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Aboriginal Australians are the various Indigenous peoples of the Australian mainland and many of its islands, excluding the ethnically distinct people of the Torres Strait Islands. Humans first migrated to Australia at least 65,000 years ago, and over time formed as many as 500 language-based groups . [ 3 ]
(For the purposes of the Australian Census, the last factor is excluded as impractical.) [16] A definition was proposed by the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in the Report on a Review of the Administration of the Working Definition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (Canberra, 1981): "An Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander is a person ...
A "Commonwealth working definition" for Indigenous Australians was developed from 1968 and endorsed by Cabinet in 1978 which contains elements of descent, self-identification and community recognition in contrast to the earlier preponderance of Aboriginal blood definition.
Australian Aboriginal English (AAE) is a dialect of Australian English used by a large section of the Indigenous Australian (Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander) population. Australian Kriol is an English-based creole language that developed from a pidgin used in the early days of European colonisation.
Indigenous Australians were considered in the global scientific community as the world's most primitive humans, leading to trade of human remains and relics. [175] This was especially true of Indigenous Tasmanians, with 120 books and articles written by scholars around the world by the late 19th century. [176]
The term "Aboriginal" is traditionally applied to only the indigenous inhabitants of mainland Australia and Tasmania, along with some of the adjacent islands. Indigenous Australians is an inclusive term used when referring to both Aboriginal and Torres Strait islanders (the "first peoples").
Connection to country, "the most fundamental pillar of Indigenous identity", is a difficult concept for non-Indigenous Australians to understand, and disconnection from country has been shown to have an impact on Indigenous peoples' health and well-being. [7] The connection to country is frequently expressed in Indigenous art. [8]
Today, Indigenous sovereignty generally relates to "inherent rights deriving from spiritual and historical connections to land". [1] Indigenous studies academic Aileen Moreton-Robinson has written that the first owners of the land were ancestral beings of Aboriginal peoples, and "since spiritual belief is completely integrated into human daily activity, the powers that guide and direct the ...