The Aboriginal Australians

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A sandstone shelter called Madjedbebe stands at the foot of the Arnhem Land escarpment, in the Country of the Mirarr. When archaeologists dug below its floor they brought up more than a hundred thousand stone artifacts, ground ochre, the edge of a hatchet shaped by grinding — the oldest such tools known anywhere — and, in the deepest dense layer, the residue of fires laid by people who had reached the bottom of the world. Optical dating of the sand around those tools returned an age of roughly sixty-five thousand years. The figure carries a margin, and a real scientific argument attends it; but it sets a minimum, and the minimum is staggering. People have been living on this continent, and telling it, longer than anywhere outside Africa.

To speak of “the Aboriginal Australians” is therefore to speak in the singular of something irreducibly plural. There was never one Aboriginal nation, one language, one religion. Before the British came there were as many as five or six hundred distinct peoples speaking some two hundred and fifty languages, with perhaps eight hundred dialects among them — each people with its own stretch of Country, its own body of Law, and its own share of the Dreaming. What binds them, and what justifies the collective name, is not a single creed but a common deep structure: a way of holding land, kin, and the sacred together that has no equal in continuity anywhere on earth.

The peopling of the continent

The ancestors crossed water to arrive. Even at the lowest sea levels of the Ice Age, when Australia, New Guinea, and Tasmania were joined in the single landmass that geologists call Sahul, a series of deep straits separated that landmass from the islands of Southeast Asia. To reach it required watercraft and the intention to use them — a deliberate sea passage across open water, made tens of thousands of years before any comparable voyage is recorded elsewhere. From the northern landfall the people spread into every environment the continent held: the monsoon tropics of the north, the central deserts, the temperate woodlands of the southeast, the alpine country of the southern ranges, the cold rainforests of Tasmania, which the rising seas cut off around twelve thousand years ago and left to a population that endured in isolation thereafter.

That spread is legible in the ground. At Lake Mungo, in the dry Willandra lakes of western New South Wales, lie the remains of a woman cremated and a man laid out with red ochre some forty-two thousand years ago — the oldest known cremation in the world and one of the oldest ceremonial burials, evidence that the dead were already being mourned and ritually returned to the earth at a depth of time the mind strains to hold. The archaeological record exempts itself from any dispute about meaning: it is exact, and it is old beyond European reckoning. Within the tradition, none of this is a discovery. The people did not come from somewhere else into an empty land; the land and its first peoples were made together, in the creative time, by the beings whose acts the Country still carries.

Uluru at dawn, in the Country of the Anangu, central Australia. Photograph by BriMiDra, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Dreaming, and the trouble with the word

The English term most often reached for is “the Dreaming,” and it must be handled with care, because it descends from a mistranslation. In the 1890s the Alice Springs stationmaster Francis Gillen, working with the anthropologist Baldwin Spencer, rendered the Arrernte word-concept Altyerre (also written Alcheringa) as “dream times,” decomposing it into a word for “a dream” plus a suffix. The gloss stuck, was canonized in Spencer and Gillen’s Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899), and spread across the continent as “Dreamtime” — a word that exists in no Aboriginal language and that suggests, falsely, that the matter is unreal, a thing of sleep. The Lutheran missionary Carl Strehlow contested it almost at once; the linguist Jennifer Green, in a study aptly subtitled “Suffering Badly by Translation,” traces the debate it sparked down to the present day.

The terms the peoples themselves use differ by nation and carry their own weight: Tjukurpa among the Anangu of the central desert, Jukurrpa among the Warlpiri, Altyerre among the Arrernte, Wongar among the Yolngu, Ungud in the Kimberley, and many more. The anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner, who knew how poorly the English served, kept “the Dreaming” only with a caution and coined for its temporal character the word everywhen — for the Dreaming is not chiefly a past age. It is the creative time in which the ancestral beings traveled across an unformed land and, by their actions, hunting and fighting and dancing and dying and changing shape, brought into being the waterholes and ridgelines and river courses and stars; and it is, at once and without contradiction, the order that those acts laid down and that persists now. The ancestral beings did not depart. They remain present in the Country they made, in the rock that is a body and the spring that is a track. To stand in such a place is to stand inside the creation, not after it.

Four things move as one in this. It is a cosmology, an account of how the world took its shape. It is an ontology, a first philosophy of being and substance and cause. It is a Law — the foundational normative order that prescribes kinship, marriage, ceremony, and conduct toward the land, so that where a desert elder speaks of Tjukurpa with a capital letter, the nearest English is something like constitution. And it is the ground of belonging to Country. The philosopher Mary Graham, of the Kombu-merri and Waka Waka peoples, has compressed the whole structure into two precepts: that “the Land is the Law,” and that “you are never alone in the world.”

