Hunting has always been a way of survival for the Australian Aborigines. Before settlers came to Australia the Aboriginese depended only on thier own ability to make tools to hunt, fish and scavenge for food. The Aborigines are very good at hunting and Gathering food needed. Aborigines made their own weopons out of what their environmet offered.
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Hunting and Gathering
European observers have in the past considered that Australian Aboriginal people had a passive relationship with the environment. It was thought that they responded in an ad hoc manner to whatever resources were found,
aimlessly roaming about the landscape waiting to see what each seasonwould bring them by way of food and resources. One of the first Europeans to encounter Australian Aboriginal people was William Dampier, who visited the Kimberley coast of northern Australia in 1688. He thought them to be worse off than the Hottentots he had seen in the Cape Colony of southern Africa. Dampier stated that the Indigenous people of New Holland (Australia) were ‘the miserablest People in the World …They have no Houses, or Skin Garments, Sheep, Poultry, Fruits of the Earth, Ostrich Eggs, &c…’ 1 In 1770, James Cook reached a similar conclusion:
‘They seem to have no fixed habitation, but move about from place to place like wild beasts in search of Food, and, I believe, depend wholly upon the Success of the present day for their Subsistence.’ 2 From the point of view of Europeans who liked well-ordered urban and rural landscapes, early visitors, such as Dampier and Cook, considered the new continent to be a
wild and unsettled place, and to British eyes, ‘terra nullius’, without legal owners. 3 |
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Publication Information: Book Title: Where the Ancestors Walked: Australia as an Aboriginal Landscape. Contributors: Philip Clarke - author. Publisher: Allen & Unwin. Place of Publication: Crows Nest, N.S.W.. Publication Year: 2003. Page Number: 53.
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