Who are Aborigines?
They are members of the indigenous race who live in Australia. They live in certain stretches of territory in groups, sometimes referred to by white people as 'tribes'. There were perhaps as many as 500 such territorially anchored groups.
The history of Australia shows that the continent has been inhabited for at least 40,000 years.
The Aborigines probably arrived either by way of the now-submerged bridge of land or where land connections were absent, by rafts and canoes.
It is not known whether there was a single wave or multiple waves of migration into Australia. The theory that there were two migrant groups, from southern China and from Indonesia, has been disputed on many grounds.
The Aborigines were not cultivators, so they lived by gathering food and hunting.
In the 1986 census, Aborigines numbered fewer than 228,000, less than two per cent of the total population in modern Australia. Their numbers have been destroyed by dispossession of their lands, poverty, cultural dislocation, disease and also by alcohol. Their jobless rate is more than six times the national average. The average wage for Aborigines is half the average national wage.