Document ID: chunk:federal_register_of_legislation:F2024L00408:front:0:p15
Version: federal_register_of_legislation:F2024L00408
Segment Type: other
Provision Reference: 
Character Range: 45013–48065

Context

 Tribal boundaries within Australia are largely based on linguistic evidence and it is probable that boundaries, clan estates and band ranges were fluid and varied over time. Consequently, 'tribal boundaries' as delineated today must be regarded as approximations only and relative to the period of, or immediately before, European contact. Social interaction across these language boundaries appears to have been a common occurrence.

 According to Tindale,2 the territories of the Ngunawal, Ngarigo and the Walgalu peoples coincide and meet in the Queanbeyan area. The AWM probably falls within the tribal boundaries of the Ngunawal people.

 References to the traditional Aboriginal inhabitants of the Canberra region are rare and often difficult to interpret.3 However, the consistent impression is one of rapid depopulation and a desperate disintegration of a traditional way of life over little more than 50 years from initial European contact.4 This process was probably accelerated by the impact of European diseases, which may have included the smallpox epidemic in 1830, influenza, and a severe measles epidemic by the 1860s.5

 By the 1850s the traditional Aboriginal economy had largely been replaced by an economy based on European commodities and supply points. Reduced population, isolation from the most productive grasslands, and the destruction of traditional social networks meant that the final decades of the region's semi-traditional Indigenous culture and economy was centred around European settlements and properties.6

 By 1856 the local 'Canberra Tribe', presumably members of the Ngunawal, were reported to number around 707 and by 1872 only five or six 'survivors' were recorded.8 In 1873, one so-called 'pure blood' member remained, known to the European community as Nelly Hamilton or 'Queen Nellie'.

 Combined with other ethnohistorical evidence, this lack of early accounts of Aboriginal people led Flood 9 to suggest that the Aboriginal population density in the Canberra region and Southern Uplands was generally quite low.

 Frequently, only so called 'pure blooded' individuals were considered 'Aboriginal' or 'tribal' by European observers. This consideration made possible the assertion of local tribal 'extinctions'. In reality, 'Koori' and tribal identity remained integral to the descendants of the nineteenth-century Ngunawal people, some of whom continue to live in the Canberra/Queanbeyan/Yass region.

    2.2   Origins and Establishment

 The origins of the AWM are integrally associated with CEW Bean, Australia's official war correspondent during World War I (refer to Figure 2.1). Bean envisioned a national war museum in Australia's new capital, Canberra, which would house the relics and trophies of battle. At the same time, Bean was actively working towards earning Australia the right to keep and maintain its own war

   records, following the success of Canada in this regard in 1916. In May 1917, Lieutenant John Treloar was appointed officer-in-charge of the Australian War Records