Foxy,

Mu understanding is that people inherited their totems, either from their father or mother, or sometimes both. I don't know that people could simply choose any totem they liked.

And when you write,

"Each was a community in itself, and within this community the
clans and family groups lived in individual units in a big commune."

I have to respectfully disagree: families yes, larger units, maybe and sometimes, 'tribe'-wide, not necessarily and maybe hardly ever: groups down this way were as likely to fight other groups within the 'tribe' as with outsiders, even within the same dialect group, and often fatally. People didn't normally share with anybody outside their own family group, unless there was something like wife-exchange going on - this seems to have been common across Australia. Individual could put us right on that score :)

In one case down this way, I think in the 1870s, a man had promised his daughter to two different men, who each duly gave him many gifts. Eventually she decided - not her father, that's how it went down this way - to marry one of the men, but the father grabbed her, stripped her naked and, with some other family members, strung her up so that the other man could have his way with her through the netting. Then she could go off and marry her choice of partner.

It was a pretty rough old world. But call it 'communal' if you like :)

Cheers,

Joe

Actually, come to think of it, no-one really "owns" any country. It's those who keep the economy going & who provide the basis for all to have a reasonable time between birth & death who are the ones who can claim to exercise authority over that country but do not morally "own" its land..
Indigenous people in any region of this planet have an unquestionable right to reside in the area of their birth just as their compatriots have the right to expel them if they become disruptive.
All this talk about owning land by groups of people who have not contributed to making that land more productive in food availability is totally unprogressive in this day & age.
All idealism goes out the window at the same rate food becomes scarce.

Foxy, Aborigines would not have had any conception of "owning" specific parcels of land, for being precisely the type of people you describe them as: (a) nomads and (b) pantheists.

Nomadic pantheists would find the notion of "possessing" a materialist parcel of nature utterly inconceivable!

If they were so attuned to nature, where are all the giant fauna?
They hunted them to extinction!

If they were territorial to any significant degree, they'd have a warrior class to defend "their" land, as has occurred everywhere else in the world.

I've only heard of one such case (and they lost the battle with the settlers, so its not "their" land now).

Warriors have weapons.
All Aborigines had were *hunting* tools (spears, boomerangs).

Yes, we once had similar fairyland explanations for life, the universe and everything.
Then we grew up and invented Science.

"there were about 500 different Aboriginal languages. Therefore there must have been at least as many tribal groups."

And all defined by shared *biological* ancestry.
But how dare White Australians do the same! NAZIS!

No, our "tribe" we must be open to everyone and anyone, *irrespective* of ancestry!

Is Mise, all the colonies except Western Australia were once part of NSW.
Therefore the founding date has just as much relevance to them as it does to the now-much-smaller NSW.

And one day, the states may be dissolved, reverting "Australia" back to a single political entity.
Which began on 26th January, 1788.

The country rightly belongs to its inhabitants and its inhabitants rightly belong to the country.

The country consists of both the inhabitants and the land that is defined by its borders.

The inhabitants are those living in the territory who were born in the territory or have been accepted as inhabitants by those living in the territory.

Dead people are not inhabitants. “We” are not those who created Australia’s history (pre or post 1788) and can’t take credit or blame for what our ancestors did, but only for what we do in the light of what our predecessors did. The moral right to derive profit or penalty from the activities of individual or ethnic ancestors is strictly limited and is often grossly exaggerated.

The date December 03 1854 marks the rebellion at Eureka which – with the contributions of ultimately millions of people to this day - led to an Australia based on the Enlightenment, in contrast to dates and symbols based on participation in colonial wars. If we value the liberty won in the Enlightenment we'll uphold its values