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who walked there. These song-lines (as Bruce Chatwin calls them) helped assure their sur-
vival. Aboriginal drawings, especially those that portray totemic gods and Dreamtime jour-
neys, are now made for the tourist trade. Old ones are rare and costly, but even the new
ones have a beauty that reveals itself with study and empathetic understanding. The same
might be said for the best-known musical instrument of the Aborigines, the didjeridu. A
wooden, flute-like instrument, the didjeridu is often made from a stick (about three feet
long) that has been hollowed out by termites. It is blown (one deep note) and thumped, and
it provides rhythm for singing and dancing.
WHO ARE TODAY'S AUSTRALIANS?
Australians today are predominantly of European descent (91 percent). Until the end of
World War II, they were mostly British and Irish. The Irish first came in convict ships, then
as free settlers (the Great Potato Famine of the 1840s drove them outward). After the Se-
cond World War, Australia opened its doors to eastern and southern Europeans (Italians,
Greeks, Poles, Spaniards) and Asians (Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipinos, Malaysians). Two
factors pushed the change. If the country was to prosper, it needed more workers. If it was
to be secure on the rimland of Asia, it needed cordial relations with its neighbors, espe-
cially since it could no longer look to Britain for security or as a trading partner (Britain
was about to join the Common Market). The proportion of people residing there who were
constitute about 7 percent of the population. Those from the Near East constitute about 2
percent, and Aborigines (including those from islands in the Torres Strait) constitute about
2 percent.
THE ABORIGINAL PEOPLE TODAY
At the time of the First Fleet, native people numbered about 300,000. Abuse, alcohol,
European diseases, and government policy quickly took their toll. As hunter-gatherers,
most native people had no fixed abode. Courts held that they did not own their traditional
tribal lands, and therefore it could be sold to white settlers. In ways parallel to the treatment
of American Indians, native people were forced onto reservations, where they died from
diseases spread by indoor living and loss of their traditional way of life. Mixed-race chil-
dren were taken from the reservation and sent to white schools. White administrators could
punish without court trials. The overall aim was to impose a white culture on people of
color. At its nadir, the Aboriginal population dropped to a mere 60,000. Then, as white at-
titudes changed and government policies grew more sympathetic, the population increased
to about 407,000 today (about 2 percent of the country's population).
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