A humpy, also known as a gunyah, wurley, wurly or wurlie, is a small, temporary shelter, traditionally used by Australian Aboriginal people. These impermanent dwellings, made of branches and bark, are sometimes called a lean-to, since they often rely on a standing tree for support.
A common stereotype is that Aboriginal people were 'nomads' and never built permanent shelters. The opposite is true. An area near Portland in southwest Victoria has evidence of volcanic stone huts that date back thousands of years.
Rock shelters are the only traditional Aboriginal dwellings that survive. Colonial accounts also make frequent reference to bark and branch huts assembled in the absence of a suitable rock shelter when the need arose.
Aboriginal people had been building secure, permanent homes using materials from the local area. They had been growing and providing food for families and communities using agricultural practices for countless generations.
Where Aboriginal people live. Contrary to what many people think (and to the stereotype of Australian advertising) the majority of Aboriginal people live in Australia's eastern states and not in the remote desert regions of the continent. Most Aboriginal people livein New South Wales and Queensland.
Between 2014–15 and 2018–19, after adjusting for inflation, the median gross weekly personal income for Indigenous Australians aged 18 and over fell by 5.6%, from $518 to $489 (Figure 1).
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.
Since 2001, Indigenous home ownership has risen 6 percentage points to 38% of Indigenous households in 2016. More than 23,000 (1 in 28) Indigenous Australians were homeless on Census night 2016.
The 2016 Census found that of the total Indigenous population (649,000) 3.6% or 23,440 were homeless, a rate of 361 per 10,000.
The Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 (see above) provides the basis upon which Aboriginal Australian people in the Northern Territory can claim rights to land based on traditional occupation. The freehold land cannot be sold or transferred, but it can be leased.
The variety of different shelters include the simple hollowed-out tree trunk, bark shelters, windbreakers, rounded huts and sleeping platforms. A bark shelter is a simple construction that looks like a modern day tent.
It was situated on a hill, and formed of two walls of stone, three feet high, with saplings across at each end, thatched with bark and grass; but we cannot be certain that it was not built by Europeans or Malays. Other authors, however, describe circular stone erections in North-West Australia.
On the Atherton Tablelands, shelters, or wiltjas, were made from pliable cane or branches lashed together. The covering was of grass, leaves or bark. In the Torres Strait Islands, houses were a distinctive 'beehive shape' constructed of thatched grass over a framework of bamboo poles lashed together.
Cootamundra Aboriginal Girls' Home (Cootamundra Domestic Training Home for Aboriginal Girls), originally a hospital, operated from 1911 to 1969. About 1,200 girls were placed in Cootamundra during this time.
Of these Indigenous adults: almost 1 in 3 (31%) were home owners – 10% owned their home outright and 21% had a mortgage. more than 2 in 3 (68%) were renters – 34% lived in social housing (see Glossary) and 34% were private renters or rented from another type of landlord (AIHW & NIAA 2020).
THE HOMES OF INDIGENOUS. (ABORIGINAL) AUSTRALIANS. Some words for 'home' are gunya (gunyah), wiltija, mia- mia, nganu, goondie and wurley.
Males made up 55.9% of people experiencing homelessness; females made up 44.1%. 23.0% of all people experiencing homelessness were aged from 12 to 24 years.
A majority of people experiencing homelessness long-term in Australia are found in the large cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. It is estimated that on any given night approximately 116,000 people will be homeless and many more are living in insecure housing, "one step away from being homeless".
Thirty-two per cent of Australia's homeless population lives in NSW. Other states and territories account for 21 per cent (Victoria), 19 per cent (Queensland), 12 per cent (the Northern Territory), 8 per cent (Western Australia), 5 per cent (South Australia) and 1 per cent each in the ACT and Tasmania.
Domestic and family violence was the most commonly reported main reason that Indigenous people sought assistance from specialist homelessness services (22%), as it was for non-Indigenous clients (21%). Agencies were able to support some Indigenous clients into more stable housing.
The report finds that inadequate funding for homelessness services, limited crisis and transitional accommodation, the shortage of affordable housing, barriers to housing access and inadequate attention to tenancy sustainment create a revolving door of housing and homelessness for many Indigenous people.
High unemployment and lasting impacts from colonialism have caused low income in Aboriginal homes. Today, people often find that Aboriginal communities in non-rural areas live off welfare in crowded housing.
Some of the most well known Aboriginal words for hello are: Kaya, which means hello in the Noongar language. Palya is a Pintupi language word used as a greeting much in the same way that two friends would say hello in English while Yaama is a Gamilaraay language word for hello used in Northern NSW.
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.
James Cook was a British explorer, navigator and cartographer, he reached the south-eastern coast of Australia on 19 April 1770, his expedition became the first recorded Europeans to have encountered Australia's eastern coastline.