Australian Prehistory

Australian Prehistory

 

Australian Prehistory: Humans are thought to have arrived in Australia about 30,000 years ago. The pristine inhabitants, who have progenies to this day, are kenned as aborigines. In the eighteenth century, the aboriginal population was about 300,000. The aborigines, who have been described alternately as nomadic hunter-gatherers and fire-stick farmers (kenned for utilizing fire to clear the brush and magnetize grass-victualing animals in lieu of cultivating the land), settled primarily in the well-watered coastal areas. 

Some observers believe that poor treatment of the environment by aborigines over many centuries may have led to the barren nature of much of the Australian interior. Higher forms of mammals never reached Australia because the land bridge from Asia ceased to subsist about 50 million years ago.

Conveyance of convicts eventually brought a total of about 160,000 prisoners to Australia. The initial character of a penal colony lasted for about 60 years in the areas of major pristine settlement. It ended in 1840 in Incipient South Wales and in 1852 in Van Diemen’s Land (modern Tasmania), which became a colony in 1825. Western Australia, which was founded in 1830 by free immigrants, integrated convicts to its population by its own cull from 1850 to 1868. Convicts were not sent to South Australia, which became a colony in 1836.

Individual immigrants to Australia incremented in number in the 1820s. They were mostly people of some betokens with which to acquire land, which was in general granted only to those of substance. This land policy, favoring the soi-disant exclusives, or individuals of established position, over the liberated convicts, or emancipists, who sought to advance themselves, facilitated the pastoral expansion of the 1820s. 

The colonies already established—New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land—got most of the early immigrants, but some immigrants went to the more incipient colonies, Western Australia and South Australia. In the 1830s, the southern part of Incipient South Wales, which later became the colony of Victoria (1851), was occupied by sheepmen from farther north and from Van Diemen’s Land. Thus, this portion of Australia was pristinely settled by migration within Australia.