The History of Aboriginal Culture

An Aboriginal Study
The indigenous people of Australia, called the Aborigines, are the oldest culture found on Earth. Studies show that the Aboriginal genome can be traced back seventy-five thousand years to when this community first migrated from Africa to Australia. As the oldest known continuous culture, their traditions and rituals have thrived even though the world around them has changed so drastically. In this paper I’d like to talk about the history of Aboriginal cultures in Australia, their cultural rituals and how their culture has been so heavily influenced and changed over the last few decades.
The Aborigine peoples of Australia live in tribes, specifically there are around four hundred tribes living in Australia today, because of this there are many variations of their language and religious beliefs. The aborigines are an oratory community; they share their religion through storytelling. The mainstay of their storytelling and religious beliefs is finding the root of creation or how their lands and people came to be. In trying to find their purpose and point of creation, they invent and believe in many deities. No one deity rules all of their lands; they ascribe belief in a deity according to their stories and what the stories tell about the features in their landscape, animals and plants. To quote an article, “Aboriginal people do not believe in animism. This is the belief that all natural objects possess a soul. They do not believe that a rock possesses a soul, but they might believe that a particular rock outcrop was created by a particular deity in the creation period, or that it represents a deity from the Creation Period. They believe that many animals and plants are interchangeable with human life through re-...

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...in their hunting lands in the condition their prey species preferred, they are also thought to be possibly, at least partially, responsible for the spread of dry eucalypt forests after their arrival, because this type of vegetation is fire-resistant.” The use of this type of farming not only helped the Aborigine survive for tens of thousands of years but, it was also a key method in changing the Australian landscape and agricultural practices of the entire world. While the Aborigines can be praised for their sustainable practices and deep spirituality, this is not always the treatment they receive. Over the past century, the aborigines have been met with much criticism and racism from the developing and modern world.
While most of the practices described in this paper outline a rich culture, this is a culture that when met with colonization was almost destroyed.