Aboriginal Australians

E

Trade and Exchange

In order to gain access to natural resources and manufactured items from distant regions, Aboriginal people entered into exchange relationships with their neighbors. Extensive trade networks formed, and some items, such as pearl shell ornaments, passed from group to group across the entire continent. These networks linked people, indirectly, across Australia and thus helped maintain a degree of cultural similarity among all Aboriginal groups. In addition to material goods, people also exchanged songs and ceremonies. The Torres Strait Islanders were intermediaries between Australia and New Guinea in these exchange networks, introducing outrigger canoes, fishing equipment, ceremonies with elaborate headdresses, drums, and other items to Cape York. In exchange, they received spears, spear throwers, dugong (sea cow) harpoons, and natural ochre pigments.

From the early 1700s to 1907, Indonesian fishermen from Makassar (in what is now Sulawesi) arrived on the northern Australian coast in December with the coming of the wet season and stayed until March to gather sea cucumbers. They exported these marine animals to China, where they were a popular food. The fishermen gave Aboriginal people tobacco, iron, glass, and some technological know-how in exchange for turtle shell, labor, and other things they needed. Occasionally, young Aboriginal men would travel back to Makassar with the fishermen, returning to Australia with them in the following wet season. Today, Aboriginal groups in Arnhem Land still commemorate the visits from Indonesian fishermen in song, ceremony, and art, and many words from the Makassarese language remain in Arnhem Land dialects.

F

Religion

The religion of Aboriginal people centered on stories of their origin and the creation of the world. They referred to the time of their origin by a wide variety of local terms, such as the Jukurrpa in parts of central Australia and the Wongar in parts of Arnhem Land. Today, in English, these creation stories are known individually or collectively as the Dreamtime or the Dreaming. In the Dreaming, ancestral spirits that could take many shapes or forms emerged from beneath the Earth onto a featureless landscape. (These spirits are known by a variety of regional names, such as Wondjina in the Kimberley and Wangarr in eastern Arnhem Land.) Taking human form, these ancestors molded all of the natural features of the land—such as lakes, rivers, mountains, stones, and forests—and created all of the animals, plants, and human Aboriginal people. Then the spirits sank back, exhausted, into the subterranean world.

In ceremonies, Aboriginal people assumed the character of the ancestral being responsible for creating their land and giving rise to their particular family or clan (a group connected by a common ancestor) and acted out the ancestor’s deeds and travels. The paths that these ancestral beings followed, and the specific places they visited, held great spiritual significance to Aboriginal people and formed the heart of ceremonial life. The paths also helped to mark the territory of each landowning group in most areas of the continent outside the desert. Young Aboriginal people learned stories of the Dreaming during initiation ceremonies and in other ceremonial gatherings. Older clan members sometimes encountered the clan’s ancestral spirits in their sleep and learned of long-forgotten songs, dances, and sacred designs that belonged to the clan.

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Aboriginal people regarded most deaths not as the result of natural causes, but rather as a result of sorcery that people practiced against each other out of jealousy or ill will. Songs were often performed immediately following a death to help guide the soul of the deceased back to the subterranean world, and the living were purified through the use of water, red ochre, and smoke. The dead were disposed of in a number of ways. Across the northern half of the continent, most people practiced secondary disposal of the dead. That is, after placing the corpse in a tree or burying it in the ground, they recovered the bones months or years later and held a second ceremony to dispose of the bones. The final disposal would not take place until group members resolved all of the anger and disputes over who was responsible for killing the person by sorcery. In other areas, the dead were simply buried or cremated, the latter practice dating back at least 30,000 years.

G

Art

Aboriginal people produced some of the earliest art in the world, and art continues to play a major role in Aboriginal life, particularly as it relates to ceremonial life. Art encompassed a wide range of forms, including earthworks (large designs of raised earth), wooden carvings, elaborate body decorations using pigments, and hats made of bird down and hair string. Shields, as well as some weapons and utensils, were decorated with designs that usually related to a person’s social and group identity. Each group had its own designs, usually related to the group’s ancestral Dreaming spirits. Four colors were used: red and yellow from natural ochre pigments, black from charcoal, and white from fine clay.

