Since the colonisation of Australia by European settlers, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians have experienced extreme hardships, ranging from the loss of traditional culture and homelands to the forced removal of children and denial of citizenship rights.
Whatever the size of the Indigenous population before European settlement, it declined dramatically under the impact of new diseases, repressive and often brutal treatment, dispossession, and social and cultural disruption and disintegration (see the article Statistics on the Indigenous Peoples of Australia, in Year ...
Aboriginal people were subjected to a range of injustices, including mass killings or being displaced from their traditional lands and relocated on missions and reserves in the name of protection. Cultural practices were denied, and subsequently many were lost.
Between 11,000 and 14,000 Aboriginal people died, compared with only 399 to 440 colonisers.
Health. Poverty within Indigenous Australian groups is also a significant contributor to the increased health hazards Indigenous Australians face. Many illnesses threaten the lives of indigenous Australians at much higher rates than non-Indigenous Australians.
Attempts at the mass killing of Aboriginal people were still being made as recently as 1981, according to a historian who has spent the past four years researching colonial violence in the Northern Territory.
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.
It's estimated that as many as 1 in 3 Indigenous children were taken between 1910 and the 1970s, affecting most Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in Australia.
There is no one Aboriginal word that all Aborigines use for Australia; however, today they call Australia, ""Australia"" because that is what it is called today. There are more than 250 aboriginal tribes in Australia. Most of them didn't have a word for ""Australia""; they just named places around them.
From 1788, Australia was treated by the British as a colony of settlement, not of conquest. Aboriginal land was taken over by British colonists on the premise that the land belonged to no-one ('terra nullius').
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 origins
Humans are thought to have migrated to Northern Australia from Asia using primitive boats. A current theory holds that those early migrants themselves came out of Africa about 70,000 years ago, which would make Aboriginal Australians the oldest population of humans living outside Africa.
It is estimated that massacres by white settlers resulted in the death of approximately 11% of the Aboriginal population between 1836 and 1851.
The reason why many Indigenous people can't simply get over the past is because the negative affects of colonisation are still having an impact on Indigenous people every day, often in drastic ways.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders: Australia's First Peoples.
Based on the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) projections, the number of Indigenous Australians in 2021 was estimated to be 881,600.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the first peoples of Australia, meaning they were here for thousands of years prior to colonisation.
On 26 January 1838 Nunn and his men massacred up to 50 Aboriginal people camped at Waterloo Creek. They also encouraged nearby stockmen and settlers to murder any Aboriginal person they came across.
The claim that a “Licence To Shoot Aborigines” was distributed in Australia as part of a 1965 pest control law is false. The supposed licence is a fake and can be traced back to a racist propaganda leaflet distributed in the 1990s. Indigenous history experts confirmed no such licence ever existed.
The British settlement in Australia was not peaceful. Aboriginal people were moved off their traditional land and killed in battles or by hunting parties. European diseases such as measles and tuberculosis also killed many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
The main feral animals that cause problems in Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park are camels, rabbits, foxes and cats. These species can drain scarce water sources, kill native animals and eat plants that are important for ecosystem health.
Bev Manton, Chairperson of the NSW Aboriginal Land Council, observes that "some 900 sites have been destroyed in recent years… with recent figures showing up to five permits [to destroy cultural heritage] being issued a week".
Australia's roughly one million Indigenous citizens have inhabited the land for roughly 60,000 years but track well below national averages on most socio-economic measures and suffer disproportionately high rates of suicide, domestic violence and imprisonment.