Indigenous Australians are the people who are indigenous to Australia. They include the Aboriginal Australians as well as Torres Strait Islanders and are often known together as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Many Indigenous Australians suffered starting in 1788, when the first Europeans arrived. Many caught diseases from the Europeans (British and Irish people) and/or lost their hunting lands.
When the British came to Australia in 1788, they called all the local people in the mainland "aboriginals", meaning people who have lived there since the earliest times.
There are now about 650,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living in Australia.
Aboriginal Australians have their own type of art. Paintings of the people, spirits, and animals of Dreamtime cover sacred cliffs and rocks in tribal territories. Some of the pictures are made in red and yellow ochre and white clay. Others have been carved into the rocks. Many are thousands of years old.
Modern Aboriginal art is mostly based on old stories about Dreamtime.
Boomerangs are one of a group of weapons known as "throwsticks". The typical boomerang is designed to be self-returning, but it must be properly thrown.
Since boomerangs have been discovered in cultures with no connection with Australia such as in ancient Egypt, they probably developed separately.
Modern computer-designed boomerangs may have three or four wings, instead of the traditional two.
Land claims
When the British came to live in Australia, they decided that the land was empty and that nobody "owned" the land in the way that Europeans used the word. That was called "terra nullius", Latin words for "empty land".
In 1976, the Australian government gave Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people the right to use the land where their tribes were originally located. On 3 Jun, 1992, the High Court of Australia said that the idea of terra nullius was wrong, and the government brought in new laws to set up native title.
Under the new laws, an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person can claim land as Indigenous Australian land if they can prove that:
12Hesp, Patrick A. et al 1999. Aboriginal occupation on Rottnest Island, Western Australia, provisionally dated by aspartic acid racemisation assay of land snails to greater than 50 ka. Australian Archaeology, No 49 (1999)
↑Valde-Nowak & others 1987. Upper Palaeolithic boomerang made of a mammoth tusk in south Poland. Nature329: 436–438 (1 October 1987); doi:10.1038/329436a0
↑Jones, Philip 1996. Boomerang: behind an Australian icon. Wakefield Press. ISBN 9781862543829
123"Terra Nullius". Aboriginal Victoria. Visit Victoria. Archived from the original on 2010-03-18. Retrieved 2010-01-11.
