ABORIGINALS

Aboriginals

The Aboriginals are  people of Australia. They are approximately 250 000 today, and represent 1,5 % of the Australian population.

The "indigenous" word was used by the European explorers who approached in Australia in 1770; it wants to say the same thing as "autochtones" or "natives", i.e. it indicates the first inhabitants of a region. Even if the Aboriginals of Australia train people, each group distributed on the Australian territory has  its own name, its art, its traditions.

Some 250 languages aboriginals would have existed before the colonization of Australia by Europeans, and perhaps 500 or 700 tribes.Today  only one score of languages  would be usually spoken and 70 others would be  disappearing. Many Aboriginals speak English in addition to their language.

A TRAGIC HISTORY

The Aboriginals would have arrived to Australia  there is more than 50 000 years  (the island was then uninhabited); they would have from India by the sea, would have reached New Guinea, and finally Australia. Europeans discover them at the same time as Australia starting from  the xvii ^E century.

But the British colonization which begins in 1788 turns to the tragedy. Eliminated by  the massacres,  the diseases, dispossessed of their territory,  off-set  in great number, the Aboriginals are gathered in missions or reserves, become today of the communities.

Much had to settle in the cities, but remained in margin of the company. They know  a rate of very high unemployment  and their life expectancy is 20 years lower than those of the other Australian ones. They obtained a true Australian citizenship only in 1967. Thanks to their fights, they obtained rights and, since 1992, the restitution of some territories, but  their combat continuous. This combat relates in particular to  the protection of their identity,  the access to the land property  and  the disappearance of the economic and social inequalities  of which they are victims.

WANDERING Hunters-gatherers

Deprived of its grounds, the population aboriginal saw  his traditional way of life destroyed little by little. The Aboriginals were wandering hunters-gatherers. They moved in their territory in small groups and established campings of huts or stone shelters. They fished and drove out animals like the kangaroo, the wallaby, the émeu or the tortoise, using nets, of hooks or lances, but also of engines  (will woomera)  and boomerangs.

There were no really heads;  the old ones  took care of the good application of the social and religious laws. Each clan had an animal or a plant like  totem, representing his ancestor founder.

THE TIME OF THE DREAM

The Aboriginals  are very attached to the ground  and have  a large respect for nature. For them, each tree, each rock, animal or mountain, each tribe, with its laws, its beliefs and its territory were created by their ancestors, of the spirits resulting from the ground. They call this remote mythical time the "time of the Dream". After having transmitted to the men knowledge necessary to their survival and their existence in company, the heroes of the ancestral culture disappeared inside the ground.

The ritual one however make it possible to enter the time of the Dream. The time of a particular ceremony, the participants themselves become the primitive ancestors and, recalling their voyages, again live the "strong" time of creation. In the same way, when somebody dies, its heart turns over in this time when it was before being born.

A VERY RICH AND DIVERSIFIED ART

This great myth was transmitted orally by the legends and the ritual one, but also thanks to  the cave paintings  (painted on the walls of the rocks or the caves); oldest go back 45 000 years. Those of the west of the ground of Arnhem, the mountains of Kimberley and the peninsula of York Cape are among most famous. They represent the supernatural ancestors, such as the maker of rain  Wandjina,  the Man-flash or the snake Arc-in-Sky. Indigenous art, very rich, includes/understands also paintings of animals and the human ones where are represented the internal skeleton and bodies (they are known as "with x-rays" because they make think of radios), as well as paintings on bark or ground.

Indigenous art knows  a true revival  since the years 1970. Artists of the desert comb fabrics to acrylic painting in a geometrical style, with circles, lines, small points. Others turn today to the cinema, the music, the literature.

TO GO FURTHER

? history of Oceania
? Australia

©  2013 " www.amanitheophile.blogspot.com ".  All rights reserved.