Aboriginal Archives

New evidence confirms our Indigenous languages have a common source, but how they spread remains a mystery

by Roberto Golovic | Sep 29, 2025 | Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes
Have you ever wondered how Australia’s many Indigenous languages relate to one another and how far back the connections go? The Australian continent has been settled by Indigenous people for at least 50,000 years, but just how old are the languages spoken today and where did they originate? Our research provides some answers to these questions – and the answers throw up new and interesting puzzles.

How historically accurate is the film High Ground? The violence it depicts is uncomfortably close to the truth

by History Guild | May 26, 2025 | Military History, Political and Economic History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 8 minutes The Australian film High Ground, set mostly at a mission in Arnhem Land in...

Of course Australia was invaded – massacres happened here less than 90 years ago

by History Guild | Jan 26, 2025 | Advocacy, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 4 minutes Much has been made of the University of New South Wales’ “diversity...

60 years old, the Yirrkala Bark Petitions are one of our founding documents – so why don’t we know more about them?

by History Guild | Dec 23, 2024 | Advocacy, Political and Economic History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 17 minutes
Each of these declamatory objects speaks back to power, a creative act of resistance to a perceived political injustice. Like the stories of the creation, presentation and reception of the Eureka Flag and the women’s suffrage petition, the story of the Bark Petitions takes us to a time when democratic inclusion, when basic entitlements of citizenship, could not be taken for granted by certain sections of the body politic.

Farmers or foragers? Pre-colonial Aboriginal food production was hardly that simple

by History Guild | Nov 11, 2024 | Political and Economic History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes
Farmers versus foragers is a huge oversimplification of what was a mosaic of food production. After all, Australian landscapes differ markedly, from tropical rainforest to snowy mountains to arid spinifex country. For many Aboriginal people, the terms “farming” and “hunter-gatherer” do not capture the realities of 60 millennia of food production.

History and myth: why the Treaty of Waitangi remains such a ‘bloody difficult subject’

by History Guild | Oct 28, 2024 | Military History | 0

Reading time: 10 minutes
The Treaty of Waitangi, the influential historian Ruth Ross (1920-1982) remarked in 1972, is “a bloody difficult subject”. She should have known – she devoted most of her working life to trying to make sense of it, especially the text in te reo Māori. That difficulty persists to this day.

Our mapping project shows how extensive frontier violence was in Queensland. This is why truth-telling matters

by History Guild | Oct 14, 2024 | Advocacy, Military History | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes The Native Mounted Police operated in Queensland for 80 years, starting in 1849. It consisted of small groups of between six and 15 Aboriginal troopers under the command of white officers. The troopers were typically recruited from areas far from where they were sent to serve. Detachments of troopers were regularly sent out on patrol, covering large areas along the frontier of the colony in pursuit of Indigenous people who were considered to be “problematic”. Their main job was to protect civilian settlers, the lands they had taken up, and their livelihoods – by whatever means necessary.

We have revealed a unique time capsule of Australia’s first coastal people from 50,000 years ago

by History Guild | Jun 18, 2024 | Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 5 minutes
Barrow Island, located 60 kilometres off the Pilbara in Western Australia, was once a hill overlooking an expansive coast. This was the northwestern shelf of the Australian continent, now permanently submerged by the ocean.
Our new research, published in Quaternary Science Reviews, shows that Aboriginal people repeatedly lived on portions of this coastal plateau. We have worked closely with coastal Thalanyji Traditional Owners on this island work and also on their sites from the mainland.

‘Habits of civilised life’: how one Australian State forced Indigenous people to meet onerous conditions to obtain citizenship

by History Guild | Apr 17, 2024 | Advocacy, Political and Economic History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 7 minutes
In the breakthrough High Court case Love and Thoms vs Commonwealth in 2020, the court ruled that First Nations people could not be considered aliens in Australia. As Justice James Edelman noted in the decision, whatever the other manners in which they were treated […] Aboriginal people were not ‘considered as foreigners in a kingdom which is their own’.

Traps, rites and kurrajong twine – the incredible ingenuity of Indigenous fishing knowledge

by History Guild | Apr 8, 2024 | Political and Economic History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 20 minutes
Some forms of Indigenous fishing inevitably became lost as Traditional Owners were dispossessed and disenfranchised of their lands and fisheries following the expansion of the colonial frontier post-1788.

In The Australian Wars, Rachel Perkins dispenses with the myth Aboriginal people didn’t fight back

by History Guild | Mar 18, 2024 | Military History, Political and Economic History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 5 minutes
The Australian Wars is a new three-part TV series directed and produced by Arrernte and Kalkadoon nations filmmaker Rachel Perkins. Perkins travels across vast territory to capture key aspects of a war that lasted more than 100 years, from the landing of the First Fleet in 1788 until the 1920s.

The series traces some of the key phases, sites and underlying features of frontier wars here on home soil.

Why Aboriginal Australian ‘Ununiformed Warriors’ Qualify for the Australian War Memorial

by History Guild | Mar 6, 2024 | Military History, Political and Economic History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 5 minutes
Last year, chair of the Australian War Memorial Kim Beazley called for First Nations “guerilla campaigns” of the Frontier Wars to be included in the Australian War Memorial. His bid was criticised by the RSL Australia’s president Major General Greg Melick.
Melick argued Indigenous casualties of the Frontier Wars could not be honoured at the War Memorial because they did not fight “in uniform”. But the Australian War Memorial already honours “ununiformed” First Nations soldiers – namely Dayak people who assisted in Borneo during World War 2.

Tag: Aboriginal