Natural Park

Imagine a world covered in ice sheets more than a kilometer thick, with the endless forests and fields between them covering a landscape that today is deep underwater. A dry, flat valley connects the Australia mainland with New Guinea to the northeast., and just 45 miles/72 km of sea rather than some 299 miles/483 km, as it is now separates the continent's northwestern edge from the southeast coast of Asia. Inland, cool greenery covers what. will in eons be the stark red Outback desert, and the very heart of the country is pocketed with vast lakes and wetlands surrounded with lush, windswept fields. This was Australia 60,000 years ago, in the time of the first Aborigines.

What brought these first dark-skinned wiry-haired, bony-limbed humans to the continent is a mystery, but the abundance of food kept waves of humans migrating south. The original settlers first camped along the islands and north coasts near Darwin, then worked their way down the cast coast near Sydney over the next 15,000 years. Slowly, tribes moved farther down the continent, finally reaching the south coast near Melbourne about 40,000 years ago, and even Tasmania by around 28,000 BC.

The new cultures thrived on this freshly-carved continent, living nomadic lives that took little from the land and flourished in both tropical and desert environments. Tribes were adept at the arts, painting hundreds of images along sheltered rock overhangs and in shallow caves, where the earliest, simple scenes of families and hunters gradually expanded to include kangaroos, thylacines, boomerangs, spears, and even the surrounding foliage. More than 500 Aboriginal groups existed throughout Australia, most with their own language or dialect. Each culture's traditions and events were preserved through songs, stories, and finely-honed rock etchings and paintings. The tribes also appointed themselves caretakers of the earth around them, their art and rituals recording specific characteristics of the land and creatures under their domain. And to survive in what was quickly becoming one of the world's harshest environments, the Aborigines created an innovative array of tools for hunting and building. The most unusual was the boomerang, a flat, curving piece of wood thrown outward to knock out game. Smaller weapons were flung at small prey such as birds. They returned to the hunter in a full circle if he missed. Bigger, heavier boomerangs, which were often carved and painted with intricate designs, were used to stun larger prey like kangaroos. The tribes also used axes, javelins, and woo/Items, long attachments that extended the range of their spears. Nets were woven to trap wallabies, wombats, and smaller game. Dingos were domesticated and taught to chase down kangaroos, or to search for such burrowing game as wombats.

Everyone participated in finding bounty on the earth. Women gathered bush raisins and bush tomatoes (fruits and berries from desert plants). Seeds were stone-ground into flour, mixed with moisture into a pasty dough, and cooked over the fire. Water was found at billabongs, by tapping into underground streams, and by cutting into the hollow roots of moisture-rich shrubs and trees. Certain types of frogs, which lived deep underground in drought times, were eaten for the moisture stored in their bodies. Small, sharp sticks were whittled to dig plump white, protein-rich witchetty grubs from the earth, while longer sticks helped reach into termite and ant mounds, or dig up deep-set plants with edible roots. The land was regularly burned to create new pastures, where fresh plants would grow and grazing animals could be easily hunted.