Where the Ancestors Walked: Australia as an Aboriginal Landscape'Philip Clarke has penned an insightful and wide-ranging account of Australia's Aboriginal cultures from a perspective of great learning and insider privilege. It's an immensely significant work, revealing the extraordinary richness of one of the world's oldest continuous cultures.' Tim Flannery, author of The Future Eaters Since their arrival many thousands of years ago, Australia's Aboriginal people have developed a unique, rich and elaborate way of life. With a deep spiritual attachment to land and a strong sense of community, they have drawn on tradition to respond to new situations. In this way, they have thrived in Australia's changing and often harsh landscape. Early European settlers in Australia judged Aboriginal culture as 'primitive'. Yet the Aboriginal people they encountered had, in fact, a highly sophisticated understanding of their environment and complex strategies for finding food and medicines, and for making tools and art objects. Philip Clarke paints a picture of the culture and traditions of Aboriginal Australia. Drawing on research from anthropology, cultural geography and environmental studies as well as his own fieldwork, he explains the diverse ways in which Aboriginal people relate to the land across the continent. Heavily illustrated, Where the Ancestors Walked will appeal to anyone interested in understanding the traditional lifestyle of Aboriginal people. 'Phillip Clarke's clear, wide-ranging and sympathetic survey describes the manner in which Indigenous societies humanised and utilised landscapes from before European times to the present... This is an excellent introduction for interested lay readers and higher and tertiary education students.' Emeritus Professor John Mulvaney, author of Prehistory of Australia |
Contents
Religious Landscapes | |
Social Life | |
Materials of Culture | |
Hunting and Gathering | |
The South | |
The Central Deserts | |
Beyond Capricorn | |
Cultural Change | |
Northern Contacts | |
Arrival of Europeans | |
Aboriginal Australia Transformed | |
Changing Cultural Landscapes | |
Aboriginal Artefacts | |
Art of the Dreaming | |
Regional Differences | |
Living in a Varied Land | |
Notes | |
References | |
Other editions - View all
Where the Ancestors Walked: Australia as an Aboriginal Landscape Philip A. Clarke Limited preview - 2003 |
Where the Ancestors Walked: Australia as an Aboriginal Landscape Philip A. Clarke No preview available - 2003 |
Common terms and phrases
Aboriginal art Aboriginal Australia Aboriginal cultures Aboriginal English Aboriginal groups Aboriginal population Aboriginal Studies Adelaide animals anthropologist areas arid Arnhem Land Arrernte artefacts Australian Aboriginal Australian English bark Berndt & Berndt birds boomerangs British camp Cape York Peninsula Central Australia century ceremonies clan clubs coast coastal collected colonisation cooked cultural landscape dingo Dreaming Ancestors early environment European settlement example Eyre fire fish food sources grass Gulf of Carpentaria Howitt hunters hunting and gathering Indigenous kangaroo Kimberley kinship Lake language large number Lower Murray Macassans Melbourne metres native Norman Tindale northern Australia Northern Territory ochre paintings PHOTO plant preEuropean Queensland rain Ranges recognised recorded region River rock art season seed settlers Skyworld South Australia South Australian Museum South Wales southeastern Australia southern spears species spirit stone Sydney Taplin Tasmania Thomson Tindale totemic trade traditions trees Victoria wallabies Western Australia Western Desert women wooden Worsnop