An outline, era by era

Aboriginal Australian cultures (continuous since prehistory)

Medieval / Post-Classical Era · ~500 – ~1500 CE

Aboriginal Australian cultures are the many societies of the first peoples of the Australian continent. Archaeology shows people living there for at least 50,000 years, and many Aboriginal communities hold that their ancestors have been on their lands since the Dreaming, the time when ancestral beings shaped the land. These are among the longest continuous cultural traditions known. Before 1788 there were several hundred language groups, each with its own country, laws and ceremonies.

In the medieval centuries, roughly 500 to 1500 CE, Aboriginal life continued across deserts, rainforests, coasts and rivers. People managed land with fire, fished with traps, traded goods over long distances and passed on knowledge through song, story, art and kinship. Contact with outsiders was limited to Torres Strait Islanders, Makassan trepangers from the Indonesian islands (from about the 1700s, possibly earlier) and, later, Europeans. This entry follows the long background to that period and the traditions that carried through it.

Things happened, and the rest is history

  1. First peoples arrive on the continent

    Event

    What happened

    At least 50,000 years ago, and perhaps earlier, people reach Sahul, the joined landmass of Australia and New Guinea, by crossing open water from Southeast Asia. Dated sites such as Madjedbebe in Arnhem Land and Lake Mungo in New South Wales show settlement across the continent. The Madjedbebe dates are debated, with estimates of about 65,000 years for the earliest occupation.

    The rest is history

    This makes Australia home to one of the oldest continuous human presences outside Africa. People adapted to ice age deserts, tropical coasts and alpine country. The long settlement is the background to the many distinct cultures that existed by the medieval period. Mungo Man and Mungo Lady, found at Lake Mungo, date to around 40,000 years ago or more.

    Sources

    1. BookMulvaney, John, and Johan Kamminga. Prehistory of Australia. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999.

  2. Sea levels rise and Tasmania is cut off

    Event

    What happened

    After the last ice age, melting ice raises the sea. Between about 18,000 and 7,000 years ago the coastlines of Australia retreat, flooding the land bridges to New Guinea and to Tasmania. Tasmania becomes an island around 12,000 years ago, and Aboriginal Tasmanians are then separated from the mainland.

    The rest is history

    The flooding of the coastal plains changed where people lived and shaped the local cultures that existed later. Many Aboriginal oral traditions about drowned coastlines are thought by some researchers to preserve memory of these changes, though this is debated. Tasmanian Aboriginal people developed in isolation for thousands of years, until the 1800s.

    Sources

    1. BookFlood, Josephine. The Original Australians: Story of the Aboriginal People. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2006.
    2. BookMulvaney, John, and Johan Kamminga. Prehistory of Australia. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999.

  3. Fire and land management

    Event

    What happened

    Aboriginal communities use fire to burn grass and scrub in planned ways, in a practice sometimes called fire-stick farming. Pollen and charcoal records show that fire regimes changed in Australia over tens of thousands of years, and that burning shaped many landscapes. Ethnographic records of the 1800s and 1900s describe deliberate, patterned burning in many regions.

    The rest is history

    The extent and timing of Aboriginal burning are debated, since climate also shaped fire. Many scholars agree that burning was a deliberate way of encouraging food plants, attracting game and keeping paths open. Today some Indigenous ranger groups use traditional burning methods to reduce the risk of large bushfires.

    Sources

    1. BookGammage, Bill. The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2011.

  4. Eel traps at Budj Bim

    Event

    What happened

    In south-western Victoria the Gunditjmara people build a system of channels, weirs and ponds to trap and manage short-finned eels, using lava flows from the Budj Bim volcano. Radiocarbon dates suggest parts of the system date back many thousands of years, with some estimates of about 6,600 years ago. Stone houses were built beside the aquaculture works.

    The rest is history

    Budj Bim shows large-scale management of food resources in a settled community. It was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2019 as a cultural landscape. The system was still in use when Europeans arrived in the 1830s, so it was in use through the medieval centuries.

    Sources

    1. PrimaryBudj Bim Cultural Landscape. UNESCO World Heritage Committee inscription, 2019.

  5. Rock art and ceremony across the continent

    Event

    What happened

    Aboriginal artists paint and engrave on rock across Australia, at sites such as Kakadu, the Kimberley and Murujuga. Some art in Arnhem Land and the Kimberley is dated to many thousands of years ago, and painting continued into the medieval centuries and later. Subjects include animals, ancestral beings, hands and, in Arnhem Land, ships of foreign visitors.

    The rest is history

    Rock art records both ceremonial life and changes in the land. The Arnhem Land paintings of boats and outsiders date to the period of contact with Makassan traders. Many sites remain places of ongoing ceremony and teaching for their traditional owners.

    Sources

    1. BookFlood, Josephine. Rock Art of the Dreamtime. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1997.

  6. Trade and exchange networks

    Event

    What happened

    Aboriginal groups exchange goods over very long distances. Pearl shell from the north-west reaches the central desert, ochre travels from mines such as Wilgie Mia, and stone axes from quarries like Mount William in Victoria are found far from their source. Songlines and trade routes link people across country.

