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Aboriginal Australians

Top row (l–r): Douglas Nicholls, David Wirrpanda, Adam Goodes. Bottom row (l–r): Truganini, Bronwyn Bancroft, Jessica Mauboy
Total population
517,000 (2006) 3% of Australia's population (2011)
Regions with significant populations
Northern Territory	32.5%
Western Australia	4.0%
Queensland	3.6%
New South Wales	2.5%
South Australia	2.3%
Victoria	1.0%
Languages
Several hundred Indigenous Australian languages, many no longer spoken, Australian English, Australian Aboriginal English, Kriol
Religion
Mixture of Christian, small numbers of other religions, various locally indigenous religions grounded in Australian Aboriginal mythology
Related ethnic groups
see List of Indigenous Australian group names

Aboriginal Australians, also referred to as Aboriginal people, are people whose ancestors were indigenous to the Australian continent——that is, to mainland Australia or to the island of Tasmania—before British colonisation of the continent began in 1788. Since 1995, the Australian Aboriginal Flag (right), designed in 1971 by the Aboriginal artist Harold Thomas, has been one of the official "Flags of Australia" under section 5 of the Flags Act 1953. About 20% of land in Northern Australia (Kimberley (Western Australia), Top End and Cape York) is now Aboriginal-owned.

Legal and administrative definitions

The category "Aboriginal Australians" was coined by the British after they began colonising Australia in 1788, to refer collectively to all peoples they found already inhabiting the continent, and later to the descendants of any of those peoples. Until the 1980s, the sole legal and administrative criterion for inclusion in this category was race.

In the era of colonial and post-colonial government, access to basic human rights depended upon your race. If you were a "full blooded Aboriginal native ... any person apparently having an admixture of Aboriginal blood", a half-caste being the "offspring of an Aboriginal mother and other than Aboriginal father" (but not of an Aboriginal father and other than Aboriginal mother), a "quadroon", or had a "strain" of Aboriginal blood you were forced to live on Reserves or Missions, work for rations, given minimal education, and needed governmental approval to marry, visit relatives or use electrical appliances.

This racial litmus test was assumed in the two references to Aboriginal people that used to exist in the Constitution of Australia. Section 51(xxvi) gave the Commonwealth parliament power to legislate with respect to "the people of any race" throughout the Commonwealth, except for the people of "the aboriginal race," who were subject to—and only to—the laws of the particular state in which they lived. Section 127 provided that "aboriginal natives shall not be counted" in reckoning the size of the population. After both of these references were removed by a 1967 referendum, there was no longer any explicit reference to Aboriginal peoples in the Australian Constitution. Since that time, there have been a number of proposals to amend the constitution to specifically mention Indigenous Australians.

The change to Section 51(xxvi) gave the Commonwealth parliament the power to make laws specifically with respect to Aboriginal peoples as a "race". In the Tasmanian Dam Case of 1983, the High Court of Australia was asked to determine whether Commonwealth legislation whose application could relate to Aboriginal people—parts of the World Heritage Properties Conservation Act 1983 (Cth) as well as related legislation—was supported by Section 51(xxvi) in its new form. The case concerned an application of that legislation that would preserve cultural heritage of Aboriginal Tasmanians. It was held that Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders, together or separately, and any part of either, could be regarded as a "race" for this purpose. As to the criteria for identifying a person as a member of such a "race", the definition by Justice Deane has become accepted as current law. Deane J said:

It is unnecessary, for the purposes of the present case, to consider the meaning to be given to the phrase "people of any race" in s. 51(xxvi). Plainly, the words have a wide and non-technical meaning . The phrase is, in my view, apposite to refer to all Australian Aboriginals collectively. Any doubt, which might otherwise exist in that regard, is removed by reference to the wording of par. (xxvi) in its original form. The phrase is also apposite to refer to any identifiable racial sub-group among Australian Aboriginals. By "Australian Aboriginal" I mean, in accordance with what I understand to be the conventional meaning of that term, a person of Aboriginal descent, albeit mixed, who identifies himself as such and who is recognised by the Aboriginal community as an Aboriginal.

While Deane's three-part definition reaches beyond the biological criterion, it has been criticised as continuing to accept the biological criterion as primary. It has been found difficult to apply, both in each of its parts and as to the relations among the parts; biological "descent" has been a fall-back criterion.

Definitions from Aboriginal Australians

Eve Fesl, a Gabi Gabi woman, wrote in the Aboriginal Law Bulletin describing how she and other Aboriginal people preferred to be identified:

The word 'aborigine' refers to an indigenous person of any country. If it is to be used to refer to us as a specific group of people, it should be spelt with a capital 'A', i.e. 'Aborigine'.

