The history of Indigenous Australians began 50,000 to 65,000 years ago when humans first populated the Australian continent. This article covers the history of Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander peoples, two broadly defined groups which each include other sub-groups defined by language and culture. Human habitation of the Australian continent began with the migration of the ancestors of today's Aboriginal Australians by land bridges and short sea crossings from what is now Southeast Asia. The Aboriginal people spread throughout the continent, adapting to diverse environments and climate change to develop one of the oldest continuous cultures on Earth.
At the time of first European contact, estimates of the Aboriginal population range from 300,000 to one million."1301.0 – Year Book Australia, 2002" . Australian Bureau of Statistics. 25 January 2002. They were complex hunter-gatherers with diverse economies and societies. There were about 600 tribes or nations and 250 languages with various dialects. Certain groups engaged in fire-stick farming and fish farming, and built semi-permanent shelters. The extent to which some groups engaged in agriculture is controversial.Gammage, Bill (October 2011). The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines made Australia. Allen & Unwin. pp. 281–304.
The Torres Strait Islander people permanently settled their islands at least 2,500 years ago. Culturally and linguistically distinct from mainland Aboriginal peoples, they were seafarers and obtained their livelihood from seasonal horticulture and the resources of their reefs and seas. Agriculture also developed on some islands. Villages had appeared in their areas by the 14th century.
The British Empire established a penal colony at Botany Bay in 1788. In the 150 years that followed, the number of Indigenous Australians fell sharply due to introduced diseases and violent conflict with the colonists. From the 1930s, the Indigenous population began to recover and Indigenous communities founded organisations to advocate for their rights. From the 1960s, Indigenous people won the right to vote in federal and state elections, and some won the return of parts of their traditional lands. In 1992, the High Court of Australia, in the Mabo Case, found that Indigenous native title rights existed in common law. By 2021, Indigenous Australians had exclusive or shared title to about 54% of the Australian land mass.
From 1971 to 2006, Indigenous employment, median incomes, home ownership, education and life expectancy all improved, although they remained well below the level for those who were not indigenous.Broome, Richard (2019). p. 353-54 Since 2008, successive Australian governments have launched policies aimed at reducing Indigenous disadvantage in education, employment, literacy and child mortality. However, by 2023 Indigenous people still experienced entrenched inequality. In October 2023, the Australian people, in a referendum, voted against a constitutional amendment to establish an Indigenous advisory body to government.
Migration
Human habitation of the continent It is believed that early human migration to Australia was achieved when it formed a part of the Sahul continent, connected to the island of New Guinea via a land bridge. This would have nevertheless required crossing the sea at the so-called Wallace Line. It is also possible that people came by island-hopping via an island chain between Sulawesi and New Guinea, reaching North Western Australia via Timor.Lourandos, Harry. Continent of Hunter-Gatherers: New Perspectives in Australian Prehistory (Cambridge University Press, 1997) p.81
A 2021 study which mapped likely migration routes suggests that the populating of the Sahul took 5,000–6,000 years to reach Tasmania (then part of the continent), with a rate of one kilometre per year, after making landfall in the Kimberley region of Western Australia around 60,000 years ago. The total human population could have been as high as 6.4 million, with 3 million in the area of modern Australia. The modelling suggests that the path of population movement may have followed two main routes down from contemporary New Guinea, with the so-called "southern route" going into Kimberley, Pilbara and Arnhem Land, and then to the Great Sandy Desert before moving towards the centre in Lake Eyre and further on to the southeast of the continent. It also leads through another path to the southwestern parts, such as Margaret River and the Nullarbor Plain. The "northern route" meanwhile crosses over the current location of the Torres Strait and then divides into one path connecting to Arnhem Land and another leading down the East Coast.
Madjedbebe, in the north of the continent, is possibly the oldest known site showing the presence of humans in Australia, with one study dating it to 65,000 ± 6,000 years ago and at least by 50,000 years ago. "The stone artefacts and stratigraphic details support previous claims for human occupation 50–60 ka and show that human occupation during this time differed from later periods" The rock shelters at Madjedbebe (about inland from the present coast) and at Nauwalabila I ( further south) show possible evidence of ochre used by artists 60,000 years ago. However, a 2020 study found that first human occupation at these sites might have been more recent.
From the north, the population spread into a range of very different environments. Devil's Lair in the extreme south-west of the continent was occupied around 47,000 BP and Tasmania by 39,000 BP.
Near Penrith, stone tools have been found in Cranebrook Terraces gravel sediments having dates of 45,000 to 50,000 years BP. A 2018 study using archaeobotany dated evidence of human habitation at Karnatukul (Serpent's Glen) in the Carnarvon Range in the Little Sandy Desert in WA at around 50,000 years, which was 20,000 earlier than previously believed. The integration of human genomic evidence from various parts of the world also supports a date of about 50,000 years ago for the arrival of Aboriginal people in the continent.
