Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have lived on the Australian continent for at least sixty-five thousand years, in hundreds of distinct nations and languages bound to their land by the Dreaming, the sacred web of law, story, and creation. Theirs are the oldest continuing living cultures known. In 1788 the British came to stay, and what followed was both a catastrophe of dispossession, disease, frontier killing, and the forced removal of children, and a long survival and renaissance that continues today.
For at least sixty-five thousand years, people have lived on the Australian continent with extraordinary cultural continuity. That is not a long time by the standards of human history. It is human history. When the first Aboriginal peoples reached this land, no one had yet painted the caves of Lascaux, farmed a field, or built a city anywhere on earth. Across that immense span they filled every desert, coast, and rainforest with hundreds of nations and languages, each tied to its own country by the Dreaming, the living sacred order that made the land and the law. Theirs are the oldest continuing cultures known. In 1788 the British arrived, and these peoples have been surviving the consequences ever since.