Many Aboriginal Australians were also forced into various forms of slavery and unfree labour from colonisation. Some Indigenous Australians performed unpaid labour until the 1970s. Pacific Islanders were kidnapped or coerced to come to Australia and work, in a practice known as blackbirding.
Aboriginal slavery disguised as 'Protectionism'
Between the 1860s and the 1970s, Aboriginal people of all ages were taken from their homes and sent to work on cattle and sheep properties, in kitchens, homesteads, shearing sheds or on the land, all across Australia.
While the forced labour of Aboriginal people by the Federal and state Governments formally began in the late 19th Century, the system didn't end until up to the 1970s. This means that there are number of people in our community today who lived through this experience.
All Five Civilized Tribes—the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations—adopted slavery. During the Trail of Tears, they took with them several thousand African slaves.
However, many consider a significant starting point to slavery in America to be 1619, when the privateer The White Lion brought 20 enslaved African ashore in the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia. The crew had seized the Africans from the Portuguese slave ship Sao Jao Bautista.
Indigenous slavery long predated the arrival of Europeans in the Americas. As far back as we can peer into pre-Contact monuments, codices, and archaeological evidence as well as the earliest European accounts, we learn about Indigenous Americans enslaving one another.
In 2021 alone, Anti-Slavery Australia helped over 400 people who had been trafficked to or from Australia, or had faced modern slavery while in Australia, including forced marriage, servitude and forced labour. But this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Aboriginal people have been in Australia for at least 60,000 years (Torres Strait Islanders at least 2500 years).
The islands were settled by different seafaring Melanesian cultures such as the Torres Strait Islanders over 2500 years ago, and cultural interactions continued via this route with the Aboriginal people of northeast Australia.
In the 1860s, Victoria became the first state to pass laws authorising Aboriginal children to be removed from their parents. Similar policies were later adopted by other states and territories – and by the federal government when it was established in the 1900s.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the first peoples of Australia, meaning they were here for thousands of years prior to colonisation.
A new genomic study has revealed that Aboriginal Australians are the oldest known civilization on Earth, with ancestries stretching back roughly 75,000 years.
Australia is home to the oldest continuing living culture in the entire world. The richness and diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures in Australia is something we should all take pride in as a nation.
In 1803, British colonisation began and in 1876, Truganini died. She was the last full-blood and tribal Tasmanian Aboriginal. Within her one lifetime, a whole society and culture were removed from the face of the earth.
Aboriginal Australians could be the oldest population of humans living outside of Africa, where one theory says they migrated from in boats 70,000 years ago. Australia's first people—known as Aboriginal Australians—have lived on the continent for over 50,000 years.
The English settlers and their descendants expropriated native land and removed the indigenous people by cutting them from their food resources, and engaged in genocidal massacres.
The First Nations people of Australia consist of two culturally distinct Indigenous groups of black people, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, born inher- itors and custodians of the land. The violent invasion by European colonisers began in 1788 and continues to this day.
In 1847, more than a decade after slavery was officially abolished throughout the British Empire, politician and entrepreneur Benjamin Boyd began the illegal blackbirding of 119 Islanders to work on his whaling and pastoral ventures in Eden and the Riverina in NSW.
On January 26, 1788, Captain Arthur Phillip guides a fleet of 11 British ships carrying convicts to the colony of New South Wales, effectively founding Australia.
While Indigenous Australians have inhabited the continent for tens of thousands of years, and traded with nearby islanders, the first documented landing on Australia by a European was in 1606. The Dutch explorer Willem Janszoon landed on the western side of Cape York Peninsula and charted about 300 km of coastline.
According to a recent study published in The American Economic Review, they were then the tallest people in the world. Men stood an average 172.6 centimeters (about 5 feet, 8 inches) tall, a hair or two above Australian men (averaging 172 cm), American men of European decent (171 cm) and European men (170 cm or less).
Slavery in India escalated during the Muslim domination of northern India after the 11th-century, after Muslim rulers re-introduced slavery to the Indian subcontinent.
The army and many settlers treated the Natives as nothing more than pests to be got rid of. Laws were introduced that banned certain ceremonies, forced the children into the European education system, and tied whole groups to land that was useless and could not sustain them.
They conclude that, like most other living Eurasians, Aborigines descend from a single group of modern humans who swept out of Africa 50,000 to 60,000 years ago and then spread in different directions.
Total brain volume was significantly smaller for Aborigines (1199 +/- 84 ml) compared to Caucasians (1386 +/- 98 ml). Significantly smaller volumes were also found for cerebellum, prosencephalon-mesencephalon unit, cerebral cortex, frontal cortex, parieto-occipitotemporal cortex, and hippocampus.