Aboriginal Australia
Today, more than ever, you can enter into the world of an ancient culture accompanied by its modern day custodians, descendants of one of the most fascinating and unique cultures on earth. What’s more, you don’t have to go overseas to discover it! Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have an enormously diverse and complex culture that traces its roots back at least 50,000 years - one of the longest of any society on the planet! You can learn about their culture through art, story telling, dance, music and the land itself. So immerse yourself in the Dreamtime and discover the spirituality, tradition and ceremonies of our great land’s first inhabitants.
Aboriginal Art and Culture
Indigenous Australians are custodians to one of the world’s oldest continuous cultures predating the Roman Empire and the building of the Pyramids. And they’re eager to share their insights into this ancient land through art, story-telling, dance, and music.
You can experience their ancient, fascinating and wonderful culture through specialised tours in places such as Uluru, or by staying in an indigenous community such as at Iga Warta in the Northern Flinders ranges. You can even get a taste for island life on the remote Tiwi Islands in the Arafura Sea, where you’ll meet the tea ladies and learn how to weave pandanus.
Indigenous experiences and tours can also be found in places as unlikely as Melbourne’s Botanic Gardens, along our coast or even on Sydney Harbour aboard the Tribal Warrior. And it’s in our cities too that you’ll find there are great modern-day examples of contemporary Aboriginal Australia - such as the Sydney-based Bangarra Dance Theatre and Perth’s Black Swan Theatre.
Whether it’s rock art and cave drawings from 50,000 years ago, or the work of our modern day western desert artists, working in co-operatives such as Papunya Tula, you can immerse yourself in a wealth of Indigenous art and culture right across Australia.
Aboriginal Dreamtime
Aboriginal Australians were explaining their existence by telling stories about the land and animals around them long before the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids.
The Aboriginal people are spiritually connected to the land and believe all life as it is today - human, animal, bird and fish - is part of a vast unchanging network of relationships which can be traced to the Great Spirit ancestors of the Dreamtime. Through ceremonial songs and dances they use the Dreamtime to tell the story of the development of our ancient land.
You too can go on a 50,000 year journey as you hear the Dreamtime stories of tribal elders in the Outback and tour remote and sacred lands with their Aboriginal custodians. You can listen to the legend of Namarrgon, the Lightning Man, in Kakadu National Park, discover Dreamtime Quinkans in Cape York’s Laura region or take a Dreamtime walk and retrace the steps of the Liru ancestors near Uluru. You can even immerse yourself in a modern-day Dreaming Festival in Woodford on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast.
As you explore the Aboriginal songline stories of Creation you’ll learn how Dreaming trails crisscross Australia, connecting important waterholes, food sources and landmarks. So go on, create a songline of your own.
Aboriginal Food
Any Aussie worth their salt knows that bush tucker refers to the huge variety of herbs, spices, mushrooms, fruits, flowers, vegetables, animals, birds, reptiles and insects that are native to the country. Once only found in the diet of indigenous Australians, native foods, however, are popping up on menus across the country and commercially produced versions are creeping onto the shelves of our supermarkets.
With Australian chefs experimenting more and more with its unusual and delicate flavours, there are plenty of opportunities to taste-test bush tucker. You can try an indigenous restaurant, or eat in a gourmet restaurant that just happens to have native ingredients such as emu or kangaroo on the menu.
Better yet, go on a bush tucker tour with Aboriginal Australians in the Outback. They’ll lead you back through time to places where you can find and cook our native bush foods in the wild. They’ll show you how they’ve survived off the land for centuries, by catching animals, digging up roots, eating leaves and even using them as medicine.
Whether you take a tour and learn to hunt for traditional bush tucker, or choose to buy some native produce at a local market and cook up a storm - don’t to miss the opportunity to taste the world’s oldest cuisine.
