Yes, Ian and attested to in oral history.

Without question, there were folk here as long ago as 60,000 years. Oral history confirms the first of these were the indigenous Tasmanian. And followed by successive waves of new settlers. the last of which would seem to have been 12-14,000 years ago?

Who brought with them hunting dogs, fire sticks and hitherto unknown brute force savagery.

Before then oral history and the paleontological record, witness to the fact that Australia was once covered from coast to coast with verdant forest.

Fire sticks and imported prehistoric hunting practise where fire flushed out or cooked game. Change the delicately balanced landscape forever.

With the last arrivals taking what and who they pleased, as they drove the earlier arrivals before them ever further south.

Simply put, very few first Australian can lay bona fide legitimate claim to a contestable 60,000-year-old, heritage.

But perhaps the 14,000 of years or so that their mob have indisputably been here as wave after wave of hostile migration laid claim to land already in other hands!

Celebrate that if you must
. Alan B.

Hi Alan,

Do you have the slightest evidence of a wave of invaders 14,000 years ago ? Dogs/dingoes were introduced around four thousand years ago, probably by visiting sailors, fishermen and traders from what is now Indonesia. People probably had fire when they arrived here sixty thousand years ago. They certainly would have needed it during the Ice Age of 12,000-25,000 years ago, when the existing population might have been cut down by as much as 90 %, and the landscape across Australia would have dried out significantly. Not to mention ice sheets over Tasmania and parts of Victoria and the Alps.

Oral history goes back a long way, sometimes decades. Forgetting and memory 'recovery' are significant features in Aboriginal culture.

As for the founding of Australia, perhaps 'finding' is a more appropriate word. Certainly sixty thousand years would give the finders some legitimacy, at least in terms of customary land use, which was recognised implicitly by Philip, and explicitly in law by about 1850: all pastoral leases issued after then had to have a clause recognising those rights, which were thought to co-exist with pastoral use. eases still have that clause in SA. Whether land use translates into land ownership is a bit moot, now that Mabo and the Native Title Act have legitimised it.

As for one group wiping out another, i.e. invaders concertedly exterminating Tasmanians, once the Tasmanian genome can be established from remains (mostly in museums), I suspect that it will be very similar to mainlanders'. Yes, the wiping out of one group by another was pretty common across Australia - one group here in SA was wiped out in about 1872, near Mt Eba south of Coober Pedy, for 'marrying wrong' - just as it was in all traditional groups across the world. Nothing unique there.

Joe

Great that life expectancy and quality of life has improved since settlement. Certainly worth celebrating. The 50 or 60000 years is a lie constantly repeated. Does not make it true. Aboriginal women have been big winners however domestic violence is at horrific levels especially where little western values have been embraced.

Contest your assumptions, Joe, given that period I referred to also neatly dovetails with the mini ice age that would have allowed such a wave.

But no, no written documentation or evidence per se, as all my Tasmanian forebears had no written language.

All I know was learned as oral history at my grandmother's knee when I stayed with her for around a year aged around 12.

My oral history and the paleontological record, against your oral history. Anyhow, no matter whose oral history is believed as the unvarnished unembellished truth, It's largely irrelevant history that can never be changed once accurately recorded.

Even so, artifacts only tell there were stone age people there. Not which ethnic grouping or their customs. Or the manner or timing of their arrival!
Alan B.

I suggest the author has a look at the definition of civilisation. It is quite clear that it refers to complex societies with centralised government, high culture, written language, specialisation of labour, taxation, domestication of animals and plants, monumental building and various other trappings. The Aboriginal people had none of these. This does not make them any better or worse than any other group of people in the world, but to refer to them as the "longest existing civilisation in history" makes as much sense as referring to the British of recent centuries as hunters and gatherers.

"We live alongside the world's oldest continuous culture, yet too many of us expect our indigenes to assimilate into our particular way of life, without realising that they have a connection to their own unique style.

"Over the last four hundred years, Europeans made the transition from an agrarian to industrial/technological way of life, but our original people retain over forty thousand years of intensive cultural knowledge about their land - its ability to provide food, medicine, shelter, and deep spiritual connection. Their history has not been modified by modernity;

"After colonisation, some of us made close contact with our first people to make use of their highly-developed skills such as foraging, hunting, and tracking, but many have regarded these folk as an unequal component of the society which we know and in which we function."

Quite a few dubious claims and inferences in that lot.

The Aboriginal skill sets the author lists are, at best, very marginal in 2018. "Foraging, hunting and tracking..." are not skills that will be highly regarded in most job seekers, especially in the big cities where most jobs are. The "forty thousand years of intensive cultural knowledge about their land", ditto. Like it or not, that knowledge is not the equivalent of knowledge flowing from intensive education and peer reviewed, legally controlled science. That's why people now turn up at a hospital or doctor's clinic rather than gather plants in the bush.

In the circumstances, assimilation can happen in only one direction.

And before we all become misty-eyed about the romance of living off the land, here's another perspective on that: https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/bennelong-papers/2013/05/the-long-bloody-history-of-aboriginal-violence

Of course, the British were relatively benign in their colonial endeavours. Alexander the Great, by contrast, thought nothing of killing every man in a captured outpost and selling the women and children into slavery.