1 Truth-telling is crucial to the ongoing process of healing and reconciliation in Australia. Truth-telling is an opportunity for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to record evidence about past actions and share their culture, heritage and history with the broader community.

The National Parks and Wildlife Act 1972 (NPW Act) makes provision for hunting and food gathering by Aboriginal people. Under the legislation, Aboriginal people may take a protected animal or the egg of a protected animal from land that is not a reserve.

November 1828

The leading causes of death for Indigenous Australians were: neoplasms (including cancer) (23% of all deaths), circulatory diseases (for example, heart attack) (23%), external causes (for example injury and suicide) (15%), respiratory diseases (9%), and endocrine, metabolic and nutritional disorders (including diabetes …

Most Aboriginal deaths in custody are due to inadequate medical care, lack of attention and self-harm. The Guardian database shows indigenous people are three times less likely to receive medical care than others.

3.3%

Background. Many sources report over-representation of Indigenous offenders at all stages of the criminal justice system. As of September 2019, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoners represented 28% of the total adult prisoner population, while accounting for 3.3% of the general population.

After European settlers arrived in 1788, thousand of aborigines died from diseases; colonists systematically killed many others. At first contact, there were over 250,000 aborigines in Australia. The massacres ended in the 1920 leaving no more than 60,000.

The extensive study of Aboriginal people’s DNA dates their origins to more than 50,000 years ago and shows that their ancestors were probably the first humans to journey across Asia and cross an ocean. The findings also show that these Aboriginal ancestors remained almost entirely isolated until around 4,000 years ago.

Most massacres were perpetrated as summary and indiscriminate punishment for the killing of settlers or the theft and destruction of livestock. There are over nine known cases of deliberate mass poisonings of Aboriginal Australians.

Researchers say the findings overturn a 2001 paper that argued the oldest known Australian human remains found near Lake Mungo in New South Wales were from an extinct lineage of modern humans that occupied the continent before Aboriginal Australians.

The lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were profoundly changed by the arrival of British colonists in 1788. Lives were lost and land taken as the colonisers attempted to impose new social, economic and religious orders. New animals, plants and diseases were introduced.

The reasons that led the British to invade Australia were simple. The prisons in Britain had become unbearably overcrowded, a situation worsened by the refusal of America to take any more convicts after the American War of Independence in 1783.