Of no surprise, the Australian Aborigine have no word for “time” as we of the modern world understand it. To these master practitioners of nature magic who maintained a thriving culture without change for over 50,000 years, time is cyclical; the end of each cycle marking the beginning of an identical cycle which has repeated countless times before. (This temporal perception is not unlike that of the Yucatan Maya.) But those cycles were forever interrupted in 1788 when the British began settling this spectacular and untamed continent that had long been isolated by both space and time. Sadly, the coming of the White Man—as has been the case far too many times throughout history—was nearly the end of the Aboriginal culture.
"Devils Island" and the British
Prison block, Devils Island
In their conquest of the “Land Down Under,” the British did not send skilled and learned colonists to stake their claim but convicted criminals who referred to this prehistoric land as “Devil’s Island.” With their arrival—“deposit,” being more accurate--the Aborigine were pushed out of their villages and away from their sacred homelands, and forced to suffer inconceivable cultural trauma. Without a sense of spiritual grounding and natural purpose, they soon became disoriented and culturally lost. Without ties to the land they believed to be under god’s watchful eye, life for them ceased to make sense. Surviving legends echo loudly the grim plight of the Tribal Elders who believing the world was coming to an end, led their people into the desolate nothingness to face the inevitable. Soon, the death toll among them rose to staggering numbers.
Execution, starvation, rape, and disease
With little understanding or respect for the “naked heathens” whose strange behavior was not even to be tolerated by the exiled criminals whose numbers continued to grow, a systematic plan of extermination was put into effect, first by the intentional cutting off of native food supplies. When the Aborigine responded by stealing the settlers’ cattle rather than stave to death, thousands were shot, poisoned, or corralled and slaughtered in mass executions. Those who managed not to fall prey to the invaders’ weapons, soon succumbed to the White Man’s diseases for which they had no natural defenses: influenza, tuberculosis, and with the rape of their women, syphilis.
Reclaiming lost heritage
Modern Aborigine
Believed to number somewhere near 1,000,000 (700 tribes speaking 400 dialects) at the peak of their cultural advancement, the Aborigine steadily diminished in number until only an estimated 66,000 had survived as of a 1990 British census. But to their credit, the British enacted a post WWII plan to repopulate the beautiful island with the help of improved nutrition and medical care, resulting in their numbers reaching near 300,000 by 1990. But this repopulation did not mean the restoration of the culture and lands that once existed. Having no written language to record their history, the loss of Tribal Elders by execution or disease meant loss of the ancient knowledge and wisdom they guarded so carefully—most of their remarkable Stone Age heritage lost forever. Aboriginal mythology, concepts of birth and reincarnation, their music and art, and of course, Aboriginal Magic, had to undergo a tedious process to be recaptured by contemporary Aborigine Elders. Fortunately, modern Aborigine tribesmen discovered cultural parallels in many neighboring tribes of the region and have been able to piece together the roots of their wondrous traditions.