Important too is the recognition now given to the complex and productive relationship that we had, and continue to have, with our country. As Australia's history was once written, Aboriginal people were mere wandering and 'primitive' tribes who naturally and inevitably gave way to more 'advanced' and industrious European settlers. The Indigenous perspective was not taken into account. In his 1968 Boyer Lectures, anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner described this state of affairs as 'the Great Australian Silence'. This continent has a human history estimated at between 50,000 to 150,000 years old.
Aboriginal people are representatives of the longest surviving cultures in the world.
Aboriginal Australia was a pattern of localities covering the entire continent. Groups hunted and gathered over areas defined by custom. Particular pieces of land were owned by particular groups. The land was not just a source of sustenance, but a materialisation of the journeys of the creative Ancestors. It was the basis of spiritual life and, in its own way, a religious text.