Australian Aboriginal culture can claim to be the oldest continuous living culture on the planet.
Recent dating of the earliest known archaeological sites on the Australian continent, using thermo-luminescence and other modern dating techniques, have pushed back the date for Aboriginal presence in Australia to at least 40,000 years. Some of the evidence points to dates over 60,000 years old.
The hallmark of Aboriginal culture is 'oneness with nature'. In traditional Aboriginal belief systems, nature and landscape are comparable in importance to the bible in Christian culture. Prominent rocks, canyons, rivers, waterfalls, islands, beaches and other natural features - as well as sun, moon, visible stars and animals - have their own stories of creation and inter-connectedness. To the traditional Aborigine they are all sacred: environment is the essence of Australian Aboriginal godliness.
Out of this deep reverence for nature Aborigines learned to live in remarkable harmony with the land and its animals.
Traditional Australian Aborigines lived a nomadic life, following the seasons and the food.
With very few simple tools, used with incredible skill, the Aboriginal learned to live in the harsh and inhospitable Australian outback.
It's possible that the first Aborigines in Australia hunted the Australian megafauna - giant kangaroos, giant wombat, to extinction.
Maybe that was when Aborigines learned to take care of natural resources and move to new hunting grounds before the old ones are depleted beyond repair.
When at rest, Aborigines lived in open camps, caves or simple structures made from bark, leaves or other vegetation. Their technology was both simple and sophisticated. Above all, it was appropriate for their way of life - ideally matched to the constraints of nomadic life.
The modern notion of possessions is alien to traditional Aboriginal culture. Material things were shared within groups. The idea that an individual could 'own' land was foreign to Aboriginal thinking.
The longest continuing religion in the world belongs to Australia's Aborigines, with the Rainbow Serpent mythology recorded in rock shelter paintings believed to be 7,000 years old in the Kakadu National Park region, where this Ancestral Being is still important to local people. Other ancient rock art shows the many customs and Ancestral Beings (deities or gods) important in Aboriginal religion tens of thousands of years ago.
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