Ca 60,000 years ago

Australia’s human history began over 60,000 years ago.

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The continent was discovered by a group of voyagers who travelled across a vast passage of water to a land where no hominid had roamed before. Over millennia, they explored and colonised every region, transforming the terrain as they moved, making the country their own through language, song and story. They harnessed flame to create new ecosystems, dug the earth to encourage crops, and built water controls to extend the natural range of their resources. They thrived in the extreme aridity of the central deserts and hunted in the glacier-filled gorges spreading from the Tasmanian ice cap. They enjoyed times of regional abundance, endured great droughts and adapted to millennia-long floods that saw the sea level rise about 125 metres. They watched territories disappear, lakes dry, volcanoes erupt, dune-fields form and species come and go. Theirs is a remarkable story or transformation and resilience. Perhaps a billion people have lived in Australia, historian and archaeologist John Mulvaney estimated to Arrernte filmmaker Rachel Perkins in the early 2000s. I remember his eyes twinkling,’ Perkins recalls, as they observed me grappling with the project to which he had given his life: understanding the depth of Australia’s humanity.’