2024

1. 15 October Stamps

   Australia Post releases four stamps celebrating the Kalkadoon Dreaming of the First Nations people of the Mt Isa region (QLD).

   The stamps showcase the work of Kalkadoon (Kalkatungu) artist Chern’ee Sutton and represent the artist’s traditional Country. Chern’ee Sutton has been the recipient of numerous awards and honours. She has been a Queensland Day Ambassador for the Arts and a Queensland Reconciliation Awards Ambassador and her work is held in collections nationally and internationally.

2. 21 October Politics Protest

   Lidia Thorpe, a Djab-Wurrung, Gunnai and Gunditjmara woman and an independent senator from Victoria, heckles King Charles, who is on a five-day visit to Australia with Queen Camilla. She approaches the stage at Parliament House yelling “This is not your country! You committed genocide against our people. Give us our land back. Give us what you stole from us – our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people! You destroyed our land. Give us a treaty. We want a treaty in this country. You are a genocidalist." Security officers had to escort her back to the foyer. She kept shouting "This is not your land. You are not my king. You are not our king. Fuck the colony!" ^[1] The incident makes global headlines.

3. 11 December Arts

   Among the 10 iconic sounds of Australia, preserved for future generations of Australians under the National Film and Sound Archive’s 2024 annual Sounds of Australia collection, are recordings of Muruwari man Jimmie Barker. He was the first known First Nations person to use recorded sound as a tool to preserve and document Aboriginal culture, producing more than 100 hours.

   Another First Nations person recognised is then-Labor senator Nova Peris, for her 2013 inaugural speech to the Australian parliament where she calls for more effective strategies to close the gap between First Nations and non-Indigenous Australians. ^[2]

10,000

1. Present day Australian climate establishes.

2. Aboriginal people at Wyrie Swamp near Millicent, 340 kms south-east of Adelaide, South Australia, use returning boomerangs to hunt waterfowl.

120,000

1. Analysis of pollen and charcoal giving a date of 120,000 BP suggests that people were using fire to clear land in the Lake George basin in the Southern Tablelands of NSW, about 30 kms north-east of Canberra. ^[3] Experts also found signs of human disturbance in rainforest pollen patterns in a drill core from the edge of the continental shelf, 80 kilometres east of Cairns.

   Similarly, research presented to the Royal Society of Victoria in 2019 by a group of academics found that blackened stones at Moyjil (Point Ritchie, Victoria), were between 100,000 and 130,000 years old. While cautious, the authors concluded that human habitation was the most likely explanation for "marine shells, stones in unexplained depositional context and fire resemblance to hearth". ^[4]

125

1. Archaeologists in 2020 found ancient banana farms on Mabuyag Island, once managed by Torres Strait Islanders, dating back 2,145 years. They unearthed banana microfossils, stone tools, charcoal and a series of retaining walls. The findings strengthen the theory that the Islanders engaged in complex and diverse cultivation and horticultural practices. ^[5]

13,000

1. Land bridges between mainland Australia and Tasmania are flooded. Tasmanian Aboriginal people become isolated for the next 12,000 - 13,000 years.

2. At Kow Swamp near Cohuna, 230 kms north of Melbourne, Victoria, Aboriginal people weare kangaroo teeth headbands similar to those worn by men and women in the Central Desert in the 19th century.

16,000

1. Hearths, stone and bone tools, Shaws Creek near Yarramundi (60 kms north-west from Sydney), NSW.

2. Sea levels begin to rise as ice caps melt. Inland lakes such as Lake Mungo have dried up.

17,300

1. Scientists confirmed that a painting of a kangaroo in a sandstone rock shelter near the Drysdale River, in Western Australia’s remote Kimberley region, is about 17,300 years old, making it the oldest known rock art in Australia.

18,000

1. Harvesting grass seeds is integral to Aboriginal socio-economic life on the large grasslands. The seeds were ground and baked or roasted and eaten whole.

2. Art at Ubirr in Kakadu National Park (Northern Territory, 300 kms east of Darwin) depicts now extinct animals, the Thylacine (Tasmanian tiger), and Zaglossus (the long-beaked echidna).

20,000

1. Aboriginal people were dispersed across the entire continent, occupying places as remote as rock shelters on the Franklin River in south-west Tasmania and at Birrigai in the ranges of the Australian Capital Territory, which surrounds Canberra, the national capital.

2. Some 10% of Tasmania is covered by glacial ice. Kutikina Cave on the Franklin River is occupied by Tasmanian Aboriginal people at the height of the last ice age.

3. Rising seas partially submerge Sahul, the landmass that connects Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania, creating separate islands for each.

22,000

1. In deep caves under the Nullarbor Plains at Koonalda (at the western edge of South Australia, about 50 kms from the ocean), Aboriginal people mine flint and leave grooved designs on the cave walls. This is early evidence of the close relationship of art and work in Aboriginal life.

2. Aboriginal people living at Malangangarr in Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, use ground-edge grooved axes. Australian technology leads the world.

3. Age of a rock-shelter on the Kings Tableland near Wentworth Falls, NSW.

   

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References