Julie VOGEL

Marianne MIRB

Anaïs MICHELS

  

 

 

 

AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINES

 

 

 

     Australia is the world’s largest island and its smallest continent. The sixth largest country on Earth, Australian extends approximately 2,500 miles (approximately 4,000 km) from east to west, and 1,875 miles (3,000 km) from north to south. From east to west, Australia has four main geographical regions. Concerning the climate, remember that Australia lies in the Southern Hemisphere, with seasons that are opposite those in the north – July is the middle of winter and January the peak of summer. This is a country the size of the United States of America, spanning three time zones, yet with barely nineteen million inhabitants. It is an ancient land, geologically one of the oldest on earth, and was first populated by the Aborigines.

The word aboriginal was used in Australia to describe its Indigenous peoples as early as 1789. It soon became capitalized and employed as the common name to refer to all Indigenous Australians. At present the term refers only to those peoples who were traditionally hunter gatherers. It does not encompass those Indigenous peoples from the Torres Strait who traditionally practiced agriculture.

    

          I. HISTORY

 

1. Arrival and occupation of Australian

 

               a. The Aborigines

 

     There are several theories on the origin of the Aborigines in Australia. The most plausible is the arrival of people comes from Asia who have joined the Papua by sea route by sailing from island to island then from the Papua towards Australia by the strait of Torres approximately 40000 years ago.

 

It is believed that first human migration to Australia was achieved when this landmass formed part of the Sahul continent, connected to the island of New Guinea via a land bridge. It is also possible that people came by boat across the Timor Sea.

 

 

With the rising waters, Australia became separated from New Guinea and Tasmania. Aborigines lived in autarky until the arrival of the first explorers. They developed a unique culture and rich spiritually. 

 

Despite this isolation, the people of Australia who remained on the North Coast had many contacts and trade with the closest islands, especially in the Torres Strait. Some theories talk about visits of Arabic and Chinese browsers in the 9th century. In the 17th century became intense exchange between the Indonesian and the Aborigines.

 

          b. The British

 

     On January 18, 1788 a British fleet of 12 ships landed at Botany Bay on the eastern coast of Australia, the purpose of the expedition was to start a colony which would double as a prison for Britain's worst criminal offenders. The ships were carrying 1530 people, 736 of which were convicts. Botany Bay turned out to be a bad choice and in less than a month the colony relocated a few miles up the coastline to Port Jackson. The colonists found Port Jackson to be a huge improvement and renamed it Sydney.

 

                      

 

2. Since British settlement

 

     Captain James Cook set the colonization of Australia into motion by exploring and mapping the fertile eastern coast of Australia, but he was not the first to visit Australia. There is evidence suggesting Aborigines in northern Australia maintained trade with some of the Indonesian islands closest to the coast. Chinese and Arab's may have had contact with the Aborigines in the 15th century. The British were the one's who first placed a permanent non-indigenous settlement on Australia. There was trouble between the Aborigines and the British from the beginning when the Aborigines local to Botany Bay complained because the British were cutting down all the trees. Eventually as more of the convicts were released and couldn't afford to sail back to England, Sydney became a real colony, and Australia was on to becoming mostly British.

 

 

 

     At first the Aborigines showed little interest in assimilating into European society. But the tide rolled on, as it had done in the United States, in Canada, and wherever Europeans displaced indigenous people. Aborigines and Europeans related to the land in completely opposing ways. The aborigines were generally hunters and gatherers, although some groups were engaged in agricultural practices; the Europeans were farmers, who regarded the land as theirs for the taking because it was not being cultivated. The Aborigines were simply ignored by the Europeans, who declared Australia an empty and ownerless land. They were, as John Pilger put it in A Secret Country, considered not as human but rather as “part of the fauna”. It was only in 1992 that the Australian High Court ruled that the Aborigines title to the land had not been extinguished.

The Aborigines realized, as the settlers kept coming, that the newcomers wanted to own the land, not to share it, and that they were here to stay – along with their fences, their missionaries to convert them, their politicians to interfere with them, their Community Service bureaucrats to take their children into care, their governments to palm them off with rather useless tracts of land, and their alcohol. Many Aborigines exchanged work for food and lodgings, particularly on farms and in rural areas.

