Australia - The beginning

The Discoverer
History books say that Dirk Hartog, the Captain of a ship sailing from Holland four hundred years ago, was the first man to discover Australia. But Australia was not really “discovered” at all- it was already home to one of the oldest surviving civilisation.
For over forty thousand years, the aborigines “from the beginning” in Latin) have lived on the world’s largest island. We know today that the original “Aussies” (as Australians are known) were very intelligent, organised people. They came to Australia (the Southern Land) from somewhere around the Indian and Pacific Oceans. They spoke more than one language, and lived in societies separated by very large distances.
It is possibile that there was as many as 750 000 aborigines at one time. Between 1770 and 1900 when the united kingdom ruled Australia, their numbers fell. Today, ther are only 250 000 aborigines, living mostly in very remote areas in northern, western and central Australia. This is the home of the aborigines sacred area, Uluru – the world largest rock.
In the last sixty years, the Australian government and its people have starter to take more care of the needs of aborigines, and the remaining ribes are protected. But many aborigines now live in the big cities in the south, such as Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. They are becoming a part of modern Australian. Aborigines today are mixed descent, and their culture is slowly becoming the same as their European discoverers.