History

Archeologists working on the Dampier archipelago off Australia’s north-west coast have found evidence of stone houses dating back 9,000 years – to the end of the last ice age – building the case for the area to get a world heritage listing.

A team from UWA are exploring the Dampier Archipelago (Murujuga). What they have uncovered so far is astounding, and pushes back the known occupation of this place to before the Last Ice Age.

A gruesome discovery revealed the fate of Tambo, an Aboriginal man put on show in the USA in the 1800s. The story begins in 1883 on Hinchinbrook and Palm islands, in Far North Queensland. Robert A. Cunningham, a recruiter for Barnum and Bailey’s circus, had traveled there to find subjects for his next show-stopping exhibition, Ethnological Congress of Strange Tribes. He sought to add to his collection of indigenous people, which already included Zulus from Africa, Toda from southern India, Nubians from southern Egypt and Sioux from the USA.

It is well documented that First Nations people knew how to make alcoholic drinks from sweet juices and nectars well before the European invasion, but little is now known about the processes involved, the yeasts and bacteria at work, or the chemistry, taste and smell of the plants and finished products, but now the University of Adelaide is investigating these traditional practices.
 

An ethnographic exhibition of First Nations artifacts and items that had been stolen, traded or collected as trophies by the colonisers during the first 100 hundred years of the slaughter and displacements were displayed in a seven-month-long exhibition, which received over one million visitors.
 

My Australian-educated friends tell me they were taught at school that all Aboriginal people only counted one, two, three, four and 'many' ... there is abundant evidence of complex Aboriginal number systems extending to high numbers.
 
So why do some people believe the generalised view that all Aboriginal people can't count beyond four when there is abundant evidence to the contrary?
 

MEDIA ALERT: Details on the Canberra Premiere of 'Star Stories of The Dreaming' will be held at 6.30pm on Wednesday 1st June 2016 at the Arc Cinema, National Film and Sound Archive, McCoy Circuit, Action, ACT
In the lead up to the Canberra premiere of Star Stories of the Dreaming Ghillar Michael Anderson Euahlayi Lawman and knowledge holder speaks briefly about the associated Law.

The Aboriginal Pilbara Strike.

At the meeting of tribal leaders Winyirin Bin Bin was nominated, in his absence, to work with a non-Aboriginal social reformer, Don McLeod, as a representative of the inland’s Aborigines.

'Dooley' and his kinsman Clancy McKenna sought a minimum wage of thirty shillings per week for Aboriginal station-hands and planned a mass withdrawal of labour if the request were refused.