Australia/Aborigines

Aborigines

Australia has only been known to "the world" for about 400 years. It was discovered in 1605 by mistake by the Dutch sailor Willem Jansz during a trip to New Guinea. In the 1770ies the British explorer James Cook sailed to the area. He found Australia’s east coast and made a British claim on the land he found. He called it New South Wales. The European sailors who landed on the coasts of the newly discovered continent met people who called themselves Kooris. Koori tribes have lived in Australia for more than 40,000 years. The sailors called them "Aborigines." Originally, the Aborigines came from somewhere in Asia. This was at a time when there was an almost continous land bridge between Asia and Australia.

During the first half of the 19th century the British established new colonies in Australia. This led to confrontations with the Kooris who wanted to defend their land and culture. The Aborigines were hunters and collectors, which means that the hunted, fished and collected fruit and vegetables from nature to get food. More than 200 different languages were spoken and almost all Aborigines were bilingual or multilingual. There may have been about 500 different tribes of these native people. The Aborigines had no chiefs or other centralized institutions of political control. The Aborigines divided the year into five to eight seasons marked by the different climatic conditions. It is estimated that there were approximately 300,000 to 1 million Aborigines living in Australia when the British came to the continent.

The British saw Australia as a rich country ideal for farming, agriculture and animal husbandry. When they started building large farms and keeping animals there, the Aborigines kept on living as they had always done. They continued to hunt and collect as the grandfathers and grand- grand-fathers did. The white settlers took ever more land away from the Aborigines. This lead to confrontations between the British and the Aborigines. Since the British weapon technology was superior to the spears of the Aborigines, the British won almost all the fights and battles, and the Kooris were almost wiped out.

Many of the Aborigines were killed, and the remaining were forced to adapt to the British way of life. They were forced to work as helping hands and servants at farms owned by whites or to move to the cities to work in industrial factories.

In the early 20th century, the white Australian population started to become more aware of the Aborigines' situation. Special reservations were established where the aboriginal tribes could live like they had done before the British invasion. However, these reservations were often too small. There were also only a few of them so that only a small percentage of the Aborigines had a chance to live there. Therefore, the Aborigines continued to live under poor conditions and they continued to fade in numbers.

In 1940, there were only about 35 thousand Aborigines left in Australia.

Today only about 1% of Australia’s population are Aborigines. The government is trying to make their living standards better but most of them still belong to the poorest group in society. Their unemployment rate is more than six times the national average, and the average wage for Aborigines is half the average national wage.