I looked outside at the ocean for what might have been the last time. From now on we were headed to the unforgiving Outback. For us, this place felt unlivable, desolate, and scorching hot. But for the Aboriginals, this was their home for tens of thousands of years. I can’t stress how impressive it was for these people to not only survive but to thrive with what they had.
People suspect that the Aboriginals first came to Australia around 50,000 years ago, using only their handmade rafts and wits to navigate the open seas. This is thought to be the first open-sea voyage ever to be recorded! Just imagine how much courage is needed to leave your home and everything you knew behind to sail into the great unknown.
Back to the topic of the Aboriginals thriving, while they were the main residents of the continent, the Australian landscape was surprisingly thought to be the most controlled in the world. People used “cool fire” to help create open grasslands, dug out water channels, and even planted crops to lure creatures to hunting grounds. For those who are unfamiliar with “cool fire”, it is a form of controlled burning where people intentionally start fires in semi-wet areas to prevent the fire from going wild but dry enough so it burns any unwanted grasses (This technique is still being used today by scientists to stop climate change).
The Aboriginals were also great hunters. They used their man-made grasslands as hunting grounds and used specialized hunting weapons, such as the first-ever flight mechanism, the boomerang. However, hunting wasn’t so easy for them. The kangaroos they hunted were fast, and they usually got only one shot before the kangaroos spotted them and fled. Luckily for the Aboriginals, they were also skilled foreigners. They knew every plant in their vicinity to the point where the whole continent became a supermarket. They knew the medical properties of plants, the flavors, and even the poisons that they used to contaminate water holes to paralyze the fish.
These specialized tasks were distributed amongst the people in their clan men and women. Speaking of which, the clans were another great feat for these people. Not only were hunting and gathering tasks assigned to each member, but they also had a “totem” system in which each member was assigned a specific species to protect and monitor. Remarkably, the Aboriginals realized that they couldn’t just go off and hunt everything they saw, so they created this system to prevent that from happening. These clans also had a complex marriage system to prevent the members from interbreeding and contaminating bloodlines. Nothing went unnoticed in these clans, because everything was supervised by a strict set of rules, and if any were broken, there would be brutal punishments including getting your leg pierced or in worse cases, death.
All of the rules, knowledge, and history were passed down from generation to generation through art and ‘dream songs’. These were a form of memorizing that involved stories. Ingeniously, the Aboriginals had figured out that the human brain remembers things better if it pairs things up with a character or a place, hence, the stories. In my opinion, the most impressive version of these stories is that relate to maps. These talk about the journey of characters who travel past other beings who resemble real mountains or valleys, and eventually end up at their destination. people used these stories to travel hundreds of miles, with the knowledge of each water hole in their vicinity along with shelter. And to think I can’t even play a normal game of telehpone.
However recently, things haven’t gone well for the Aboriginals. When settlers came to Australia, they treated the natives as strangers to the land, as beings who didn’t fully appreciate the seemingly perfect land they lived in. They could not have been more wrong. Over the next few generations, so skillfully cultivated land began to grow wild, back to its original form before the first Aboriginals came from the horizon on nothing but small rafts. All of the skill and knowledge slowly started to fade, and worse, the Aboriginals became poor and homeless, not fully adapting to this new world. This section of the trip made me think about the morals of the first settlers and the deep connection the Aboriginals had with their land. It felt cruel to let these skilled gatherers and warriors become overlooked and as lower beings. Such infamy has happened around the world on countless occasions. Sadly, in this story, there is no true happy ending. Some Aboriginals have learned to blend into modern society, but for most, their perception of the world has been flipped, and what once was their homeland, is now a completely different world.