Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand in the Ancient World

DATE: 8000 B.C.E.-700 C.E.

LOCALE: South Pacific

Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand in the Ancient World

The first peoples to arrive in the largest islands in the South Pacific came originally from Eurasia and traveled by sea south along the Australonesian archipelago, reaching Australia by about 40,000 years ago. Tasmania was isolated from the rest of Australia during the last great rise in ocean levels, about 12,000-6000 B.C.E. New Zealand was reached by ocean much later, perhaps as recently as 1000 C.E., and populated by a seagoing Polynesian people, the Maori, whose origins and culture remain distinct. Animal remains indicate an abrupt disappearance of certain species of birds about 50,000 years B.C.E., coinciding with the probable arrival of the first wave of human immigrants to the unpopulated continent, from the western lands and across the shallow seas.

By the period from 8000 to approximately 5000 B.C.E., human populations—with their tribal technologies, distinctions, distributions, language variations, and common knowledge—had stabilized and were associated with specific locales. These cultures had differentiated and adapted to areas from tropical coastal lowlands to high desert plateaus. During this late Holocene period, Aboriginal populations moved into the interior of the continent to explore desert environments. The evidence indicates that changes in toolmaking increased the efficiency of harvesting of local resources and gave human populations time to explore and exploit marginal environments.

Early populations of hunter-gatherers did not engage in agriculture and were completely dependent on their knowledge of their surroundings and their ability to sustain their yearly yields of local resources as their nomadic bands moved from place to place. These Aboriginal people apparently believed that by keeping the balance and maintaining the blueprint for creation—in the form of behavior, rituals, and ceremonies left by the Dreamtime people, who gave them to humans as instructions for sustaining the environment in all its complex dimensions—they ensured that human beings would continue. Variations in culture were mostly related to the demands of the different environments, and a great degree of cultural continuity is evident in the tools, beliefs, and social and economic forms across what was, before the oceans rose in the last episode of glacial subsidence, isolating Tasmania, a single continent referred to as Sahul.

Around 2000 B.C.E., flaked stone tools appeared, coincidental with the arrival in Australia of a type of wild dog, the dingo. From 1000 to 500 B.C.E., populations increased as these new tools allowed more efficient exploitation of the previously unused marginal environments, and trade between isolated groups became more widespread.

Though disputed to some degree, it is generally agreed that the Aboriginal peoples are of a single type, or perhaps two peoples, who originated in different areas of Indonesia and China and came onto the islands at separate times. There is striking uniformity among the many distinct groups that came to populate what are among the world’s largest islands.

Languages, cultural practices, and uses

More than two hundred various languages were spoken among groups referred to as tribes by Europeans. There were as many as five hundred distinctive tribal groups defined by their territorial ranges and named accordingly. Various groups were defined by the set of mythic cycles used in their songs, which were shared at large gatherings at various places from season to season. Their oral tradition was not poetic but includes chants, some several hundred verses long, recited to the accompaniment of clapping sticks, clubs, boomerangs, or other percussive instruments, as well as the didgeridoo, depending on the norms of the areal cultures.

Visual arts were highly developed. As the Aboriginal peoples went naked almost universally, they wore elaborate headdresses and painted and pierced their bodies. They also created complex incised wood carvings, rock and cave paintings, ceremonial hardwood poles, and various fetishes.

Housing types varied depending on weather. In the southern deserts, bough shelters and windbreaks were used in the cooler season, although most of the time people simply slept out in the open. Dogs and fires kept the people warm. In the north, bark shelters were constructed during the monsoon season, or the people retreated to caves or built stilt houses to get above the pests and floods.

Tools had to be, for the most part, portable. Fire kits, boomerangs, and spears thrown with the atlatl are examples of things carried in the Aboriginal peoples’ tool kits. Some tools were made on site from available materials, and some were part of sites returned to repeatedly. Tool types evolved in identifiable ways across the islands. The Aboriginal peoples made dugout canoes with stone adzes, as well as bark canoes and rafts rigged with pandanus sails, harkening back to their ancestors’ seagoing origins. They carried things in plaited baskets and wooden dishes, made kangaroo skins into water bags, and drank from skulls in the south. Women also carried kits of stone tools including files made of sharkskin, bone needles, wedges, and digging sticks that could be easily used as weapons. Small bands and family groups were the rule, and they had to be self-sufficient.

Cultural uses and practices have remained fairly consistent over tens of thousands of years and into historic times. Changes in the way people lived originated primarily during periods of climatic change or large-scale geological incidents such as changes in ocean levels. Aboriginal people have proven immensely adaptable.

