Many people both nationally and internationally consider the first contact Indigenous Australians had with outsiders as that of interactions with European fleets. However what many are unaware of is, that by this point, Indigenous Australians had for many years participated in a successful trading partnership with their northern neighbours the Macassans. It is important at this point to note that the term Macassan is used in a general sense and does not ‘imply any specific ethnic or cultural group’ . The Macassans, the majority of whom were Macassarese with the odd few Bugis, Turidjene (Bajau) and Javanese , travelled from the ‘extreme south-west corner of the island of Celebes’ embarking on the treacherous journey to the coast of Northern …show more content…
Powell highlights that determining these precise influences is ‘hard to assess because so much of our information comes from the period when European influences were strong in the same areas and because human memory is fallible and prone to interpret the past according to the perceived needs of the present’. One piece of evidence that highlights the long running impacts of the Macassans is that of the dream time stories of the Yolngu people home to the north of Australia. Particularly the story of Djuranydjura, ‘the dingo, who meets Macassans on the beach in a first contact narrative’. The story refers to the Macassans and the goods they bought with them on the journey to North Australia such as matches and rice. In this variation of the dreamtime story the dingo responds by saying if he was to accept the offers of the Macassans goods then ‘he would be the Macassan and Macassans would be Aborigines’. There are many variations of this story some of which act as an ‘affirmation that Aborigines were dependent on non Aborigines for the things they came to find essential following contact’ others reference the trade and sexual nature of relations between Aborigines and outsiders. Furthermore the changes to the language of the Aboriginal people who traded with the Macassans is testament to the impacts of these interactions. The area in which the Macassans travelled along the northern coast of Australia was diverse in its language and culture, as a result of this diversity the language of the Macassans was at the forefront of communication between the two groups resulting in a lingua franca also used among aboriginal people from different areas and dialects. Powell notes the use of the word ‘balanda’ a term originally used in reference to
According to Lambert (2012. pg13) Torres Islanders and Aboriginals ownership of land were classified ‘‘outside the “advanced” nations of Europe” as Aboriginals and Torres Islanders used land for “sustainability, cultural and spiritual terms”. (Lambert 2012 pg.13) Lambert suggests “affinity to the land was not recognised by Europeans because it did not conform to the manner and procedure of land ownership recording in Europe”. Jeff Lambert debates that Aboriginals lived in Australia before the European settlers.
However, he believes that the old notion that Australia was merely an ‘ugly’ or ‘clumsy’ or ‘second-hand’ version of Europe is wrong. For him it is not merely Europe ‘transported’, but Europe ‘translated’. So Malouf is not a staunch believer of the so-called ‘germ theory’ of the development of New World culture—which claimed that the Europeans brought their minds and their habits with them and these became the matrix of the new society, and remained unchanged by the new environment. The word ‘translated’ suggests that these habits of thought and culture have to be rendered into another environmental
There are various Aboriginal tribes throughout Australia. The Yolngu, a north eastern Australian Aboriginal tribe, will be the the primary focus of this paper as they are also the primary
Ronald, M, Catherine, H, 1988, The World of the First Australians Aboriginal Traditional Life: Past and Present, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra
During the fifteenth century, the Europeans set out to find new land, natural resources and spices. The Europeans had contact with one particular group of aboriginals known as the Beothuk, who resided in Newfoundland. The relationship between this tribe and the European settlers was like no other. The conflict between these two groups was quite evident and caused trouble between the Beothuk and Micmac as well. The Beothuk tribe no longer exists.