Country, songlines, and Law

The word Country, capitalized in Aboriginal English, does not mean territory in the European sense of a parcel that can be owned, bounded, and sold. It names the specific tract of land and water and sky and ancestors to which a person belongs — by descent, by Dreaming, by ceremonial responsibility. Country is not a setting for life but a participant in it: addressable, sentient, morally implicated, something that gives life and must be given care in return. People belong to Country before Country belongs to people. The relationship is closer to kinship and to obligation than to property; one is answerable to one’s Country as to a relative, and to neglect it is a failure of duty, not merely of management.

The threads that bind Country and Dreaming into a single fabric are the songlines — also called Dreaming tracks, iwara in the central desert, the paths the ancestral beings walked as they made the land. A songline names a sequence of sites in order; the song that travels with it holds the order in its words; the body-design, the sand-drawing, the painting hold the song; and the Law of the line specifies who has the right and the duty to sing it, to teach it, to enter the places it strings together. So a songline is at once a map, a chronicle, and a body of law — and to know a stretch of Country is, quite precisely, to know its song. Some lines are short and local. Others run for thousands of kilometers and cross the lands of six or ten peoples, who hold their own portions and hand the cycle on across the boundaries between them. The Indigenous curator Margo Neale, of the Gumbaynggirr and Wiradjuri, has described songlines as corridors of knowledge traveled the way one would travel the shelves of a library.

Over this whole order lies a structure of kinship more elaborate than any other documented human system, dividing each society into moieties and further sections that govern who may marry whom, who owes what to whom, who must mourn, who must teach. The divisions are not merely social bookkeeping; they map onto the Dreaming itself, sorting people, species, places, and ancestral beings into the same reciprocal halves, so that the social world and the cosmos are cut along the same lines.

The longest gallery

The oldest continuous artistic tradition on earth is painted and pecked into the rock of the continent. At Murujuga, the Burrup Peninsula in the northwest, lie more than a million petroglyphs — engravings pecked into the dark weathered stone over tens of thousands of years, among them images of animals long extinct, the densest concentration of rock art known anywhere. In Arnhem Land, at Burrungkuy in what is now Kakadu, the shelters carry painted figures layered across vast spans of time, including the great ancestral beings of the region. These are not relics of a finished culture. Where the Law requires it, certain images are renewed by those who hold the right to do so, the act of repainting a continuation of the ancestral presence rather than a restoration of a picture.

A turtle-and-figure engraving at Murujuga, with a liquefied-gas flare tower beyond — the rock art and the industry that crowds it. Photograph by Marius Fenger, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The beings who appear in this art and in the songs are many and regional, and they resist the single label that outsiders have wished on them. There is no one pan-continental creator. In the southeast the sky-being Baiame is the maker and the giver of Law, whose presence is contested as to how far the figure was reshaped by missionary contact; among the Kulin peoples of the south the eagle-hawk Bunjil made the land and the people and ordered the moieties; in the Kimberley the Wandjina are the rain-and-cloud spirits whose images are renewed under strict Law and whose knowledge is in part restricted; in Arnhem Land Namarrkon, the Lightning Man, brings the violence of the monsoon. The Rainbow Serpent is widely attested as a being of water and creation — but it is the clearest case of a category outsiders have over-unified: the regional water-serpents are many and distinct, and the convenient single name flattens them. Within the Yolngu world of northeast Arnhem Land, by way of further contrast, the wangarr beings handed Country to particular clans on the condition that the ceremonies and the designs that commemorate their journeys be kept up forever — a charge that has lately been argued, and recognized, in Australian courts as a form of law.

Much of this knowledge is not public. Aboriginal religious life is stratified: a great deal of it is restricted by gender or by grade of initiation — men’s business and women’s business, knowledge held only by those who have earned the right to it — and is not for outsiders to repeat. The colonial archive does not always observe this, and some of what early ethnographers and collectors published should never have been published; the most notorious cases reached the courts. What can be said here is only the public framing. Where a tradition is closed, the honest thing is to say so and stop, rather than to guess.