While the term 'indigenous' is being more commonly used by Australian Government and non-Government organisations to describe Aboriginal Australians, Lowitja O'Donoghue AC, CBE, commenting on the prospect of possible amendments to Australia's constitution, was reported as saying:

I really can't tell you of a time when 'indigenous' became current, but I personally have an objection to it, and so do many other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. This has just really crept up on us ... like thieves in the night. We are very happy with our involvement with indigenous people around the world, on the international forum because they're our brothers and sisters. But we do object to it being used here in Australia.

O'Donoghue went on to say that the term indigenous robbed the traditional owners of Australia of an identity because some non-Aboriginal people now wanted to refer to themselves as indigenous because they were born there.

Definitions from academia

Dean of Indigenous Research and Education at Charles Darwin University, Professor MaryAnn Bin-Sallik, has publicly lectured on the ways Aboriginal Australians have been categorised and labelled over time. Her lecture offered a new perspective on the terms urban, traditional and of Indigenous descent as used to define and categorise Aboriginal Australians. She said:

Not only are these categories inappropriate, they serve to divide us. Government's insistence on categorising us with modern words like 'urban', 'traditional' and 'of Aboriginal descent' are really only replacing old terms 'half-caste' and 'full-blood' – based on our colouring.

She called for a replacement of this terminology by that of "Aborigine" or "Torres Strait Islander"—"irrespective of hue".

Origins

The origin of Aboriginal peoples in Australia has been the subject of intense speculation since the nineteenth century. Until recently, no theory of migration had gained wide acceptance. Genetic studies had shown the Aboriginal peoples to be related much more closely to each other than to any peoples outside Australia, but scholars had disagreed whether their closest kin outside Australia were certain South Asian groups, or instead, certain African groups. The latter would imply a migration pattern in which their ancestors passed through South Asia to Australia without intermingling genetically with other populations along the way. A 2009 genetic study in India found similarities among Indian archaic populations and Aboriginal people, indicating a Southern migration route, with expanding populations from Southeast Asia migrating to Indonesia and Australia.

In a genetic study in 2011, researchers found evidence, in DNA samples taken from strands of Aboriginal people's hair, that the ancestors of the Aboriginal population split off from the ancestors of the European and Asian populations between 62,000 and 75,000 years ago—roughly 24,000 years before the European and Asian populations split off from each other. These Aboriginal ancestors migrated into South Asia and then into Australia, where they stayed, with the result that, outside of Africa, the Aboriginal peoples have occupied the same territory continuously longer than any other human populations. These findings suggest that modern Aboriginal peoples are the direct descendants of migrants who arrived around 50,000 years ago. This finding is supported by earlier archaeological finds of human remains near Lake Mungo that date to 45,000 years ago. In the same genetic study of 2011 it was found evidence that Aboriginal peoples carry to one degree or another some genes associated with the Denisovan peoples of Asia, the study suggests that there are an increase in allelee sharing between the Denisovans and the Aboriginal Australians genome compared to other Eurasians and Africans. Nevertheless the Papuans have more sharing alleles than Aboriginal peoples, these data suggests that modern and archaic humans interbred in Asia before the migration to Australia.

Groups of Aboriginal Australians

Dispersing across the Australian continent over time, the ancient peoples expanded and differentiated into hundreds of distinct groups, each with its own language and culture. Four hundred and more distinct Australian Aboriginal peoples have been identified across the continent, distinguished by unique names designating their ancestral languages, dialects, or distinctive speech patterns. Historically, these groups lived in three main cultural areas, known as the Northern, Southern, and Central cultural areas. The Northern and Southern areas, having richer natural marine and woodland resources, were more densely populated than the less resource-rich Central area.

Other names used by Australian Aboriginal people

There are a number of other names from Australian Aboriginal languages commonly used to identify groups based on geography, including:

• Bama in north-east Queensland
• Koori (or Koorie or Goori or Goorie) in New South Wales and Victoria
• Murri in southern Queensland
• Noongar in southern Western Australia
• Nunga in southern South Australia
• Anangu in northern South Australia, and neighbouring parts of Western Australia and Northern Territory
• Palawah (or Pallawah) in Tasmania.

See also

• Aboriginal Tasmanians
• First Nations
• History of Indigenous Australians
• Indigenous Australian music
• Maori people
• National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award

References

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Aboriginal Australians" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (May 2009) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

