Aboriginal Australians

III

Traditional Culture

Until Europeans began to settle in Australia in 1788, the Aboriginal way of life was supported by hunting, gathering, and fishing. Like other hunting and gathering peoples, Aboriginal people had an extremely detailed knowledge of their environment, especially plant ecology and animal behavior. The deep connection between Aboriginal people and the natural world influenced every part of their culture, including their food gathering, tools, trade, religion, art, music, language, and social organization.

Knowledge of Aboriginal ways of life before European contact comes primarily from observations made after European arrival. Although traditional practices observed during the post-contact period were probably similar to those of many thousands of years ago, it is also clear that climate, environment, fauna, material culture, and social and cultural practices changed during the intervening period. This section primarily describes how Aboriginal people were living in the early 18th century, in the period just prior to European settlement of Australia. Many of these descriptions are based on anthropologists’ studies of Aboriginal people whose traditional ways survived intact into the 20th century and who had little if any regular contact with Europeans. These included Aboriginal groups in parts of the central desert, Arnhem Land (in the Northern Territory), the northern Kimberley region (in Western Australia), and the western Cape York Peninsula (in Queensland).

A

Food and Subsistence

Aboriginal people generally enjoyed a mixed and abundant diet of plant and animal foods that varied according to time of year and local environmental conditions. Their intimate understanding of regional ecology and natural resources enabled some of them to survive in environments that European settlers of Australia still find extremely harsh and uninhabitable. 

For the many Aboriginal groups that lived on the coast, fish were an important part of the diet. Some coastal groups built large and complex systems of stone-walled traps that caught fish as the tide dropped. Others used nets of plant fibers to catch fish and, in some areas, eels. In some coastal regions, massive ancient middens (trash heaps) of discarded shells up to 5 m (16 ft) high have been discovered, indicating that certain Aboriginal groups made extensive use of shellfish. Besides eating seafood, coastal dwellers also ate a variety of plant foods and hunted land animals.

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For as yet unknown reasons, the inhabitants of Tasmania stopped eating fish about 3,500 years ago, long after the region became separated from the mainland. Some scientists believe the change was related to cultural or religious factors, a decrease in the amounts of fish in waters surrounding the island, or a switch to hunting fat-rich sea mammals and birds. This change may have coincided with an independent development of watercraft by the Tasmanians, who evidently did not have that technology when they became separated from the mainland. 

Aboriginal groups in the most arid desert regions relied on a wide variety of lizards for meat and a great variety of seeds, fruits, and tubers. Larger animals such as kangaroos and emus, although prized, were not particularly common in the driest areas. Common plant foods included many kinds of acacia seeds, solanums (a type of wild tomato), an indigenous variety of sweet potato, and the seeds of common grasses.

Many species of large marsupials, birds, and reptiles—or megafauna, the scientific term for these large animals—populated the Sahul landmass when Aboriginal people first arrived there. These included wombat-like creatures the size of rhinoceroses, kangaroos up to 3 m (10 ft) high, huge emu-like birds, giant snakes and lizards, and other large animals. Most of these species became extinct by 20,000 years ago. Given that Aboriginal people arrived in Australia at least 50,000 years ago, Australian megafauna and Aboriginal humans probably coexisted for thousands of years. No evidence has yet been found to show that Aboriginal people ever hunted megafauna, although they apparently scavenged the carcasses of some species. Even so, most archaeologists believe that a combination of human activity and climate changes led to the extinction of megafauna.

About 3,000 years ago, Aboriginal people began to more intensively use a grinding process for a variety of seeds, including wild millet, to make a heavy kind of bread. Among many interior groups, harvesting grain from wild plants became an established practice. However, Aboriginal people never practiced full-fledged horticulture, which involves the deliberate planting of seeds and plants, fertilization, and irrigation. The reasons for this absence of horticulture are unclear. Certainly in the drier regions, where the millets grew, the huge variation in annual rainfall would have ruled it out. In the tropical north, where Aboriginal people at the tip of Cape York were in contact with Torres Strait Islanders who made gardens, the lack of horticulture indicates that people there probably had adequate food resources and low population densities.