Aboriginal society

The Aboriginal peoples believed that life came from the Dreaming, a fully integrated world, alive and theirs to sustain by ritual and other appropriate forms of ceremonial and kinship behavior. Timeless truths from the original spiritual beings were enacted in their daily life. If the people followed the original pattern given to their ancestors and handed down from one generation to the next, the world would remain in balance and they would survive. Dances and other forms of sacred ritual dominated daily life, apart from hunting by the men (which could be used as a way to gain spiritual knowledge) and food gathering by the women, and thus daily life was for these Aboriginal peoples an expression of the life of the Dreaming. Everything emerged from it and returned to it in continuous cycle, keeping the world in balance and giving the people a sense of involvement in and control over their surroundings. Life and death were contained in what was given to each generation.

Children were weaned by the age of two to three years. Children learned primarily by imitating adults and older relatives. Girls were taught to provide food and would join their husband’s household upon marriage. Kinship shaped all social relationships. Some people, such as in-laws, one learned to avoid, and some, such as elders, one respected. Totemic beliefs, close-knit clans, extended family bands, and social moieties each played a part in the greater community and landscape. Each person could identify himself or herself by birth group, hearth group, or estate group. The spiritual beings of the Dreaming were evident in every shrub, waterhole, and creature.

Boys were initiated between the ages of six and twelve, depending on the group. They were “reborn” as adults, to be guardians of spirit, fertility, and sacred space across time. They depended on their vast, complex, and intricate social and oral traditions for survival. Initiation into adulthood might include circumcision, urethral subincision, body piercing, tooth pulling, genital bloodletting, plucking, or otherwise removing body hair.

Marriage was mostly arranged, and infant betrothal was common. Other forms of negotiating a marriage included contracting, compensatory trades of family members for reciprocal mates from other groups, elopement, and bride capture. Polygyny was acceptable to varying degrees, and depending on the group, men could, in some instances, have from two to twenty-five wives. Divorce was known but not that common. Usually women left the men or were given away to fulfill reciprocal obligations. Women and children were treated well and not abused, although they were made somewhat subservient by social convention.

There were no chiefdoms or other evident political entities or structures, with rare exception. Likewise, the Aboriginal groups lacked class distinctions and were egalitarian in nature. Age and sex were the major determinants of social status. Most conflicts arose over unexplained deaths, arguments over spiritual matters, and fights over women. Shame was the means of social control, and in arguments, elders dealt with the principals and handed out sanctions to settle conflicts. Kinship claims held precedence over all others, and most authority was based on them. Unselfish giving and sharing, free association, exchange and trade, and devotion to the life of community were the most common values. Tools, weapons, red ochre, mind-altering plants, and pearl shell were traded across the continent. Environmental relationships and limitations tended to preclude the development of political structure.

Beliefs tended to be animistic and totemic, directed toward maintaining balance between the Dreaming, the people, and the environment. The creative beings provided the plan, changeless as the law of the Dreamtime. Self-disciplined, autonomous, and proud, the people needed only to participate in the eternal recreation of those original patterns of Dreaming, accessible through nature, trance, and dream. Beliefs drew the people together, and their totemic ties held them in place in their individual and communal relationships with all of creation. All things were thus defined by their relationships to all others. Men, women, and children, though somewhat circumscribed by their social conditioning and roles, all had a place in the sacred life of the world and played their part in the life of the community and its rituals, ceremonies, initiations, and social gatherings.

Social obligations and networks were mirrored in the extensive trade relationships that gradually developed within and between regions. Gift exchanges were the most common form of reinforcing social bonds and redistributing goods geographically. Some members of certain groups would travel hundreds of miles just to engage in social exchange networks. As they were nomadic and traveled light, Aboriginal peoples were not able to accumulate objects that might interfere with their necessary movement within their territories. The economy was based on the local environmental resources; if there were surpluses of objects of value, they were traded or given away to solidify social ties, incur and dispatch debts, and meet other obligations. This supported the continental diffusion of shared cultural characteristics.

Over long stretches of geological time stretching back more than 40,000 years, the peoples of Sahul, which became the continental islands of Indonesia, Papua, and Australia, and Tasmania, developed and stabilized, remaining fully responsive to the demands of the environment as expressed in the beauty and laws of the Dreamtime, adaptable enough to survive the rigors and demands of their place in the historic period after 1000 C.E.

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