Traditional aboriginal culture. Aboriginal culture

The beliefs, practices, values and stories of any people will change over time, though often so slowly or so little the changes are barely noticeable. One cause of cultural change might be the need to adapt to new circumstances. The long isolation of Australian Aboriginals from the rest of the world and from upheavals such as invasions has no doubt meant changes to their culture have been few. Aboriginals must surely have one of the oldest, continuous cultures in the world.

Some Aboriginals today still have very traditional beliefs, some have a mixture of western and Aboriginal beliefs, and some are totally westernised. Where traditional beliefs have changed this is most likely to have been a forced or voluntary adaptation in response to outside factors, such as the impact of colonisation. It would be a mistake to assume that just because some Aboriginals are living in urban settings their values, stories or beliefs have changed any more than the values, stories or beliefs of other ethnic groups in Australia have changed just because they are living in a new country.

My aim in discussing Aboriginal Culture here is not to provide a wealth of knowledge – I certainly don’t have a wealth of knowledge to share. No doubt I've misunderstood or misrepresented something. What would be useful, however, is to remember that the Aboriginal world is three-dimensional; that there is far more to it than some of us older Australians were first led to believe when we were at school. Just as there is more to whitefella Australian culture than wrestling crocodiles, there is more to Aboriginal culture than didgeridoos and boomerangs. The culture of any people is, more than anything, a set of beliefs and values and the ways of expressing of those beliefs and values.

Bearing in mind that even on the mainland there is no single, universal truth about traditional Aboriginal culture, let’s take a crook’s tour of some features of mainland Aboriginal cultures.