B

Housing and Shelter

Aboriginal people built a wide variety of shelters that varied with the seasons. In clear weather, Aboriginal shelters were often simple leafy structures to provide protection from the sun during the day and low windbreaks to provide protection from breezes at night. These windbreaks were the main form of shelter across the desert regions, although when the weather turned wet, desert peoples sometimes built temporary domed huts with grass roofs.

During the wet season in Arnhem Land and in some other parts of northern Australia, the principal structure was the roofed platform house. This open-sided shelter consisted of a wooden platform raised 1.2 to 1.8 m (4 to 6 ft) above the ground by sapling poles. The platform was covered by a roof of curved sheets of eucalyptus bark, with enough room for people to sit up without their heads touching the roof. The raised floor, reached by climbing up a sloping pole, was used as a living and sleeping area during the rain and protected those inside from the boggy ground. Sometimes a smoky fire was built underneath the platform to repel mosquitoes.

At times of year when there were large numbers of mosquitoes, some Arnhem Land Aboriginal groups built domed shelters similar in form to igloos. These huts were made of a frame of saplings covered by paperbark from melaleuca trees. Aboriginal people in southern Australia built much more robust domed houses, made of a sturdier wooden frame with a turf covering, to keep out the wet and the cold.

C

Clothing and Ornamentation

Although Aboriginal people in most regions went naked, they wore various kinds of personal ornaments, including armbands, headbands, pendants, necklaces, and bracelets. Depending on available resources, they made these decorative objects from shell, bone, animal teeth and claws, woven and coiled fibers, or tufts of feather and fur. In the colder climate of southeastern Australia, people wore cloaks of sewn possum skin; in southwestern Australia the cloaks were of kangaroo skin. In Tasmania, where the climate was often cold and damp, people covered themselves in red ochre and animal fat to help keep warm, as well as with kangaroo skins.

Hair was styled and decorated in a variety of ways. Women in desert regions often wove colorful seeds into their hair. In parts of Arnhem Land, men plucked their facial hair to create a goatee-style beard. In Tasmania, hair was coated with red ochre. Throughout Australia, the bodies of both men and women were enhanced with scarification (cutting the skin to produce decorative scars), mainly on the chest, arms, and back. On ceremonial occasions, men and women painted their faces and bodies with elaborate geometrical designs of spiritual significance.

D

Tools, Weapons, and Crafts

Aboriginal people manufactured many kinds of tools, weapons, and crafts. Stone implements included axes, knives, chisels, gougers, borers, and scrapers. From wood, they fashioned spears, spear throwers, throwing sticks, clubs, shields, digging sticks, dishes, musical instruments, and a variety of ceremonial objects. Along much of the northern coast people manufactured dugout canoes. Aboriginal people also developed the well-known boomerang, a curved or angular piece of wood used as a throwing weapon and for sport. Boomerangs could be of two types, return or nonreturn; a properly released return boomerang, if it fails to hit anything, will glide back to the thrower. Many tools served multiple purposes. For example, a boomerang could also function as a digging stick, a club, or, most commonly, when used in pairs, as clap sticks for rhythmic accompaniment to singing. Desert spear throwers had a stone blade attached to the handle to serve as a chisel, and their concave form meant they could also serve as a small dish. 

Aboriginal people also made string spun from vegetable fiber, animal fur, and human hair to manufacture rope, string, nets, and net bags. In addition, they used tree bark, reeds, palm leaves, and grasses to make baskets and fish traps. Along the eastern coast of Australia, Aboriginal people made fishhooks from shells. In cooler regions, Aboriginal people stitched animal skins together using bone needles to make cloaks and rugs, which were often scored on the inside to create complex patterns. 

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