Aboriginal people are also well known for their long-standing rock art tradition. In different regions and at different times in the past, they painted and engraved rocks in a variety of styles, with diverse motifs and subject matter. The earliest known Aboriginal art is in the form of petroglyphs (rock engravings) and may date back more than 30,000 years. The petroglyphs usually depict stylized shapes and symbols, as well as human faces and bodies. Their meaning remains mostly unknown.

Aboriginal rock paintings are found across northern Australia. The paintings typically depict hunting scenes, human and spirit figures, and many kinds of animals, including kangaroos, wallabies, emus, and fish. Some paintings show hunters running or jumping with bundles of spears, spears traveling through the air, and wounded prey. Others show people using boomerangs and nets to capture prey, groups of hunters driving their quarry toward traps, or hunters stalking prey while disguised in animal hides. Outstanding examples of Aboriginal rock painting include the mouthless Wondjina (ancestral spirit) figures of the Kimberley region, the solid red stick-like figures of Bradshaw paintings in the Victoria River district (named for Australian farmer Joseph Bradshaw, who first wrote of them in the 1890s), the “x-ray” art of western Arnhem Land (so called because it depicts the inner organs of animals and humans), and the varied figurative art of the Laura region of Cape York.

In northern Australia, some Aboriginal groups developed the technique of making colorful stencils by spraying pigment from their mouths, an artistic tradition that continues today. The most common technique was to blow pigment over the hand, forming a negative image of the hand, but there were also stencils of feet, boomerangs, and axes.

Dot painting, a well-known technique of modern Aboriginal art, probably originated in the deserts of central Australia as a form of ceremonial art. The technique involves creating a pattern or picture using numerous dots of paint applied with a stick or brush.

See also Aboriginal Art.

H

Music and Dance

Like art, music and dance were interwoven with social and religious life. Much traditional music was secular, but sacred songs were chanted at ceremonial times. Protracted song and dance cycles, often associated with special events such as initiations and funerary rites, were traded from group to group, eventually being performed far from their place of origin.

Nocturnal performances of song and dance took place whenever several groups were camped together. Usually men danced while women formed a chorus to one side, but women also had dances of their own. Singing was usually in unison, but people in some areas, such as Arnhem Land, practiced harmony. Participants kept rhythm by beating together resonating clap-sticks, tapping boomerangs together, or by hitting their thighs or buttocks with cupped hands.

The traditional wind instrument of the Aboriginal people in Arnhem Land is the didjeridu, a hollow piece of wood or bamboo about 1 to 1.5 m (3.25 to 5 ft) long and from 3.8 to 5 cm (1.5 to 2 in) in inside diameter. Its range of notes is limited, but it can produce intricate patterns of tone and rhythm.

I

Language

Before European settlers arrived in Australia, Aboriginal people spoke between 200 and 250 distinct languages, the majority of which had several dialects. Because Aboriginal people separated from other human groups tens of thousands of years ago, linguists have been unable to reconstruct the links between Aboriginal languages and any others outside of Australia.

Aboriginal languages belong to the Australian language family. The largest language group within this family is called Pama-nyungan, taking its name from the words for “man” in two languages representing the extreme geographical ends of its distribution. Pama-nyungan languages are spoken across most of the continent. In the past, neighboring Aboriginal groups could generally communicate well with each other, and many individuals knew more than one language. In some cases, groups living across a vast range of territory all spoke dialects of a single language. Although two groups at each end of such a range might find little apparent similarity between their languages, each pair of neighboring groups could readily understand each other. Thus, cultural changes and innovations could spread even among groups who would not have been able to understand each other.

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