How many aboriginal tribes in australia

Three of the languages. See full list on info. Today, Indigenous people make up 2. New South Wales was settled as a penal colony – a place where Britain could send convicted criminals because her prisons were overcrowded. Many convicts had grown up in poverty and committed only minor offences, such as the theft of a loaf of bread.

Conditions in the new colony were little better than at home – it took many years for British settlers to understand the different environment of the new colony, and disease and malnutrition were widespread during the first decades of settlement.

Many people thought of themselves as British people, living in a different land. Non-white immigrants were essentially excluded by the restrictions of the new Immigration Restriction Act, which required that they take a dictation test in a specific language with which they were not necessarily familiar. Policies such as this were to remain in place until after World War Two, when the governme. For thousands of years prior to the arrival of Europeans, northern Sydney was occupied by different Aboriginal clans.

Living primarily along the foreshores of the harbour, they fished and hunted in the waters and hinterlands of the area, and harvested food from the surrounding bush. Self-sufficient and harmonious, they had no need to travel far from their lands, since the resources about them were so abundant, and trade with other tribal groups was well established. Moving throughout their country in accordance with the seasons, people only needed to spend about 4-hours per day working to ensure their survival.

With such a large amount of leisure time available, they developed a rich and complex ritual life – language, customs, spirituality and the law – the heart of which was connection to the land.

Cook’s voyage of exploration had sailed under instructions to take possession of the Southern Continent if it was uninhabite or with the consent of the natives if it was occupied. Either way, it was to be taken. Upon his arrival, Lt Cook declared the land he called New South Wales to be the property of Britain’s King George III, and ignored the inconvenient fact that the land was already well populated. For Aboriginal people an in this instance, the clans living on the northern shores of Sydney, nothing could have been further from the truth. Wisdom and skills obtained over the millennia enabled them to use their environment to the maximum.

For the Aboriginal people, acts such as killing animals for food or building a shelter were steeped in ritual and spirituality, and carried out in perfect balance with their surroundings. Food was abundant, as was fresh water and shelter. Everything needed for a fruitful, healthy life was readily available. It was not to remain so.

Disease struck a fatal and extensive blow to the Aboriginal people, who until that point had been isolated for thousands of years from the diseases that had raged through Europe and Asia. They had no resistance to the deadly viruses carried by the sailors and convicts such as smallpox, syphilis and influenza. Australian Tribes Australia DNA. In less than a year, over half the indigenous population living in the Sydney Basin had died from smallpox.

It is difficult to comprehend how devastating this event was to the Aboriginal clans of the Sydney area. Bennelong told Judge Advocat David Collins that his friend Colebee’s tribe had been reduced to only three people. Those witnessing could not remain unmoved.

Aboriginal history has been handed down in ways of stories, dances, myths and legends. A history of how the worl which was featureless, was transformed into mountains, hills, valleys and waterways.

These sites are under threat every day from development, vandalism and natural erosion. All Aboriginal sites are significant to Aboriginal people because th. Estimates of Aboriginal population vary from 300to more than 00000. At the time of the arrival of European settlers, many Indigenous people were victims of massacres, disease, and violence.

They were a well-established group with high living standards. Once there were over 5different First Nations – so there’s no single ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture,’ there are many. The dreaming is history. First came the influx of the strangers who carried with them diseases, which decimated the immediate population of the Sydney tribes.

Currently, it is believed that there are around 1uncontacted tribes left in the world.