The Anbangbang panel at Burrungkuy in Kakadu; the figure encircled by lightning is Namarrkon, the Lightning Man. Photograph by Saint amand, released CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The catastrophe

In 1788 the British landed a fleet of convicts and soldiers at Sydney Cove and claimed the continent for the Crown. They claimed it under a legal fiction that would govern Australian law for two centuries: terra nullius, land belonging to no one — the doctrine that the continent, though peopled for tens of thousands of years by societies with their own intricate Law, was legally empty, available for the taking because its inhabitants were held to have no recognizable system of ownership. On that fiction the whole edifice of dispossession was built.

What followed is among the longest colonial catastrophes on record. Epidemics ran ahead of the frontier and behind it; smallpox alone is thought to have killed a great share of the peoples around Sydney within a few years. As pastoralists pushed inland through the nineteenth century the frontier wars went with them — a long, dispersed sequence of killings and reprisals and massacres, poorly recorded by intention, in which whole communities were destroyed and survivors driven from their Country onto missions and reserves and the margins of towns. The Tasmanian peoples were nearly annihilated within a single lifetime of contact. To be removed from Country was not only a material loss but a rupture in the order of the world, severing people from the sites and the songs that were their Law and their identity.

The cruelty took a further, intimate form in the twentieth century. Under official policies sustained for decades, governments and missions removed Aboriginal children — especially those of mixed descent — from their families, to be raised in institutions or with white families and, by design, severed from their language, their kin, and their Country. The aim was absorption, the disappearance of a people by attrition. The children taken this way, across generations, are the Stolen Generations. The national inquiry that finally documented the policy, the Bringing Them Home report of 1997, found it to amount to a grave and systematic wrong, and recommended that the nation say so. For a people whose very identity is constituted by belonging to Country and kin, the deliberate breaking of that belonging was an injury aimed at the root.

The reassertion

The people were not erased. The long counter-movement of the modern era is a history in its own right. In the referendum of 27 May 1967 — carried by more than nine voters in ten, one of the most lopsided results in the country’s history — Australians voted to count Aboriginal people in the census and to allow the federal parliament to legislate for them, ending a constitutional exclusion that had treated them as not quite part of the population.

The legal fiction itself fell in 1992. On 3 June of that year, in Mabo v Queensland (No 2), the High Court of Australia held by six judges to one that terra nullius had never been good law — that the Meriam people of the Torres Strait had held, and still held, traditional ownership of their islands, and that native title survived the Crown’s acquisition of sovereignty wherever a people had maintained their connection to their land and that title had not been validly extinguished. The case bore the name of Eddie Koiki Mabo, a Meriam man of the Torres Strait who carried it for a decade and died months before the judgment that vindicated him. The following year the Native Title Act gave the recognition a working framework. In 2008, on 13 February, the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, rose in Parliament and delivered to the Stolen Generations the formal national apology that the Bringing Them Home report had called for — the single word sorry, withheld for eleven years, at last spoken by the state.

The struggle continues, and not every chapter ends in victory. In 2017 a convention of First Nations representatives at Uluru issued the Uluru Statement from the Heart, calling for an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament to be written into the constitution. The proposal went to a referendum on 14 October 2023 and was defeated, rejected nationally and in every state, with about forty percent in favor. The question of how a people who were here first should be recognized in the founding law of the nation that came after them was, by that vote, left unresolved.

Heritage and handback tell a parallel story. Uluru and its surrounding Country were returned to their Anangu owners in 1985 and leased back as a jointly managed national park; in 2019 the climbing of the rock, long requested to stop on the ground that the route crosses a sacred Tjukurpa track, was finally closed. The remains of Mungo Lady and Mungo Man were repatriated to their Country, in 1992 and 2017. UNESCO has inscribed the great sites one after another — the Willandra Lakes, Kakadu, Uluru-Kata Tjuta — and in July 2025 added the Murujuga Cultural Landscape, the million engravings now formally counted among the heritage of the whole human species even as heavy industry presses against their edges.

Sixty-five thousand years is a span against which the two and a half centuries of the colony are a thin recent layer. The peoples who made the songlines are still singing them, still being born into their sections and their Country, still painting and dancing the Dreaming that did not end when the ships came. The oldest living culture on earth is exactly that — living — and it measures the newcomers not by their power but by their brevity.

→ Related: The Yolngu · The Torres Strait Islanders · Rainbow Serpent · Baiame · Bunjil · The Wandjina · Namarrkon · Uluru · Lake Mungo · Murujuga · Burrungkuy · The Polynesians · The Maori · The Ainu · The Yoruba · Reincarnation · Soul · Immortality · Divination · Christianity