenous people roamed across the land with no fixed territories. Tindale’s map refuted this widely held view by providing graphic evidence that no part of Australia was empty land. This map is printed on four sheets labelled Southwest, Northwest, Northeast and Southeast, with map title printed on the Southwest sheet. ‘Tribal’ names and boundaries are printed in dark blue. States, placenames, major cities and geographical features are printed in brown or blue. Other information includes boundaries of subincision and circumcision rites. Tindale’s Map of Tribal Boundaries (http://www.samuseum.sa.gov.au/tindale/boundaries_intro.htm): . . . Dual naming: There has been a move in recent years to recognise the validity of Indigenous names and to promote the investigation and official use of these names. In NSW the Geographical Names Board (http://www.gnb.nsw.gov.au) has established a dual naming sub-committee and dual naming guidelines. These guidelines recognise the significance of Aboriginal culture by giving dual names to already named geographical features, such as, rivers, creeks and mountains. An example of dual naming is Dawes Point Reserve situated under the southern end of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority proposed a dual name be considered for the Reserve. Local Indigenous communities and historical sources were consulted to ensure cultural accuracy; a dual name can be assigned only where there is strong evidence of a pre-existing Indigenous placename, and the proposal must have the support of the local community. The Sydney Harbour pilot project has resulted in the Cadigal name Tar-ra, as well as Dawes Point, being adopted and displayed prominently at the Reserve. P. 9 >>>more Many examples of Aboriginal land management traditions are counter to the narrative of "primitive" peoples. How the Wiradjuri people of Central West NSW survived first contact with European settlers ABC Central West, 17 Aug 2018 By Micaela Hambrett Excerpts: Much is known about European settlement in the Central West of New South Wales once the mountains were traversed in 1813. But perhaps not as widely understood are the coexisting arrangements of the first people of the region, in the face of sudden colonial occupation. … First contact Europeans followed an Aboriginal highway over the Blue Mountains using a track that is now the Great Western Highway. The initial relations between the new settlers and Wiradjuri were widely reported to be peaceful, with the Wiradjuri sharing their food and resources with the new arrivals. However a misunderstanding over a potato harvest tipped the squatters and Wiradjuri into all-out war. Dennis Foley, professor of Indigenous entrepreneurship at the University of Canberra, said the modern-day Bathurst Showground was a rich yam pasture where alluvial soil flooded regularly. "The yams weren't just growing there wild, they were re-dug and harvested. That whole area was beautiful yam. It was shared with the first explorers, then the first settler came in," Professor Foley said. "He saw, 'well yams grow, potatoes will grow'. So they grew their potatoes and along come the local clan and they thought, 'well we shared the yams with you, let's borrow a few potatoes'. "People were killed, and it was all over this misunderstanding of sharing." Native title historian Michael Bennett completed an Aboriginal heritage study for the Cabonne and Blayney Council local government areas to build a picture of Wiradjuri after European contact. "As pastoralism spread throughout the west there were fewer and fewer places for Aboriginal people to live," Dr Bennett said. Intermarriage and kinship Intermarriage occurred during this period as pastoralists, convicts and settlers took Aboriginal wives and raised Aboriginal children, which furthered the complex nature of frontier relationships. "They [Irish convicts] were being treated by the British as badly as we [the Wiradjuri] were, so there was a commonality there," Professor Foley said. "You can see those links; the Irish boys obviously picked up and married the Aboriginal women and that's how you've got so many crossed marriages in a lot of our families." The concept of kinship is important to Wiradjuri society and explains migration and marriage movement. "Strong kinship networks were maintained despite intermarriage with non-Indigenous individuals," Dr Bennett said. "The descendants of mixed unions continued to marry into established Aboriginal families." Homesteads built on campsites White settlers were unfamiliar with the land and relied on Aboriginal knowledge to establish their properties, meaning homesteads were built on Wiradjuri campsites — places that were sheltered, had clear water, and were safe from flooding. ... But Professor Foley believes that history has a way of being the great leveller. "All the Aboriginal history has been eradicated, the scar trees have gone." "But several waves of white or non-Indigenous history has also been eradicated and that's what's really interesting. "But the land remains, the trees are coming back." "A lot of scrub is coming back — prickly pear and god knows what else — but the beauty of the land remains." "And it's such a beautiful country." >>>more Indigenous suicide shows our traumatic past is just too heavy a burden by Shannan Dodson for IndigenousX " Our families have been stripped of the coping mechanisms all people need - and it’s killing us" Screen capture: The Guardian, 26 March 2019

Part 3
Transportation - convicts & free settlers
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The signing of the U.S. Declaration of Independence on July 4th 1776 forced Britain to find a new penal colony: "Transportation" to Australia from the British Isles and Ireland began after England lost landing rights and control over plantations in North America. The majority of those people transported as convicts were disinherited, impoverished people of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England, by whose “hard labour” colonial infrastructure was laid down in preparation for the arrival of “free settlers”. Invasion Day aka Australia Day Australia (New Holland) became a British Penal Colony following the arrival, on 24 January 1788, of the First Fleet of 11 ships from England, transporting 1480 men, women and children, including Irish, Scottish, English, French, African, and American convicts. January 26th is a national holiday across Australia commemorating the day Governor Arthur Phillip raised the British flag at Sydney Cove. Two days late! The French arrived on 26 January 1788! "On 26 January two French frigates of the Lapérouse expedition sailed into Botany Bay as the British were relocating to Sydney Cove in Port Jackson. The isolation of the Aboriginal people in Australia had finished. European Australia was established in a simple ceremony at Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788." – Australian Migration Heritage Centre British 'convicts' transported "Downunder" from 1787 to 1865. On 19 October 1800, a French expedition led by Nicholas Baudin, accompanied by zoologists and botanists, set out to map and document the Natural History of “New Holland”. The Freycinet Map of 1811 (enlarge map), the first map of Australia showing the full outline of the continent, was published three years before the publication of Matthew Flinders' map, Terra Australis. In 1802, Matthew Flinders was the first to circumnavigate the Australian continent. Flinders gave the continent the name “Australia”. Flinders’ map reads: "General chart of Terra Australis or Australia: shows the parts explored between 1798 and 1803 by Matthew Flinders Commander of H.M.S. Investigator."

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Part 5
"Walkabout" to Cultural Discovery
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Rites of Passage into Manhood
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In Recovery: The Stolen Generation
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Kath Walker aka Oodgeroo Noonuccal Song of Hope Look up, my people, The dawn is breaking The world is waking To a bright new day When none defame us No restriction tame us Nor colour shame us Nor sneer dismay. Now brood no more On the years behind you The hope assigned you Shall the past replace When a juster justice Grown wise and stronger Points the bone no longer At a darker race. So long we waited Bound and frustrated Till hate be hated And caste deposed Now light shall guide us No goal denied us And all doors open That long were closed. See plain the promise Dark freedom-lover! Night's nearly over And though long the climb New rights will greet us New mateship meet us And joy complete us In our new Dream Time. To our fathers' fathers The pain, the sorrow; To our children's children the glad tomorrow.

Tracy Westerman
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