The first
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.
Australia's first people—known as Aboriginal Australians—have lived on the continent for over 50,000 years. Today, there are 250 distinct language groups spread throughout Australia.
From 1788 to 1868 Britain transported more than 160,000 convicts from its overcrowded prisons to the Australian colonies, forming the basis of the first migration from Europe to Australia. When these first Europeans arrived they did not find an empty land as expected.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Aborigines from Bathurst Island (1939), one of the Tiwi Islands in the Northern Territory. Australian Prehistory: Humans are thought to have arrived in Australia about 30,000 years ago. The original inhabitants, who have descendants to this day, are known as aborigines.
The oldest human remains in Australia were found at Lake Mungo in south-west New South Wales, part of the Willandra Lakes system. This site has been occupied by Aboriginal people from at least 47,000 years ago to the present.
1 The first people to migrate to the Australian continent most likely came from regions in South-East Asia between 40,000 and 60,000 years ago.
It is generally held that Australian Aboriginal peoples originally came from Asia via insular Southeast Asia (now Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, East Timor, Indonesia, and the Philippines) and have been in Australia for at least 45,000–50,000 years.
The legislation was specifically designed to limit non-British migration to Australia. It represented the formal establishment of the White Australia policy.
In some quarters, people of non-British (and especially non-European) heritage were regarded as being inferior, greedy or unable to fit in with dominant Australian society. Many Australians wanted their country to remain a paradise for white, working men and their homemaking wives.
White Australian may refer to: European Australians, Australians with European ancestry. Anglo-Celtic Australians, an Australian with ancestry from the British Isles.
Australia's first car race winner, James Robert Crooke, staged and then won, Australia's first motor race on 12 March 1904, on the horse racing track at Sandown Park, Melbourne,Victoria, Australia.
The aboriginal skin, which is normally reddish mahogany or chocolate brown (not black, except perhaps in some northern tribes), is very subject to tanning (see Fig.
A new genomic study has revealed that Aboriginal Australians are the oldest known civilization on Earth, with ancestries stretching back roughly 75,000 years.
White Australia policy, formally Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, in Australian history, fundamental legislation of the new Commonwealth of Australia that effectively stopped all non-European immigration into the country and that contributed to the development of a racially insulated white society.
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.
The March 1966 announcement was the watershed in abolishing the 'White Australia' policy, and non-European migration began to increase.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the first peoples of Australia, meaning they were here for thousands of years prior to colonisation.
Aboriginal Australians became genetically isolated 58,000 years ago, tens of thousands of years before other ancestral groups, making them the world's oldest civilization.
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.
By the early 1850s, news of a gold rush in Australia had reached southern China, sparking an influx in Chinese migration to Australia. It is thought that approximately 7000 Chinese people came to work at the Araluen gold fields in southern NSW.
In 1606, Dutch explorers made the first recorded European sightings of, and first recorded landfalls on, the Australian mainland. The first ship and crew to chart the Australian coast and meet with Aboriginal people was the Duyfken captained by Dutch navigator, Willem Janszoon.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island languages
Over 250 Australian Aboriginal languages are thought to have existed at the time of first European contact.
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.
The Kuku Yalanji people, Australia
Deep in the rainforests of Daintree, North Queensland, you can find one of the oldest civilisations in the world. The Kuku Yalanji people have made the area their home and lived in relative isolation for over 50,000 years!