Dreamings or Dream Time creates access to the ancestral world. Based on research, the Aboriginal lifestyle can be divided into the human or what I think of as the real world, from the sacred world and the physical world. The human world, in which I will just call their “reality,” is the world that consists of the people, their culture in the generic form, and basically their daily lives. The sacred world is where Dreamings take place. It is the ancestral world where the world was created, where ancestors are roaming and creating. This world in not situated only in the past but also in the present (more will be said of this later). Finally, there is the Physical world which connects the previous two realms. The physical world is the landscape, it is nature, it is land formations it is the tangible materializations of the world. During their Dreamings or Dream Time, aboriginals witness and learn the creation stories that formed the physical world. The Myths of these stories goes often something like this: The sky gods where sleeping but then they arose and created the landscape by transforming into different characters along the way. Once the Sky Gods were done with formations they took the shape of different features of the land like rocks or mountains (Eliade 1973:45). The Dream Time then is a time to transcend from their reality to another worldly realm. This is in order to discover the stories of their ancestors and their totems. Here is where they learn the stories of their realities. What is interesting to analyze at this point, which has been done by Alan Rumsey (Rumsey 1994), is acknowledging that “Dreamtime is a sense of dreaming in that it is not taken place in the everyday life of reality. It is in the sense a different ...
"I am a wildlife warrior, and I will fight, fight to the death for wildlife.” This is the day that we celebrate our prosperity and achievements of our country. When we remember our present and past great Australian icons. One of our great Australian icons is Steven Irwin, “The Crocodile hunter” a famous wildlife expert and television personality. Steven Irwin died in a horrific workplace contingency in 2006. He died while filming a documentary off the coast of Queensland. While diving on the barrier Reef he was pierced in the heart by a stingray barb. He was an Australian Icon whose death was felt worldwide. Through is conservation work and passion for Australian wildlife, he became iconically Australian. Steven Irwin has changed the world by representing Australia as a wildlife country, which made the world to turn towards Australia. Steve Irwin was loved towards an animal which has been descried from the historical years.
Bourke, E and Edwards, B. 1994. Aboriginal Australia. St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press.
Reynolds, H. (1990). With The White People: The crucial role of Aborigines in the exploration and development of Australia. Australia: Penguin Books
Watson, I 2002, Looking at you looking at me: Aboriginal culture and the history of the South-east of South Australia, vol. 1, Nairne, South Australia.
Ancient Aboriginals were the first people to set foot on the Australian continent, over 40,000 years or more before Colonization (Eckermann, 2010). They survived by hunting and gathering their food, worshipping the land to protect its resources, and ensuring their survival. The aboriginal community had adapted to the environment, building a strong framework of social, cultural, and spiritual beliefs (Eckermann, 2010).
Gard, S. (2000). A history of Australia. The Colony of New South Wales. South Yarra: MacMillan Education Australia Pty Ltd.
Australian indigenous culture is the world’s oldest surviving culture, dating back sixty-thousand years. Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders have been represented in a myriad of ways through various channels such as poetry, articles, and images, in both fiction and non-fiction. Over the years, they have been portrayed as inferior, oppressed, isolated, principled and admirable. Three such texts that portray them in these ways are poems Circles and Squares and Grade One Primary by Ali Cobby Eckermann, James Packer slams booing; joins three cheers for footballer and the accompanying visual text and Heywire article Family is the most important thing to an islander by Richard Barba. Even though the texts are different as ….. is/are …., while
Australia’s Indigenous people are thought to have reached the continent between 60 000 and 80 000 years ago. Over the thousands of years since then, a complex customary legal system have developed, strongly linked to the notion of kinship and based on oral tradition. The indigenous people were not seen as have a political culture or system for law. They were denied the access to basic human right e.g., the right to land ownership. Their cultural values of indigenous people became lost. They lost their traditional lifestyle and became disconnected socially. This means that they were unable to pass down their heritage and also were disconnected from the new occupants of the land.
This is an incredible paragraph extracted from Bora Ring. This poem depicts perfectly of the European invasion of Australia. It shows how the traditions and stories are gone, how the hunting and rituals are gone and ‘lost in an alien tale’, the Europeans being the aliens. This poem also describes that it seemed as if the tradition of Aborigines was ‘breathed sleeping and forgot’. These are powerful words Judith Wright used to show how they Aborigines were quickly invaded and ‘forgotten’. This poem is an excellent example of why Australian students should study her poetry.