 

     The early Europeans brought with them epidemics of smallpox, measles, and venereal diseases, and they also, occasionally, murdered Aborigines. At the time of white settlement the estimated black population was 700, 000. By 1900, this figure had shrunk to 100, 000. The most famous, perhaps, was the Myall Creek Massacre in 1838, when Aborigines – men, women, and children – were rounded up after some perceived wrongdoing, herded into a creek bed, and shot. We don’t know how many there were, but there may have been hundreds. For this wanton killing of defenseless Aborigines, seven of the eleven whites accused were subsequently hanged. But such justice was not common.

 

 

          II. CULTURE

1. Flag 

     It is an official flag of Australia but as it is know nit isn’t the « Australian National Flag ». It was designed in 1971 by an Aboriginal artist, Harold Thomas, who decended from a tribe from the centre of Australia called Luritja. The aboriginal Flag is composed of three elements. There are two horizontal stripes, one black (above) and an other one which is red (below). In the centre of the flag is a yellow disc.

 

Each part of the flag mean an element :

 

     - the black region represents the aborigenes

     - the red region represent the red earth, the red ochre and a spiritual relation to the land

     - the yellow circle represents the Sun, the giver of life and protector

 

Additionnal to the special and symbolic meaning of this flag, it is representing the Indigenous Australians.

 

 

2. The dreamtime

 

     Also called The Dreaming, the Dreamtime or Creation period explains the origins of Australia but also of Australia inhabitants, and the world around them as Mountain, river, animals, etc.

The stories of The Dreamtime form the basis of Aboriginal religion, behaviour, law and order in society.

The name “The dreamtime” comes from the fact that Aborigines interpreted their dream as the memory of action during this Creation Period that made the land as it is today. So “Dreamtime” doesn’t refer to a person who is dreaming but to the creation of the world.

 

     The Dreaming tells of the journey and the actions of Ancestral Beings who created the natural world. They created landforms, such as certain animals digging, creating lagoons or pushing up mountain ranges, or the first animals or plants being made.

It is the central theme of Aboriginal culture. It leads to different kind of representation; most oral stories, legends, but also painting, and body painting. Images of the creation of the world are represented on weapons, utensils, body, ground designs, bark paintings, and on rock.

 

     So dreaming stories give meaning to human life. A particular family or group, from a particular area has their dreaming stories, which explain origins and occupations of their world by actions of their ancestors and spirits beings. Each tribe has their own Creation Period stories, often with a lesson or moral to be learned. These stories refer to aboriginal deities, animals, plants, and other beings, and are told to children, discuss around fire during camp but also sung and danced during ceremony.

In aboriginal culture, when an adolescent becomes an adult, he is progressing through phases of initiation and the more important, senior and secrets parts of “Dreamtime Stories” are taught to them, as well as secret rituals, songs and dances.

 

     Aborigines believe that their Ancestral Beings now reside in stones, trees, plants or animals, that is why this elements have value to them.

 

     One of a famous aboriginal story is The Rainbow Serpent, a giant snake which at the beginning of the earth created the mountain and the river with the furrow that it let during his passage.

                                                                                                 A representation of The Rainbow Serpent

 

3.Ceremonies

          

          Aboriginal life is punctuated of different ceremonies, which are following the life’s cycle, as Initiation for girls and boys, who are growing and becoming adults, and playing a big part in their culture.

          

          One ceremony practised and which can be during one week with nightly singing and dancing, story telling, display of body decoration and ceremonial objects, is the initiation of boys and girls into adulthood. This kind of ceremonies can be seen in the Film “Australia” with Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman. The songs and stories are about the “Dreaming” or the Creation Period, are told again and again, some of them can be told to women and children, other are restricted and kept secret just for Initiates.

