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Archaeological findings indicate that Aboriginals have lived in Australia for 40,000 - 100,000 years or longer. Aboriginal means, "the people who were here from the beginning". For the Aboriginals of Australia, spirituality and the sacred is deeply rooted in the landscape and in their relationship to the environment which sustains them. Traditional Aboriginal lands are mainland Australia and most of the islands. Prior to 1788, the Aboriginal Australia population has been estimated at more than 750,000. The country then was pristine and bountiful. Besides food, "bush tucker", the land provided them with natural remedies for healing, "bush medicine". Aboriginals took care of the environment in Australia, making sure that all hunting and gathering activities were balanced; and, resources were conserved.
Every part of an
animal hunted or plant gathered was utilized in some way either as food,
baskets, tools, etc. They also moved their camps around with the seasonal
cycles, allowing the areas of their territory to rest and renew.
There is no agreed upon term to identify Aboriginal Australian groups. Generally they lived in small groups called clans, bands, hearth groups, family groups, or sub-tribes. A number of these smaller groups living in the same area of the land, sharing a Dreaming Track, comprised a tribe. There are many different Aboriginal Australia tribes who have their own Dreamtime folklore, customs, languages, and totems; but, there are also many commonalities they share such as: strong kinship and family structures, totems, Elders, skin names, Dreaming, territoriality, ceremonies, songs, storytelling, and strict boundaries between men's and women's business. The land is their life, their mother, their way, their nourishment, and their spiritual connectedness. Dreaming Tracks delineate the area of land created by the Ancestral Spirits where a tribe was created, their belonging place... Continue on
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Aboriginal Australia Totemic Dreamtime 
