Survey of the history, society, and culture of the Australian Aboriginal peoples, who are one of the two distinct Indigenous cultural groups of Australia. It is generally held that they originally came from Asia via insular Southeast Asia and have been in Australia for at least 45,000–50,000 years.
Australian Aboriginal peoples, one of the two distinct groups of Indigenous peoples of Australia, the other being the Torres Strait Islander peoples. It has long been conventionally held that Australia is the only continent where the entire Indigenous population maintained a single kind of adaptation hunting and gathering into modern times. Some scholars now argue, however, that there is evidence of the early practice of both agriculture and aquaculture by Aboriginal peoples. This finding raises questions regarding the traditional viewpoint that presents Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islander peoples as perhaps unique in the degree of contrast between the complexity of their
Aboriginal peoples who lived on the north coast were the only ones to encounter foreign visitors before European settlement. Seagoing Makassarese traders from the Indonesian archipelago began making regular visits to Arnhem Land sometime before the 1700s to harvest bêche-de-mer (sea cucumber, or trepang) for export to China. They had a powerful impact on local art, music, ritual, and material culture. In the northeast, on Cape York Peninsula, Papuan visitors from New Guinea also had an influence; bows and arrows, dugout canoes, masked ritual dancing, and the use of the drum can all be traced to them. Yet these influences