          

          Another important ceremony is for the death of a person, the Funeral ceremony. Aborigines paint themselves white; cut their own bodies to show that they lost people they love. They also make some rituals, sing and dance to lead person’s spirit to its “birth place, from where it cans reborn. This funeral ceremony, or burial, have different version across the country, and some of them can have two steps; a primary burial, when the corpse is layed out and left several months to let the flesh rot away the bones. Then, the secondary burial consists to collect the bones, painted them with red ochre, and then dispersed in different ways.

                                                                                             

 

4. Art

 

The visual imaging is a fundamental part of abrigines's life, a connexion enter the past and the present, the surnatural and the ground, the people and the earth.

The abrignines always express in art with rock paintings, body painting and on the ground or in the sand.

At the begining aborignines didn't know the writing. The knowledge was pass on the word and the paintings drew for the initiation.

The paintings who talk about the "dream time" is always interpret by the initiation level of the man who paint or look.

 

Rock paintings

 

New researches shown that they began to paint 40000 years ago. It's one of the oldest form of art know.

We find it in the north of this enormous island. It represent the actors of te "dreamtime" that pain on canvas wil take back. 

 

Ground painting 

 

About the "dreamtime", it is realise during big assembly rituals it together aborigines guards of specifics dreams. 

This ccomposition on the ground can extending on 1 hectare ! 

On a prepare place they use naturals things like feathers, coal, tan and plants. 

This realisations are ephemeral but the patterns are permanently. 

 

Bark painting

 

The technic date from the begin of the 20th century. It developped in the wooded regions of the north of Australia. 

It use various patterns but it's always about "dreamtime".

 

Paint on canvas

 

  The paintings on canvas. They will appear at Papunya (Central Australia), in the 1970's at the initiative of an art teacher, Geoffrey Bardon. What was originally proposed to work together teenagers painting murals quickly aroused individual practices. Adults it interested it, it was for them to find, preserve and pass on their cultural and artistic heritage threatened by the representative, first of all on board and canvas.

 

 

          III. Conclusion

 

     Australian Aborigines are maybe the first inhabitants of earth, and it is art which allowed to discovered this important point. Indeed old rock painting was discovered and dated as the oldest drawing.

They have a rich culture and their own biliefs system which influenced their life and their art. However the settlement by British in Australia still 1788 had an  important and differents impacts on the Native Australian. British brought to them Alcoohol and put them into reservation.  British also tried to eradicate Aborigine population, for instance the Stolen Generations (also known as Stolen children) were the children of Australian Aboriginal descent who were removed from their families by the Australian government  and church missions between 1869 and 1969. Today many of aborigines have moved to suburbs, discrimination is very strong, that is maybe why the number of Aborigines unemployed is high.

But Government rencently tried to repair their mistakes, like Apologies for the Stolen Generation in 2008.

 

  

Glossary

 

          - History part

 

hunter = chasseur
gatheres = ceuilleurs
sailing = navigation
strait = détroit
landmass = zone terrestre
rising waters = la montée des eaux
remain = rester
trade = commerce
closest = le plus proche
browser = navigateur
fleet = flotte
purpose = la raison, l'objet de..
carry = transporter
convict = un détenu
improvenant = amélioration
settlement = gouvernement
complain = se plaindre
afford = se permettre
the tide rolled on = la chance a tourné
extinguish = éteindre, effacer
to share it = partager, avoir en commun
to palm off = refiler, fourguer
rather = assez, un peu
tract = large étendue
lodging = hébergement
smallpox = variole
measles = rougeole
shrink (shrunck) = rétrécir
roundup = rassemblement, rafle
wrongdoing = méfaits
herded = rassembler (en troupeau)
wanton = unjustifié, gratuit

 

References :

Sites : http://siekman.tripod.com/british.html consult the 15th november 2011

         http://www.voyage-australie-nz.com/aud_ab_migration.html consult the 24th november 2011

         http://www.aboriginalculture.com.au/art.shtml consult the 25th november 2011

         http://www.indigenousaustralia.info/culture/aboriginal-art.html

 

 

Book : Culture Smart ! Australia, Barry Penney, KUPERAD, Reprinted 2004