1. 4705.0 - Population Distribution, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, 2006, Australian Bureau of Statistics.
2. http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/census-reveals-citys-changes-20120624-20wme.html
3. FLAGS ACT 1953 – statusquo.org. Retrieved 22 November 2011.
4. http://www.environorth.org.au/windows/all/indigenous_health.html
5. ^ de Plevitz, Loretta & Croft, Larry: "Aboriginality Under The Microscope: The Biological Descent Test In Australian Law" (2003) 3 QUT Law & Justice Journal 105 Accessed 21 November 2011.
6. Gooda, Mick. Indigenous inclusion is good for our constitution – smh.com.au. Published 9 July 2010. Retrieved 23 November 2011.
7. Karvelas, Patricia. Strong constitution needed for national consensus on Aboriginal recognition – theaustralian.com.au. Published 5 February 2011. Retrieved 23 November 2011.
8. Deane J in Commonwealth v Tasmania (Tasmanian Dam Case) (1983) 158 CLR 1 at 273-274.
9. Re A-G (Cth) v Queensland FCA 285; 25 FCR 125 (Federal Court of Australia, Full Court). The outcome was to fix the Queensland government with responsibility for an "Aboriginal" death in custody, when the deceased was of Aboriginal descent but had himself denied being of Aboriginal identity.
10. Fesl, Eve D.: "'Aborigine' and 'Aboriginal'" (1986) 1(20) Aboriginal Law Bulletin 10 Accessed 19 August 2011.
11. ^ "Don't call me indigenous: Lowitja". The Age. Melbourne. Australian Associated Press. 1 May 2008. Retrieved 12 April 2010.
12. ^ Charles Darwin University newsroom (12 May 2008) "First public lecture focuses on racist language" Accessed 13 May 2008.
13. Edwards, W H (2004). An introduction to Aboriginal societies (2nd ed.). Social Science Press. p. 2. ISBN 1-876633-89-1 9781876633899. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: length (help)
14. An Aboriginal Australian genome reveals separate human dispersals into Asia. Morten Rasmussen, Xiaosen Guo, Yong Wang, Kirk E. Lohmueller, Simon Rasmussen, Anders Albrechtsen, Line Skotte, Stinus Lindgreen, Mait Metspalu, Thibaut Jombart,Science. 2011 October 7; 334(6052): 94–98. Published online 2011 September 22. doi: 10.1126/science.1211177
15. Callaway, Ewen (22 September 2011), First Aboriginal genome sequenced, Nature News
16. ^ Lourandos, Harry (1997) "New Perspectives in Australian Prehistory," Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom. ISBN 0-521-35946-5.
17. Horton, David (1994) The Encyclopedia of Aboriginal Australia: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander History, Society, and Culture, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra. ISBN 0-85575-234-3.

v t e Ancestry of Australians
Ancestral background of Australian citizens
Indigenous	Aboriginal Australians Torres Strait Islanders
Africa	Angolan Beninese Burundian Cameroonian Congolese Eritrean Ethiopian Gabonese Gambian Ghanaian Guinean Ivorian Kenyan Liberian Malawian Malian Mauritian Nigerian Rwandan Senegalese Sierra Leonean South African Tanzanian Togolese Ugandan Zambian Zimbabwean
Americas	American Canadian Caribbean and West Indian Australian Hispanic and Latin American Argentine Bolivian Brazilian Chilean Colombian Cuban Ecuadorian Guatemalan Honduran Mexican Panamanian Paraguayan Peruvian Puerto Rican Salvadoran Uruguayan Venezuelan Jamaican Trinidadian and Tobagonian
Asia	Afghan Hazara Pashtun Armenian Azerbaijani Bangladeshi Bengali Bhutanese Burmese Chin Karen Mon Cambodian Chinese Hmong Hong Kong Cantonese Mien Taiwanese Hakka Fuzhou/Hokchiu Hoklo Tibetan Uyghur East Timorese Filipino Georgian Indian Bengali Gujarati Indo-Fijian Malayali Punjabi Sindhi Tamil Telugu Indonesian Acehnese Balinese Javanese Madurese Sundanese Japanese Kazakh Korean Kyrgyz Laotian Malaysian Bruneian Kadazan Temoq Maldivian Mongolian Nepali Pakistani Baloch Hazara Pashtun Punjabi Sindhi Pathan Singaporean Sri Lankan Tamil Tajik Tatar Thai Turkmen Uzbek Vietnamese Hmong Mien
Europe	Albanian Anglo-Celtic Cornish English Irish Northern Irish Scottish Welsh Austrian Belgian Belarusian Bosnian Bulgarian Croatian Cypriot Czech Danish Dutch Estonian French Finnish German Greek Hungarian Icelandic Italian Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian Maltese Montenegrin Norwegian Polish Portuguese Romani Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovene Spanish Swedish Swiss Ukrainian
Middle East and North Africa	Arab Algerian Bahraini Egyptian Emirati Iraqi Jordanian Kuwaiti Lebanese Libyan Moroccan Palestinian Saudi Somali Syrian Tunisian Assyrian Bari Berber Coptic Chaldean Darfur Dinka Iranian Israeli/Jewish Kurdish Mandaean Nubian Nuer South Sudanese Sudanese Turkish Yezidi
Oceania	Fijian Indo-Fijian Niuean Ni-Vanuatu New Zealander Māori Papua New Guinean Samoan South Sea Islander Tongan
according to Reflecting a Nation: Stories from the 2011 Census, 2012–2013 and Census of Population and Housing: Reflecting Australia - Stories from the Census, 2016

• Use dmy dates from January 2011
• Indigenous peoples of Australia