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Australian Aborigines

The societies and cultures of Australian Aborigines have captured the interest of anthropologists for a variety of reasons. In the evolutionist anthropology of the 19th century, they were thought to represent survivals of “Stone Age man.” For the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, their religions represented the “earliest” and most pure type of religion. By the beginning of the 20th century, with the demise of evolutionist anthropology, anthropologists became interested in Aboriginal cultures and societies for their intrinsic qualities and in some cases out of a concern for social justice.

A series of ethnographic studies appeared from the late 19th century and through the 20th century, resulting from research among communities living on missions and government stations or on the fringes of country towns such as Alice Springs but largely treating their ways of life as pristine systems. From the mid-20th century, a number of ethnographies dealt with Aboriginal communities living on the fringes of country towns and within larger towns and cities. Anthropological interests shifted in the late 20th century toward studies of the relationships between Aboriginal people and the missions, their position in Australian society, and the history of that relationship.

Prehistory

Archaeologists date the first arrival of modern humans into Australia and New Guinea at about 50,000 years ago. Until the British colonization of Australia, which began in 1788, Australia and its peoples remained relatively isolated. The Australian landmass was periodically joined to the islands of New Guinea at times of low sea level to form the continent of Sahul. Following the end of the last such glacial period about 12,000 years ago, rising sea levels separated Australia from New Guinea, and Tasmania (and other smaller islands) from the mainland. Nevertheless, social intercourse continued, at least sporadically, across the Torres Strait, and in recent centuries, Macassan visitors voyaged on the summer monsoon winds from what is now Sulawesi, to the north coast of Australia, to gather bêche-de-mer. Despite these northerly contacts,Aboriginal people across the continent retained a hunting, gathering, and fishing mode of subsistence across the continent, although it can be argued that they practiced a form of “cultivation” through various kinds of interventions in the reproduction of food species, particularly through the use of fire to burn off the understory. Aborigines developed complex cosmologies, rituals, and forms of kinship and social organization and were linguistically very diverse; and their forms of society and culture were also quite diverse.

Population

The first systematic attempt at estimating the pre-colonial population was that of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, who arrived at a minimum population of 300,000. This estimate has recently been revised upwards on the grounds that the early estimates neglected the effects of smallpox, which ravaged the populations of many areas ahead of the British frontier. Archaeologists now consider a figure between 500,000 and a million to be plausible. Population densities probably ranged from about one person per 200 sq km in the arid zone to perhaps one person per 2 to 3 sq km on coasts with rich marine and terrestrial resources, and along the lower Murray River.

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