Answer the following in full sentences 

1. What does your article examine?

2. What does the article illustrate about Aboriginal cultures throughout Australia e.g. it could illustrate the sheer length of time and continuation of the culture

3. What primary and secondary sources have they used in their article?

Write a paragraph using the NAME scaffold responding to this question

1. What is the significance of the artefact / practice / site / event?

The world’s oldest axe found in Australia

https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/the-worlds-oldest-axe-found-in-australia/hmc8ivilf

First rock art

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-56164484

Earliest evidence of the boomerang; 

https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/earliest-evidence-of-the-boomerang-in-australia#:~:text=The%20oldest%20Australian%20boomerangs%20yet,are%20about%2020%2C000%20years%20old.

Arrival of the dingo 

https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/research-reveals-when-dingoes-first-arrived-in-australia#:~:text=Archaeologist%20Professor%20Sue%20O'Connor,ago%20or%20possibly%20even%20earlier.

Shell Middens

https://www.firstpeoplesrelations.vic.gov.au/fact-sheet-aboriginal-coastal-shell-middens

Brewarrina Fish Traps

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/jul/10/fish-traps-brewarrina-extraordinary-ancient-structures-protection

Firestick Farming

https://www.sbs.com.au/topics/voices/culture/article/2021/03/17/firestick-farming-how-traditional-indigenous-burning-protected-bush

Scarred Trees

https://www.firstpeoplesrelations.vic.gov.au/sites/default/files/2019-03/Aboriginal%20Scar%20Trees%20Fact%20Sheet.pdf

After presenting, please submit your presentation in the folder in classwork called "Article Presentation" so that we can all access each other's notes

Order these findings about ancient Aboriginal people in terms of significance for evidence of the length and complexity of Australian Aboriginal culture. Be prepared to defend your decisions!

• Testing of artefacts in an island cave in northern WA  called Boodie Cave has established some of the oldest occupation dates recorded in Australia, proving Aboriginal Australians were living in the now largely submerged northern coast 50,000 years ago. At Boodie Caves they found artefacts that included spoons and cutting implements carved from shell, as well as beads thought to form necklaces. The significance of the artefacts found at Boodie Cave is that they give us evidence of human life from a time before most of what was then northern Australia was submerged. With water covering the ancient coast line it is difficult to confirm where and when Aboriginal people lived there.

• In the Dreaming many significant features – rivers, rock formations and mountains – were created when Ancestors threw boomerangs and spears into the earth. The vast majority of boomerangs are of the non-returning variety. However, the oldest images of boomerangs in Australia are found among the Bradshaw/Gwion Gwion rock art paintings in the Kimberley, and are about 20,000 years old. For many thousands of years, Aboriginal groups exchanged boomerangs across the continent providing evidence of a complex econmic system of trade.

• Research from The Australian National University (ANU) and University of Western Australia (UWA) shows found dingo bones are between 3,348 and 3,081 years old. The oldest dingo bones ever found come from  Madura Cave on the Nullarbor Plain on the southern point of Western Australia. Dingoes constitute the only hard evidence of non-European people visiting Australia prior to European contact about 400 years ago. Dingos were almost certainly introduced as domestic animals, once in Australia they became feral but were tamed by Indigenous Australians and used as companions animals in much the same way as dogs today. Dingoes would have been used in the food gathering process to find small game that the women would then catch, such as bandicoots, rodents, goannas and even small kangaroos. They were also useful for guarding the camp and keeping you warm at night.

• Coastal shell middens contain the remains of shellfish eaten by Aboriginal people. The characteristics of a shell midden include: usually associated with brown or black, ashy, charcoal-rich soils; bones from native mammals and fish and crustacea shell can be present; and stone and bone artefacts, grinding stones and stone pounders can be present. Shell middens provide valuable information about Aboriginal use of the coast and can show changes in diet, behaviour, activities and settlement over the last 12,000 years. One of the most important features of midden places is that the shell can easily be dated using the radiocarbon method of dating.

• The Brewarrina fish traps are a “remarkable example” of Aboriginal innovation, an ability to understand and exploit the natural landscape and form one part of a growing body of work that challenges how hunter-gatherer Australian societies have long been perceived.Fish traps became prominent across Australia – from the Torres Strait islands to south-east Australia – during the past few thousand years, suggesting interconnections across tens of thousands of miles - proving life in pre-European Australia was a lot more complex than we might think.

• Aboriginal people systematically burnt vegetation to reduce fuel and encourage new growth to lure grazing animals for hunting. One of the central pillars of Aboriginal land management, traditional burning was practised for millennia among Aboriginal people. It was a complex, interconnected system that spread across the continent, creating “a single estate, albeit with many managers,” writes historian Bill Gammage, author of The Biggest Estate on Earth (2011).

A glass-plate negative of the fish traps dating from 1880-1923. Photograph: Powerhouse Museum Sydney