Australia's native peoples

Australia's first peoples. The Aborigines (a general name for many different societies) began arriving over 40,000 years ago from New Guinea, then joined to Australia by a land-bridge. In their own traditions they did not arrive; they had always been there. They call the distant past the 'Dreamtime', in which past and present are not sharply separated, an idea Europeans found hard to grasp.

• In the late eighteenth century there were 350 to 750 native communities, each with its own language; about 200 of these languages are still spoken.
• In the north live the Torres Strait Islanders, believed to have come from elsewhere.
• Together they made up about 2.4 per cent of Australia's population in 2005. Most Australian towns lie along the coast, because the interior is desert.

The Europeans arrive. Dutch sailors sighted Australia in 1606; Tasman landed on the island later called Tasmania in 1642; James Cook reached Botany Bay in 1770 and named the area New South Wales. In 1788 the British set up a penal colony and founded Sydney.

• Cook's early reports praised the natives' friendliness, but attitudes hardened after Cook was killed by a native, in Hawaii, not Australia. A single incident was used to justify later violence.
• Most early settlers were convicts deported from England, allowed to stay as free people after their sentences on condition they never returned. With nowhere else to go, they had no hesitation in driving natives off the land.
• Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, nearly 90 per cent of the natives died from new diseases, loss of land and resources, and battles with settlers.

Building a European Australia. The economy grew on huge sheep farms, mining, vineyards and wheat farms; one name suggested for the new capital in 1911 was 'Woolwheatgold'. It was named Canberra, from a native word meaning 'meeting place'. Some natives worked on farms in conditions little better than slavery. Chinese immigrants provided cheap labour until they were banned, and until 1974 a 'White Australia' policy kept 'non-white' people out.

Breaking the silence. In 1968 the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner gave a stirring lecture called 'The Great Australian Silence', about historians' silence on the Aborigines. Later, Henry Reynolds asked in his book Why Weren't We Told?, criticising histories that began with Cook's 'discovery'. From the 1970s:

• Natives came to be studied as communities with distinct cultures, knowledge of nature, stories, painting and carving, not as curiosities. Universities set up departments of native studies, and museums and galleries added native art and culture.
• From 1974, multiculturalism became official policy, giving equal respect to native cultures and to the cultures of immigrants from Europe and Asia.
• Australians realised with dismay that, unlike the USA, Canada and New Zealand, Australia had no treaties with the natives. The land had been treated as terra nullius, 'land belonging to nobody'.
• There was also the painful history of mixed-race children taken by force from their native families, from the 1820s to the 1970s.

Recognition. Two decisions followed: to recognise the natives' deep historic bond with land sacred to them, and to make a public apology for the separated children.

• 1992: in the Mabo case, the High Court declared terra nullius legally invalid.
• 1995: a National Enquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families.
• 26 May 1999: 'A National Sorry Day', an apology for the children 'lost' over a century and a half.
• Writers such as Judith Wright championed native rights in poems about what was lost by keeping white and native Australians apart.