Australian Aboriginal

The ancestors of the Aboriginal Australians crossed from Southeast Asia, by land bridges and short sea crossings, some 50,000 to 65,000 years ago. They formed about 600 nations speaking some 250 languages, complex hunter-gatherers who in places practised fire-stick farming and fish farming. The Dreaming, a sacred account of creation still unfolding, ties each person to the land.

From about 1750 Makassarese trepang gatherers visited the northern coast, and a Makassan pidgin became a trade language there. The British landed in 1788, and disease and frontier violence cut the population sharply; in Tasmania the Black War of the 1820s and early 1830s nearly destroyed the Aboriginal Tasmanians.