The oldest human remains found are at Lake Mungo in New South Wales, which have been dated to around 41,000 years ago. The site suggests one of the world's oldest known cremations, indicating early evidence for religious ritual among humans.
Humans reached Tasmania approximately 40,000 years ago by migrating across a land bridge from the mainland that existed during the last glacial maximum. After the seas rose about 12,000 years ago and covered the land bridge, the inhabitants there were isolated from the mainland until the arrival of European settlers.Mulvaney, J. and Kamminga, J., (1999), Prehistory of Australia. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington.
Short-statured Aboriginal people inhabited the rainforests of North Queensland, of which the best known group is probably the Tjapukai of the Cairns area.Tindale's Catalogue of Australian Aboriginal Tribes: Tjapukai (QLD)
Genomic studies suggest that the peopling of Australia happened between 43,000 and 60,000 years ago. DNA studies have suggested that the ancestors of Aboriginal Australians belonged to the southern route dispersal following the "out of Africa" exit, which expanded into the South and Southeast Asia region and subsequently diverged rapidly into the ancestors of Ancient Ancestral South Indians (AASI), Andamanese, East Asians, other Australasians, such as Papuans.
Indian migration theory A number of changes in Indigenous culture about 4,000 years ago have led some scholars to theorise that a second wave of immigration was responsible. These changes include the introduction of the dingo, the spread of the Pama-Nyungan language family over most of the mainland, and new stone tool technology using smaller tools. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Pama-Nyungan language family, probably originated between 5,000 and 3,000 BP, expanded during the Middle Holocene period. A 2013 study based on large-scale genotyping, indicated that Aboriginal Australians, the indigenous peoples of New Guinea and the Mamanwa of the Philippines were closely related, having diverged from a common origin approximately 36,000 years ago. The same study suggested that Aboriginal genomes consist of up to 11% Indian DNA, indicating a substantial gene flow between Indian populations and northern Australia occurred around 4,000 years ago. However, a 2016 study using advanced gene sequencing technology showed no Indian DNA and that Aboriginal people diverged from other Sahul peoples 47,000 to 53,000 years ago. The authors concluded that Aboriginal Australians were probably the source for the technological and linguistic changes 4,000 years ago. The consensus of scholars is that before the arrival of the British there was probably only one wave of immigration to Australia at least 50,000 years ago.
History to 1770 Geography and cultural adaptation
When the north-west of Australia was first occupied, the region consisted of open tropical forests and woodlands. After around 10,000 years of stable climatic conditions, by which time the Aboriginal people had settled the entire continent, temperatures began cooling leading to an ice age. By the glacial maximum, 25,000 to 15,000 years ago, the sea level had dropped to around 140 metres below its present level. Australia was connected to New Guinea and the Kimberley region of Western Australia was separated from Southeast Asia (Wallacea) by a strait only approximately 90 km wide. Rainfall was 40% to 50% lower than modern levels, depending on region.J.G. Luly et.al Last Glacial Maximum habitat change and its effects on the grey-headed flying fox James Cook University, Townsville, Queensland The Kimberley, including the adjacent exposed continental Sahul Shelf, was covered by vast grasslands dominated by flowering plants of the family Poaceae, with woodlands and semi-arid scrub covering the shelf joining New Guinea to Australia.
Tasmania was covered primarily by cold steppe and alpine grasslands, with snow pines at lower altitudes. There may have been a significant reduction in Australian Aboriginal populations during this time, with scattered "refugia" where vegetation and Aboriginal populations were able to survive. Corridors between these refugia seem to be routes by which people kept in contact.Jonathan Adams Australasia during The Last 150,000 Years Environmental Sciences Division, Oak Ridge National LaboratoryM.H.Monroe Last Glacial Maximum in Australia Australia: The Land Where Time Began: A biography of the Australian continent With the end of the ice age, strong rains returned, until around 5,500 years ago, when the wet season cycle in the north ended, bringing with it a megadrought that lasted 1,500 years. The return of reliable rains around 4,000 years BP gave Australia its current climate.
Following the Ice Age, Aboriginal people around the coast, from Arnhem Land, the Kimberley and the southwest of Western Australia, all tell stories of former territories that were drowned beneath the sea with the rising coastlines. It was this event that isolated the Tasmanian Aboriginal people on their island, and probably led to the extinction of Aboriginal cultures on the Bass Strait Islands and Kangaroo Island in South Australia. In the interior, the end of the Ice Age may have led to the recolonisation of the desert and semi-desert areas by Aboriginal people of the Northern Territory. This in part may have been responsible for the spread of languages of the Pama–Nyungan language family and secondarily responsible for the spread of male initiation rites involving circumcision. There has been a long history of contact between Papuan peoples of the Western Province, Torres Strait Islanders and the Aboriginal people in Cape York.Flood, Josephine (1994), "Archaeology of the Dreamtime" (Angus & Robertson; 2Rev Ed)()