Indigenous Australians

By Aidan Sim-CamposMods 12/13

Introduction

• The Indigenous Australians were the first people to live on Australia’s land.

• They are known as aboriginal people because they are indigenous to Australia.

• Today the Indigenous people live in many different places in Australia and make up of 2.6% of the population on the continent.

The Aboriginal Flag

History

• The Indigenous Australians have lived on the land of Australia for about 40,000 to 50,000 years.

• Almost the whole time they have been in Australia, the Indigenous Australians have been living as nomads and hunter-gatherers.

Illustration from "Australia: the first hundred years," by Andrew Garran, 1886

History continued…

• The way that they lived changed radically when the British came to Australia in the late 1700s. They brought many diseases such as chickenpox, smallpox, influenza, and measles that got passed around throughout the Indigenous people. Many of the people were killed from the diseases because they had no medicine to cure the sickness.

• Also, the British took over most of the land of the Indigenous Australians and drove them off their land for farming and ranching.

Society

• The Indigenous Australians were very social people who lived in groups called either bands, clans, sub-tribes, or tribes.

• The relationships within Indigenous Australians families are more complex than the relationships of families in the U.S. and are more difficult to understand than American family relationships.

• Each family has an elder who is the leader. Next in line for leadership is the elder’s brother, then the elder’s wife, then the father, and so on.

Society continued…• They lived in small huts made out of bark called

gunyas and also in caves or just outside.• The Indigenous Australians eat many foods like

berries, plants, eggs, and insects. They also hunt animals like kangaroos, wallabies, echidnas (spiny anteaters), and possums. They hunt many reptiles as well.

• When they hunt they use boomerangs and spears to catch the animals and then kill them. They also climb up in trees to get fruit and to hide from the animals before killing them.

Long-Beaked Echidna (Spiny Anteater)

Culture• The main spiritual belief of the Indigenous

Australians is The Dreaming or Dreamtime. The people believe that powerful beings came up from the earth and created people, plants and animals, languages, and religions. I think that’s the reason why they had so much spiritual connection with their land.

• But when the British came and took over their land, many of the Indigenous Australians converted to Christianity and now two-thirds of the population is Christian.

• The type of music that they play is folk-style music. The instrument called a didgeridoo is what they use most commonly to make music.

Man playing didgeridoo

Culture continued...

• The traditional songs of the ceremonies for the Indigenous Australians have been handed down from generation to generation. It is very important to know the songs because they believe that you should have to know the songs that were sung and played by the ancestors in the Dreamtime.

• The younger kids of the Indigenous Australian people very much like to listen to African-American and Aboriginal hip hop music. Also, Indigenous Australian people have gotten more into listening to rock and roll, hip hop, and reggae.

Bibliography

• http://www.crystalinks.com/aboriginals.html• http://

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_Australians#History• http://

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Indigenous_Australians#The_impact_of_British_settlement

• http://philtar.ucsm.ac.uk/encyclopedia/westoc/abor.html

• http://scrapetv.com/News/News%20Pages/Everyone%20Else/images-3/didgeridoo.jpg

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiny_anteater