Contrasting Colonial and Indigenous Use of Natural Resources

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The Australian Aboriginals arrived on the North west coast of Australia some 50,000 years ago, crossing on land bridges caused by changing sea levels (ACME, 2008). They have stayed in Australia to this day, once expanding to about 600 different groups all over the country (though in particular concentration around littoral regions and other large water sources, as demonstrated in Figure 1). When European colonisation began in the 1780s (australia.gov, 2008), a fundamental difference in the two cultures, and cause of much dispute and damage, was a fundamental difference in opinions of surplus. This void of understanding between the native hunter-gatherer culture for which surplus was unnecessary, and the settling, largely agriculturally and pastorally based culture in which surplus was vital, can be said to account for a large part of cultural difference and disagreement.

It can be generally assumed that in terms of sustainability the Aboriginal style of living was superior. One simply has to look at the rapid environmental degradation and depletion of resources since European colonisation to see that in order to survive for 50,000 years the Aboriginal people must have used far more sustainable techniques, and this observation is supported by masses of records and research. While the Aboriginal peoples manipulated the environment, it was done in such a way that naturally occurring processes were not changed, but rather enhanced. Fire was used as a sophisticated tool to create a series of diverse environments, increasing the variety of plants and animals available (Aboriginal Heritage Tasmania, 2012). While this changed the landscape—notably opening up forest canopies and thus allowing for undergrowth germination, and transforming ...

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...Aboriginal Heritage Tasmania, 2012. Burning Regimes. [Online] Available at: http://www.aboriginalheritage.tas.gov.au/firestick-farming [Accessed 29 March 2014].
ACME, 2008. Australian Indigenous cultural heritage. [Online] Available at: http://australia.gov.au/about-australia/australian-story/austn-indigenous-cultural-heritage [Accessed 29 March 2014].
Cairns Museum, n.d. The War for the land: A Short History" of Aboriginal-European relations in Cairns.. [Online] Available at: http://www.cairnsmuseum.org.au/aboriginal.htm [Accessed 29 March 2014].
Heritage History, 2007-2012. British Empire—Australia and New Zealand. [Online] Available at: http://www.heritage-history.com/maps/philips/phil065b.jpg [Accessed 29 March 2014].
Wolfram Alpha LLC, 2014. Wolfram Alpha: Australia. [Online] Available at: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=australia [Accessed 29 March 2014].

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