Indigenous AustraliansIndigenous Australians are people with familial heritage from, and membership in, the ethnic groups that lived in areas within the Australian continent before British colonisation. They consist of two distinct groups: the Aboriginal peoples of the Australian mainland and Tasmania, and the Torres Strait Islander peoples from the seas between Queensland and Papua New Guinea.
Aboriginal AustraliansAboriginal Australians are the various indigenous peoples of the Australian mainland and many of its islands, but excluding the ethnically distinct people of the Torres Strait Islands. The term "Indigenous Australians" is applied to Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders collectively. People first migrated to Australia at least 65,000 years ago and formed as many as 500 language-based groups. They have a broadly shared, complex genetic history, but only in the last 200 years were they defined as, and started to self-identify as, a single group.
Australian Aboriginal religion and mythologyAustralian Aboriginal religion and mythology is the sacred spirituality represented in the stories performed by Aboriginal Australians within each of the language groups across Australia in their ceremonies. Aboriginal spirituality includes the Dreamtime (the Dreaming), songlines, and Aboriginal oral literature. Aboriginal spirituality often conveys descriptions of each group's local cultural landscape, adding meaning to the whole country's topography from oral history told by ancestors from some of the earliest recorded history.
Indigenous Australian artIndigenous Australian art includes art made by Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders, including collaborations with others. It includes works in a wide range of media including painting on leaves, bark painting, wood carving, rock carving, watercolour painting, sculpting, ceremonial clothing and sandpainting; art by Indigenous Australians that pre-dates European colonisation by thousands of years, up to the present day.
Oral historyOral history is the collection and study of historical information about people, families, important events, or everyday life using audiotapes, videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews. These interviews are conducted with people who participated in or observed past events and whose memories and perceptions of these are to be preserved as an aural record for future generations. Oral history strives to obtain information from different perspectives and most of these cannot be found in written sources.
