The History of boriginals and the 1st settlers in WA. See link for lesson plan http://www.thehotrock.org.au/hotrockcatalogue/society--environment/year-10/the-story-of-your-place-.aspx

1. The Story of Your Place: South-West Australia
The First Australians

2. The oldest site of human
occupation around Perth is
in the Upper Swan north-
east of the city.
It shows that there were
Australians living here
around 400 centuries ago.
At the time of European
settlement, about 250 distinct
languages were spoken in
Australia.
About the same number of
languages are spoken in
Europe today.
In other words, for thousands
of years the Australian
continent has been home to
many, many different cultures
and societies.

3. The people of south-western Australia
spoke dialects of the language Nyoongar.
Further north and east where the rainfall
dropped off the Western desert people
lived. These were people who were
culturally different from the Nyoongar in
many ways, for example practicing
circumcision as part of male initiation
ceremonies.

4. They sleep on dried sheets of paperbark or the leaves from balga (grass trees) in their
mias, a word that means house, but can also mean the haunt of an animal. Their
mias are small beehive shaped dwellings whose frame is made from the spears of
balgas and thatched with the leaves of balgas or with paperbark.
If we travel back two hundred years in time we are more likely to bump into people on the
Swan coastal plain than, for example, in the thick karri forests to the far south. These
people don’t live in tribes, but in what is more accurately described as large extended
families of up to fifty people (often around 20 or 30). Each group calls its home its ka-la,
or hearth. Some people say that where they hang their hat they call their home, and these
people would say that where they set their fire, they call their home.
South Perth
1840s

5. They walk naked in summer.
The men have string belts
around their waists from
which hang throwing sticks,
hammers and kyli, or
boomerangs. Each has a
totem animal. Some of these
nomads have headbands with
red tipped black cockatoo or
emu tail feathers stuck in the
side, rising regally above their
faces. The men have long
hair done up with string in a
matted bundle, in what today
we would call dreadlocks.

6. In winter they retreat to the area inland just below the Darling Ranges, away from the strong and
chilly winds coming off the ocean. They hunt yonga, or kangaroos, at this time. They wear bukas,
long cloaks made of around three female kangaroo furs sewn together. This area looks like a park
with jarrah and marri trees here and there and lots of grass. This is because of the habit of the locals
of seasonally starting small fires. They light the fires in order to create carpets of lush new growth
the next year which will be good hunting pastures.
They are fire-stick farmers.

7. Nearly all species of Banksia trees
come from Australia. But 61 of the
78 species in existence come from
the south-west.
As the year progresses and summer
approaches the people move
westwards over their sandy home
towards the coast. It is early
summer (December) so thousands
of tall candle-stick banksia (Banksia
attenuata) flowers start to glow
yellow in the sun. The people
collect them and put them in
paperbark-lined holes filled with
fresh water. The flowers soak and
then they sit around the hole and
taste a sweet liquid. They call this
drink mungitch. It is yellow
season in banksia country.

8. As summer comes on fishing starts to become their main source of protein.
At this time the rivers and estuaries such as the Swan are really alive with healthy shoals
big fish. The locals fish by herding fish into the sandy shallows and spearing them. Cano
and fishing hooks are not to be seen, but here and there weirs are used to trap fish. This
fish trap above, a monument to thousands of years of human history, existed into recent
decades near Albany.

9. More than you or I, the first Australians had kallip of
the south-west.
Kallip is an old Nyoongar word meaning ‘a knowledge
of localities; familiar acquaintance with a range of
country… also used to express property in land’.
It is a word that we might today translate as awareness of
the nature of the local terrain, plants and animals in one’s
area. While you and I can read printed text, we cannot
read the sounds and shapes of our natural environment
with the same enormous skill and insight as the first
Western Australians.

10. Line drawing taken from The Colonial Eye, Barbara Chapman, Art Gallery of Western
Australia, 1979. P.66. Photo of Nyoongar fish trap taken from Brearley, Anne. Ernest
Hodgkin’s Swanland: Estuaries and Coastal Lagoons of South-western Australia. Crawley:
University of Western Australia Press, 2005. All other photos copyright of Tom M. Wilson.