Brief history of the Australian indigenous peoples.
The Aborigines achieved a balanced diet by hunting and gathering, moving seasonally between camps as food supplies dictated. Fire was used methodically to burn old growth and encourage new. They had complex religious beliefs, sophisticated social relationships and trading links across the continent. In 1788 the first European settlement -Britain's latest penal colony - was established at what is now Sydney. The effects were catastrophic. With the convicts, soldiers and settlers came diseases to which Aboriginal people had no resistance - typhoid, flu, smallpox and venereal disease (Chesterman, J. and Galligan, "The Citizenship Divide in Colonial Victoria", in Citizens Without Rights: Aborigines and Australian Citizenship pp 14-33). The rape and abduction of Aboriginal women and girls were common (Saul, Ben p 41). .
From the beginning of the British invasion of Australia, indigenous people were slaughtered on a grand scale. In Tasmania between 1804 and 1834, the Aboriginal population was reduced from an estimated 5000 people to just 200, which represented a 90% reduction in just 30 years. In Victoria it has been estimated that the Koori population declined by about 60% in just 15 years between 1835 and 1850 as more than 68 individual 'massacres' were perpetrated in that period. According to representative of the North West Clans of Victoria, Mr. Gary Murray, of the 38 clans that lived in Victoria B.C. (Before Cook) only 24 today have living descendants. By 1850 virtually all active resistance to the invasion had been quelled in Victoria. Census figures published in March 1857 showed only 1,768 Aborigines were left in all of that state. So comprehensive was the 'ethnic cleansing' of Australia that out of an estimated 500 language groups on mainland Australia when the British arrived, barely half that number of languages were to survive (Dr T.
