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Aboriginal People Northern Territory of Australia Land Councils

History Misconceptions

Aboriginal people are considered to have lived in Australia for at least 60,000 years. European settlement began in southern Australia just over 200 years ago while in northern Australia it began in earnest less than 150 years ago.

Through colonisation, the spread of pastoralism and past practices of forcing Aboriginal people off their land and into missions and settlements, traditional landowners found themselves excluded from or unable to control the land they and their families have owned, lived on and looked after for thousands of years. Unfortunately, the Aboriginal population also declined rapidly during that time through contact with new diseases and, in some areas, violent contact with non-Aboriginal settlers.

There is a misconception that all Aboriginal people in Australia belong to the one big group and are "all the same".

This is not so.

There are hundreds of clans, family and other groupings of people throughout Australia, scores of languages, and numerous differences in customs, laws, systems of land ownership and lineage and so on.

For example, in the Northern Territory alone, more than 20 different languages have survived colonisation and are still spoken daily in the communities, along with recently evolved Aboriginal languages such as Kriol.

Aboriginal people also have a wide range of lifestyles. Many live in remote communities and combine traditional lifestyles with contemporary activities. While they may go to school, conduct businesses such as tourism enterprises and run the usual Council services in their areas such as repairing roads and collecting rubbish, their lives are also dominated by traditional events and practices, such as initiation ceremonies and smoking ceremonies following the death of significant people, collecting bush tucker and observing restrictions (for example on what they can eat and where they can go) based on their Dreaming stories.

On the other hand, a substantial number of Aboriginal people in the NT lead urban lives in the major, predominantly non-Aboriginal centres of Darwin, Alice Springs, Tennant Creek, Nhulunbuy, Katherine and Jabiru.