Aboriginals Speak Out. 

Reading time: 8 minutes 

By Philippa Hadlow 

Aboriginal Australians are one of the most ancient cultures and oldest continuous populations in the world. 

A genome extracted from a 100-year-old hair sample in Western Australia revealed that Aboriginals descended from a single human lineage who migrated from Africa to Southeast Asia to Indonesia to New Guinea to Australia, around 70,000 years ago, during Paleolithic times. 

Their arrival in Australia is regarded as one of the earliest migrations and is integral to what scientists labelled the ‘Out of Africa’ movement.

The migration was made possible due to its timing at the end of the Pleistocene epoch when sea levels were much lower than they are today. Once the migrants reached the island of Timor, they could see the Sahul Shelf (the continent of present-day Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania subsequently became known as Sahul) and ‘island-hop’ using land bridges to walk to the rest of the continent.

It wouldn’t be so easy to island-hop these days. Although Australia separated from the great continent of Gondwana around 96 million years ago, it is only during the past 10,000 years that rising sea levels have flooded the lowlands and separated the area into today’s low-lying mainland and the two mountainous islands of New Guinea and Tasmania. 

With the separation of the continent came a settling of the people, and once the great migration was over, the ancestors of today’s aborigines hunkered down in their new homes — for tens of thousands of years.

Spoken language didn’t arrive on the scene until around 6,000 years ago. Scientists maintain that the Aboriginal Indigenous language spread from one Mother Language, dubbed Proto-Australian. From this came Pama−Nyungan (meaning ‘man’) − the most widespread family containing perhaps 300 Aboriginal languages and about 700 dialects. 

Other linguists claim that indigenous language originated as far back as the end of the last ice age, around 13,000 years ago, when there was still a land bridge between New Guinea and Australia. If correct, then the continental division possibly explains why two distinct groups of primary Aboriginal language evolved, the Pama−Nyungan and (rather simply) the non-Pama−Nyungan. 

Whatever the case, before 1788, Pama−Nyungan covered 90% of the country. Over half of that family of languages is now extinct. 

What happened in 1788 to make this so?