Читать книгу Australian History For Dummies - Alex McDermott - Страница 31

IN THIS CHAPTER

Finding our way to Australia with the first indigenous arrivals

Meeting the early explorers and traders who passed through

In this chapter, you get to stand back and take the long, long view. While most of the rest of the book is chiefly concerned with the events that took place after British settlers started arriving in the late 18th century, this chapter looks at the almost unthinkably long period of human occupation of the Australian continent before that.

Indigenous Australians arrived multiple millennia ago. They developed a uniquely successful system of living that stood the test of time. Then, in the last few hundred years before British settlement, other visitors started turning up too. In this chapter, I provide some sense of the world Indigenous Australians developed and maintained, and a feel for what was going on with the Macassans, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch later on.