page_title: Religion in Australia
section_title: Indigenous Australian religion
hierarchical_section_title: Religion in Australia / History / Indigenous Australian religion
caption_attribution_description: English: Hermannsburg Lutheran church, Northern Territory, Australia. Deutsch: Lutherische Kirche in Hermannsburg, Northern Territory, Australien.
context_page_description: Religion in Australia is diverse. Section 116 of the Constitution of Australia of 1901 prohibits the Commonwealth government from establishing a church or interfering with the freedom of religion. In an optional question on the 2016 Census, 52.2% of the Australian population declared some variety of Christianity. Historically the percentage was far higher; now, the religious landscape of Australia is changing and diversifying. In 2016, 30.1% of Australians stated "no religion" and a further 9.6% chose not to answer the question. Other faiths include Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, and Jews.
  Australia's Aboriginal people developed the animist spirituality of the Dreaming and some of the earliest evidence on earth for religious practices among humans has been found in the archaeological record of their ancestors. Torres Strait Islander religion bore similarities to broader Melanesian spirituality. The general isolation of indigenous Australian religion ended with the arrival of the first British settlers in 1788, whereafter subsequent immigrants and their descendants have been predominantly Christian.
context_section_description: At the time of British settlement, the Indigenous Australians had their own religious traditions of the Dreaming. As Mircea Eliade put it, "There is a general belief among the [indigenous] Australians that the world, man, and the various animals and plants were created by certain Supernatural beings who afterwards disappeared, either ascending to the sky or entering the earth." and ritual systems, with an emphasis on life transitions such as adulthood and death.
  Prior to European colonisation in 1788 there was contact with Indigenous Australians from people of various faiths. These contacts were with explorers, fishermen and survivors of the numerous shipwrecks. There have been countless artifacts retrieved from these contacts. The Aborigines of Northern Australia (Arnhem Land) retain stories, songs and paintings of trade and cultural interaction with boat-people from the north. These people are generally regarded as being from the east Indonesian archipelago. (See: Macassan contact with Australia.) There is some evidence of Islamic terms and concepts entering northern Aboriginal culture via this interaction.
  Centuries before European sailors reached Australia, Christian theologians already speculated whether the region, located on the opposite side of the world from Europe, had human inhabitants and, if so, whether the Antipodes descended from Adam and have been redeemed by Jesus. The prevailing point of view, expressed by St. Augustine of Hippo, was that "it is too absurd to say that some men might have set sail from this side and, traversing the immense expanse of ocean, have propagated there a race of human beings descended from that one first man." A dissenting view, held by the Irish-Austrian St. Vergilius of Salzburg, was "that beneath the earth there was another world and other men"; while not much is known about Vergilius' views, the Catholic Encyclopedia speculates that he was able to clear himself from accusations of heresy by explaining that the people of the hypothetical Australia were descended from Adam and redeemed by Christ.
  By the early 18th century, Christian leaders felt that the natives of the little-known Terra Australis Incognita and Hollandia Nova (still often thought as two distinct land masses) were in need of conversion to Christianity. In 1724, a young Jonathan Edwards wrote: 
  And what is peculiarly glorious in it, is the gospelizing the new and before unknown world, that which is so remote, so unknown, where the devil had reigned quietly from the beginning of the world, which is larger – taking in America, Terra Australis Incognita, Hollandia Nova, ... – is far greater than the old world. I say, that this new world should all worship the God of Israel, whose worship was then confined to so narrow a land, is wonderful and glorious!
caption: Hermannsburg Aboriginal Mission, Northern Territory
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