2020 IB Extended Essays

of the hardships which today’s generation of Indigenous peoples’ face. Historical

pasts will be recognised, and colonial truths revealed as they are told through the artworks mentioned.

Indigenous Australia The Aboriginal peoples are the oldest surviving cultures in the world. With a hunter gatherer and semi-nomadic approach to survival, the Indigenous people have been living on Australian country for between 50,000 to 120,000 years. Communities were created through small families living within a defined territory, systematically drifting across the country as the seasons changed. Each group followed their own history and language which is what made this culture so distinct and self-sufficient. However, 1770 marked the beginning of the end to their largely isolated culture with

the intrusion of British explorer, Lt James Cook. Upon Cook’s arrival he declared the

land of ‘New South Wales’ to be property of the British Empire, despite clear

evidence of its already being occupied. Cook was later followed by the first fleet, who worked to take control of Australian land for settlement, establishing a penal colony. With the invasion of Britain fully underway, the population of the new-comers spread rapidly. Estimates suggest that around 300,000 to 1 million Aborigines lived in

Australia prior to the 1800s. Britain’s attempt to destroy and punish the existences of

First Nations peoples, through poisonings massacres and the spread of diseases, leaving only one in four Indigenous Australians survived colonisation.

In the 1930s the mass killings began to cease but the control of white Australia over the Indigenous peoples only grew stronger. Legislation was put in place in many

states of Australia to ‘protect’ the lives of the Aborigines, giving governments full