Hi there MHAZE...

Best of luck for your upcoming procedure, I'm sure you'll be walking out of Hospital on your own two feet after your quick recovery. OK! Bye for now.

Dear Foxy,

Can we just nail this one ? All cultures in the world are equally old, but some have moved on from hunting and gathering (often far more recently than people think).

If you mean the world's least-changing culture, the culture (or cultures) with the least change over the past 80,000 years (barring the necessary changes which must have occurred during the last Ice Age) - you might be closer to the mark. But I'm not sure what is so admirable about that.

The most enduring culture ? In such a harsh environment as Australia's, scrabbling for an existence, where survival was the be-all and end-all, with no real opportunity or happy confluence of circumstances to move from foraging to farming ? That might be true too.

As for population, I suspect that it would have taken a hammering during long droughts: no babies born, young children necessarily left to die, old and sick people dying off early, perhaps conflict between groups as they battled over scarcer resources.

So, perhaps in the best circumstances, it may have reached 750,000, but a long drought may have cut that back to as low as 250,000. So a mean of 500,000 sounds more realistic. For 500 language-groups, at an average of 1,000 each, that sounds reasonable.

Best wishes,

Joe

Well, let those who want to celebrate, celebrate & those who don't want to can stay home !

My earnest hope humanity can become one, reinforces Loudmouths view we are ALL about the same age
Is threatened every time some usually very small group, wants to change history
Cook, mum,s maiden name but no link, did find our country [maybe/almost certainly] other did it first
If you do not like the history learn from it
But look just at the history of our so called mother country, invaded over and again as is the case for just about every country

Dear Joe,

The information that I'm giving here has been taken
from various sources on the web. I'm merely quoting
what I've found.

The conclusion reached is that - "The conquest of
Aboriginal Nations provided a profound and lasting scar
on society that has often been more comfortable to ignore."

"It is a sign of maturity that such difficult issues are now
attempted at being confronted. A grand narrative of
spectacular economic growth does not drown out Black History
it was predicated upon it."

We're told that "Convict Australia is a story of sharp
contrasts. The colonial cocktail mixed coercion with
freedom, deprivation with opportunity, a state that was
both strong and weak, economic miracle with calamity, black
and white colonists annihilated property rights and
simultaneously lauded them."

"A self-styled civilised nation justified genocide. All
this resulted from penal policy but the policy was also
at the service of British imperial ambitions. The British
government had landed some 160,000 criminals in Australia's
convict colonies and commenced a process that dispossessed
perhaps one million Indigenous People. Persisting
consequences across the centuries make Australia's
colonial history a live political topic."

"A self-styled civilised nation justified genocide.
Foxy,
can you substantiate such a claim or is it simply something you've read written by some ignorant academic historian with no concept of then life & associated hardship ?