Neilster
Posts: 2890
Joined: 10/27/2003 From: Hobart, Tasmania, Australia Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: TulliusDetritus quote:
ORIGINAL: Neilster There's currently a culture war going on here about whether to call Australia's colonisation an "invasion", driven by Aboriginal people who, quite reasonably, feel their side of the story has been glossed over in the education system for too long. Mind you, go to any museum here in the last 20 years and Aboriginal history gets a huge section of it and European and modern Australia is embarrassedly squished away in about one room Cheers, Neilster To be fair, aboriginal history covers 40.000 years, whilst the "European" era covers 200 years? Still I get the point. If you want to know what the earliest modern humans were like, studying the oldest Aboriginal rock art is a good place to start. Some of their language, songs and stories may be extremely old too. Humans probably left Africa around 60,000 years ago (it's a bit fuzzy and may have been a bit earlier) and they made it to Australia remarkably quickly. Then, just as in the Americas, the got to the most Southerly bits in quick time as well. There is Aboriginal rock art at the bottom of Tasmania that is about 40,000 years old. I think it's fascinating that these people were wandering around a whole continent for tens of thousands of years in complete isolation and only started encountering outsiders in the last few hundred. When Tasmania got cut off from mainland Australia after the last ice age, they eventually forgot about it and thought Tasmania was the entire world. Having said that, there has been a fair bit of action in the last 225 years, and possibly now it's European Australia's history that's being glossed over. Cheers, Neilster
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