The original inhabitants, who have descendants to this day, are known as aborigines. In the eighteenth century, the aboriginal population was about 300,000.
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.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the first peoples of Australia, meaning they were here for thousands of years prior to colonisation.
From at least 60,000 B.C. the area that was to become New South Wales was inhabited entirely by indigenous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples with traditional social, legal organisation and land rights.
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.
Prior to British settlement, more than 500 First Nations groups inhabited the continent we now call Australia, approximately 750,000 people in total. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures developed over 60,000 years, making First Nations Peoples the custodians of the world's oldest living culture.
Some 40,000 to 50,000 years ago, a band of intrepid Southeast Asians became the first humans to reach Australia, and without a single glance at a GPS unit.
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.
Long connection to country
Analysis of maternal genetic lineages revealed that Aboriginal populations moved into Australia around 50,000 years ago. They rapidly swept around the west and east coasts in parallel movements - meeting around the Nullarbor just west of modern-day Adelaide.
“They provided stunning proof that Portuguese ships made these daring voyages of discovery in the early 1520s, just a few years after they had sailed north of Australia to reach the Spice Islands -- the Moluccas. This was a century before the Dutch and 250 years before Captain Cook,” he said.
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.
Northern Aboriginal Australians can trace as much as 11% of their genomes to migrants who reached the island around 4,000 years ago from India, a new study suggests. Along with their genes, the migrants also have brought more advanced tool-making techniques and the ancestors of the dingo.
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.
Almost a French Australia: French-British rivalry in the southern oceans. Only a historical accident prevented Australia's settlement by the French, who persistently explored this region in fierce rivalry with the British, as both nations attempted to establish trade opportunities above and below the Equator.
But there's evidence that Captain Cook was really three centuries too late. You see in the 1420s Australia's west and east coasts were visited and charted by the Chinese. In fact in a great surge of navigation and discovery the Chinese mapped much of the world in the 1420s.
Australia, once known as New South Wales, was originally planned as a penal colony. In October 1786, the British government appointed Arthur Phillip captain of the HMS Sirius, and commissioned him to establish an agricultural work camp there for British convicts.
A new genomic study has revealed that Aboriginal Australians are the oldest known civilization on Earth, with ancestries stretching back roughly 75,000 years.
Genetics. Genetic studies have revealed that Aboriginal Australians largely descended from an Eastern Eurasian population wave, and are most closely related to other Oceanians, such as Melanesians.
Aboriginal people have been in Australia for at least 60,000 years (Torres Strait Islanders at least 2500 years).
Aboriginal peoples
The earliest anatomically modern human remains found in Australia (and outside of Africa) are those of Mungo Man; they have been dated at 42,000 years old.
'Aborigine' is generally perceived as insensitive, because it has racist connotations from Australia's colonial past, and lumps people with diverse backgrounds into a single group.
Australian English arose from a dialectal 'melting pot' created by the intermingling of early settlers who were from a variety of dialectal regions of Great Britain and Ireland, though its most significant influences were the dialects of Southeast England.
The first European Australians came from United Kingdom and Ireland. Other British settlements followed, at various points around the continent, most of them unsuccessful. In 1824, a penal colony was established near the mouth of the Brisbane River (the basis of the later colony of Queensland).
Homo sapiens, the first modern humans, evolved from their early hominid predecessors between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago. They developed a capacity for language about 50,000 years ago. The first modern humans began moving outside of Africa starting about 70,000-100,000 years ago.
Co-lead researcher Shimona Kealy said these people probably travelled through Indonesia's northern islands, into New Guinea and then Australia, which were part of a single continent between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, when sea levels were 25-50 metres below the current level.