A Way of Life

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The first Indigenous people of Australia inhabited a vast and ancient land. They had extensive cultural traditions including their oral history, poetry, art, song, myths and legends. Theirs was a boundless landscape, sometimes plentiful and blessed by nature, but also with wide desert regions whose climate compares with the harshest lands to be found on Earth. To survive in such difficult conditions over thousands of years the Aborigines developed a deep understanding of their land and its resources. Mountains, rivers, skies and deserts came together to make up a framework for their entire life and belief system.

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For the Indigenous Australians the Dreaming was the time of creation. This was a Time Before Time when Mythic Ancestors travelled across the land, creating the landforms, rivers, mountains and stars. The whole land was crossed and marked out by the Dreaming Tracks of the Ancestors and each of these journeys had a Songline so its story could be expressed in song and dance. These adventures of the Ancestors not only provided maps of country and the stars but were highly significant in that they included the Law and set out a pattern of life for the Indigenous Australians.

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The Indigenes held and respected the tribal knowledge that had been built up over eons - intricate details of plant and animal life, water resources and locations, the moods of the Earth and its weather systems, the very earth itself. The different languages of the Aboriginal Australians reflected this knowledge and were a powerful factor contributing to their pride in their culture and sense of identity. For the Indigenous people across Australia this entire way of life and survival continued to exist until the time when European explorers arrived from across the seas.

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A Meeting of Cultures

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Imperialism was the policy by which the British established colonies during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, the time when settlement in Western Australia was underway. The imperialist early settlers brought with them their own familiar cultural traditions and carried an assumption of their own ideological and racial superiority over the inhabitants of the land they were colonizing. However, these newly arrived white settlers in Australia were to encounter incomprehensible language, a different humankind and a way of life far beyond their experience and comprehension.

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Following the practice of colonizers of the time the British invaded Australia with violence. Having a very limited perception or understanding, if any, of cultures other than their own, the new settlers chose not to acknowledge the ancient culture of the Aborigines but rather to shatter it by enforcing their own. Thus the skills, the close and intimate knowledge of their environment which had been developed by the Aborigines and which had enabled them to adapt and survive in a harsh land over hundreds of generations, were gradually being lost due to force and the newcomers’ lack of discernment or compassion.

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Indigenous Australians were separated from lands for which they and their ancestors had been nominated as trustees and carers forever. This loss of place and breaking up of families and communities together with the gradual destruction of their lifestyle and belief system left them with nothing. The culture on which they depended for their identity was gone. During the barbarous first century of Europeans in Western Australia some white settlers did not even regard Aboriginal persons as being human and reports exist of settlers bragging about the number of black people they had killed. Aboriginal people often lived in appalling conditions.

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In 1904 a Royal Commission into “Native” conditions led to formation of the Western Australian Aborigines Protection Board which then initiated the development of reserve settlements for Aboriginal people, whoever it was decided should live in them. In 1916 a reserve was gazetted on an area west of Mogumber on the Moore River and this was to become one of the best known of Aboriginal reserves. Dr W.E. Roth who had experience of organizing settlements in Queensland was brought over to do the same in the West and in 1918 the Moore River Settlement, also known as Mogumber, was created.