THE BEGINNING OF THE AUSTRALIAN STORY

When did human occupation of Australia begin and by whom? We only know that the Aborigines and their ancestors have been here for tens of thousands of years .

There is speculation amongst historians, both white and black, about where the Aborigines originally came from. They came in different waves at different times from various parts of Asia. Aborigines in different parts of Australia are not all ethnically and racially the same.

As Prof. Manning Clark says in his "A History of Australia", the early inhabitants of the continent created cultures but not civilisations. He goes on to say "A distinction is made here between 'civilisation' in the sense described in the Oxford English Dictionary, of a people brought out of a state of barbarism, and 'culture' in sense defined in the Grosse Brockhaus as the sum of the efforts made by a community to satisfy and reconcile the basic human requirements of food, clothing, shelter, security, care of the weak and social cohesion by controlling its natural environment. The word 'culture' is not used in its other sense of 'the efforts made to ennoble, refine and cultivate the human personality by sublimating its instinctual nature"

In both Europe and Asia there had long been speculation about a "great unknown south land" terra australis incognita, to balance the land masses of the north. Ancient Greek and Roman writers wrote of it and put it on their maps of the world.

The truly surprising thing is that Australia was not settled by people from Malaysia or Indonesia or the Chinese long before white man came here. The fear of the unknown and that past a certain point on the map there were monsters and demons seems to have affected both European and Asian seafarers and explorers.

The Muslim peoples in Indonesia, Malaya and countries to the north of Australia shared these fears and before 1400 regarded anything beyond Indonesia-Timor as the "The Kingdom of the Anti-Christ".

The Macassans, from a part of Indonesia, did sail to Australia for fishing off the north-western Australian coast and also did some trade with the Aborigines.

The Portuguese sailor Torres sailed through the narrow strait between New Guinea and Northern Australia in 1607, and completely missed Australia, though it is still called Torres Strait for him. He did land in New Guinea and saw "Moors" there. Moors were North African Muslims, called Moors by the Spanish and Portuguese, so it was clear that travellers from distance parts had come close to Australia but never actually found it.

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