Aboriginals weapons

Boomerangs:
Boomerangs are also a very multi functional instrument of the Aboriginal people. Their uses include warfare, hunting prey, rituals and ceremonies, musical instruments, digging sticks and also as a hammer. Click here

Clubs:
Clubs are usually always made from mulga wood and can vary in shapes and sizes.

Shields:
Shields are usually made from the bloodwood of Mulga trees. Aboriginal men using very basic tools make these. They are designed to be mainly used in battle but are also used in ceremonies. Like other weapons, design varies from region to region.

Aboriginal art

Australian Indigenous art is the oldest unbroken tradition of art in the world. The oldest firmly dated rock art painting in Australia is a charcoal drawing on a rock fragment found during the excavation of the Narwala Gabarnmang rock shelter in south western Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory. Dated at 28,000 years, it is one of the oldest known pieces of rock art on Earth with a confirmed date. Narwala Gabarnmang is considered to have one of the most extensive collections of rock art in the world and predates both Lascaux and Chauvet cave art, the earliest known art in Europe by at least 10,000 years.

The Customs

Australian Aboriginal culture includes a number of practices and ceremonies centred on a belief in the Dreamtime. Reverence for the land and oral traditions are emphasised. Language groupings and tribal divisions exhibit a range of individual cultures.

Australian Aboriginal art has existed for thousands of years and ranges from ancient rock art to modern watercolour landscapes. Aboriginal music has developed a number of unique instruments. Contemporary Australian aboriginal music is predominantly of the country music genre. Indigenous Australians did not develop a system of writing.

The History

The history of Aboriginal Australian is thought to have spanned 40,000 to 45,000 years, although some estimates have put the figure at up to 80,000 years before European settlement. The Aboriginal Australians lived with a strong dependence with the land, and also the water. Each group developed skills for the area in which they would live – hunting or fishing or gathering.

The path of Australian Aboriginal history changed radically after the 18th- and 19th-century settlement of the British: Indigenous people were displaced from their ways of life, were forced to submit to European rule, and were later encouraged to assimilate into Western culture. Since the 1960s, reconciliation has been the pursuit of European Australian–Aboriginal Australian relations.

The Religion

Aboriginal religion, like many other religions, is characterised by having a god or gods who created people and the surrounding environment during a particular creation period at the beginning of time.

Wandjina bring the Wet Season
rains to the people of

the Kimberley.

Aboriginal people are very religious and spiritual, but rather than praying to a single god they cannot see, each group generally believes in a number oof different deities, whose image is often depicted in some tangible, recognisable form.