    The rest is history

    These networks moved ideas and ceremonies as well as objects, and held distant communities in relationships of obligation. They continued through the medieval period. Many routes were later followed by European explorers and by modern roads.

    Sources

    1. BookMulvaney, D. J. The Prehistory of Australia. London: Thames and Hudson, 1969.
    2. BookMcBryde, Isabel, ed. Records of Times Past: Ethnohistorical Essays on the Culture and Ecology of the New England Tribes. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1978.

  7. Contact with Torres Strait Islanders and New Guinea

    Event

    What happened

    In the far north, Aboriginal peoples of Cape York have long contact with Torres Strait Islanders, who are Melanesian, and through them with peoples of New Guinea. Goods such as canoes, drums, shells and ornaments pass along these links. Torres Strait Islanders are farmers and sea-traders with their own culture and languages.

    The rest is history

    This is the main contact with outsiders in medieval times, and it shows that Aboriginal Australia was not wholly isolated. Torres Strait Islanders are recognised as a separate Indigenous people in Australia today. The relationship appears in early records of the 1800s.

    Sources

    1. BookFlood, Josephine. The Original Australians: Story of the Aboriginal People. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2006.

  8. Makassan trepangers visit the north coast

    Event

    What happened

    Fishermen from Makassar in Sulawesi sail to northern Australia each year to gather trepang, or sea cucumber, for the Chinese market. They trade with Yolngu and other Aboriginal communities, leaving goods such as cloth, metal and tobacco. The start of this trade is debated, with many scholars favouring the early 1700s and others suggesting earlier.

    The rest is history

    The visits left words from Makassarese in Aboriginal languages, as well as tamarind trees, and influenced art and song. Aboriginal people sometimes sailed to Sulawesi. The trade ended in 1907 when the Australian government banned it. It matters here as the first documented regular contact with outsiders beyond the Torres Strait.

    Sources

    1. BookMacknight, C. C. The Voyage to Marege: Macassan Trepangers in Northern Australia. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1976.
    2. BookClark, Marshall, and Sally K. May, eds. Macassan History and Heritage: Journeys, Encounters and Influences. Canberra: ANU E Press, 2013.

  9. The Dreaming and the Rainbow Serpent

    Myth

    The legend

    In the Dreaming, ancestral beings travel across a formless land and create hills, rivers, animals and laws. In many regions the Rainbow Serpent is one such being, who shapes waterholes and rivers as it moves, and who may punish those who break the law. Each community keeps its own versions, tied to specific places.

    The rest is history

    The Dreaming is not a single story or an ancient tale only, but a living framework of law, belonging and ceremony that links people to country. The term Rainbow Serpent was applied widely by anthropologists, and local names and stories differ considerably. Some rock art in Arnhem Land showing serpent-like beings is thought to be thousands of years old. Stories are told by custodians with rights to tell them.

    Sources

    1. BookStanner, W. E. H. White Man Got No Dreaming: Essays 1938-1973. Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1979.
    2. ArticleRadcliffe-Brown, A. R. "The Rainbow-Serpent Myth in South-East Australia." Oceania 1, no. 3 (1930): 342-347.

  10. Memories of drowned lands

    Folk tale

    The legend

    Aboriginal communities around the coast tell of a time when the sea was far out and the land was dry, and of how the water rose and covered it. Stories from Port Phillip Bay, Spencer Gulf and the Great Barrier Reef region describe a flooded plain where people once lived. Some tell of the sea rushing in.

    The rest is history

    Some researchers, notably Patrick Nunn and Nicholas Reid, argue that these stories preserve memories of sea level rise at the end of the ice age, over 7,000 years ago. Others doubt that oral accounts could last so long unchanged. The geology confirms that these coastlines did flood, and the debate shows how much weight oral tradition can bear. Nunn and Reid published their analysis in 2016.

    Sources

    1. ArticleNunn, Patrick D., and Nicholas J. Reid. "Aboriginal Memories of Inundation of the Australian Coast Dating from More than 7000 Years Ago." Australian Geographer 47, no. 1 (2016): 11-47.
    2. BookNunn, Patrick D. The Edge of Memory: Ancient Stories, Oral Tradition and the Post-Glacial World. London: Bloomsbury, 2018.

  11. Australia as terra nullius, an empty land

    Popular belief

    The legend

    A common belief holds that Australia was an empty or barely used land before Europeans came, and that Aboriginal people were simple wanderers with no settled life or law. British colonisation in 1788 proceeded as if the land could be taken by settlement, and this was later described as the doctrine of terra nullius.

    The rest is history

    The evidence shows the opposite: communities held defined territories, managed land and water, built structures such as the Budj Bim eel traps, and kept elaborate systems of law and kinship. The term terra nullius was applied to Australia largely in later legal discussion, rather than being formally invoked in 1788. In the Mabo case of 1992 the High Court of Australia rejected the idea that the land had belonged to no one and recognised native title. The belief was always a legal and political fiction, and not a description of the land.

    Sources

    1. PrimaryMabo v Queensland (No 2). High Court of Australia decision, 1992. (1992) 175 CLR 1.
    2. BookPascoe, Bruce. Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture. Broome: Magabala Books, 2014.
    3. BookReynolds, Henry. The Law of the Land. Ringwood: Penguin, 1987.

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