Tag: Aboriginal history

A tribe can be described as an entire distinct community, like the Larakia, or a smaller division within one. This can be used interchangeably. However, often, the writer defines its use. When they don’t, you must read between the lines to get how it is being used.

Claims that the didgeridoo has been played for 40,000 years or more are common, but there is no historical or archaeological evidence that proves such an age.

The instrument was clearly in Aboriginal use before large-scale European settlement of northern Australia. Collet Barker’s 1829 journal describes a musician at Raffles Bay using a large hollow cane about three feet long, and Thomas Braidwood Wilson’s published 1835 account describes and illustrates the instrument there.

Those records prove that the instrument existed by the early nineteenth century — not that it had existed for tens of thousands of years. Alice Moyle later examined its distribution, language evidence and rock art and proposed a much more recent history, including possible movement into Arnhem Land within the previous thousand years or less.

Moyle’s dating is a scholarly interpretation, not an exact birthday for the instrument. The important point is that a claim of “40,000 years” is not a date established by the available evidence.