There is speculation and unsubstantial theoretical belief that Aboriginal social structures, and their concepts of law and ownership, changed comparatively little over thousands of years.  However since there are no written records and only skeletal information of peoples that inhabited this continent through archeological research, we will never actually know who [kin or language group] inhabited any area or for how long or what took place on this continent and we will never know the many, many changes, territorial or otherwise, that this continent underwent in a history since the arrival of mankind dating back over 50,000 years.

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About 72,000 years ago, when the Hunter gatherer ancestors, in East Africa crossed the southern shores of the Red Sea and, in the long walks that followed, spread out to populate the rest of the world.

 

The current dominant theory is that all of today's non-African people, Aborigines and Europeans alike, are descended from the small group of a few thousand east Africans. The different peoples that inhabit the world outside of Africa all had the same political starting line. Those Hunter gatherers who eventually made their way to Europe began with the same kinship based social organisational clans, as those who trekked around the shores of the Indian Ocean to this hemisphere.

 

The ancestors of the Aborigines made landfall on Sahull, the much larger, Ice Age version of what we now call Australia and New Guinea, perhaps 60,000 years ago.  The ancestors of the Europeans who walked up the tigris and Euphrates River valleys and kept going into Western Europe probably arrived there about 50,000 years ago.

 

But after the emergence of agricultural societies on the flood plains of Eurasia some 15,000 years ago, many people in the world outside Australia created regimes whose political arrangements evolved much further in terms of both size and sophistication.

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By the 7th century BC, the principal cities of ancient Greece, Athens and Sparta, had redefined their citizenship and their loyalties in terms of residents in a locality rather than membership of a clan. This was a key concept that paved the way for the eventual transition of political rule from small kinship groups to large territorial organisations.

 

Once societies on the great Eurasian landmass had developed agriculture and organised themselves into states with standing armies and fortifications, specialist weapons and organised societies no other society could keep up with the ensuing arms race and was doomed to be subsumed into large kingdoms, republics or extinguished forever.

 

Aboriginal society never made this transition, which is why, when the British colonised the Australian continent in 1788, neither they nor the international law/community of the time recognised aboriginal kinship relationships as constituting a legal nation or a state.

 

Aboriginal society never had the power to nor political organisation to prevent any of the strangers from overseas right to drop anchor in their waters or pitch tents on their shores.  Under these conditions to expect the continent of Australia to remain in the hands of Hunter gatherers is naïve. Denounce it today more than 200 years after the events is moral indulgence, to try to reverse it is utopian and insane.

 

​It is true that, because Australia was the last large, inhabitable place where the original Hunter gatherer way of life survived and at that time it housed the world's oldest living culture. But it is just as true that all the other people of the world had ancient cultures too only transition eventually well beyond it. 

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There are no more hunter gatherer societies in Australia.  There is remnants of the oldest culture but its practices are diminished or in most part extinguished. They are remembered and held with reverence by descendants and distant descendants but not actively practiced.  For the vast majority, the Aboriginal people have become part of Western civilisation prevalent in Australia.  They are no longer nomadic, their languages extinguished or moribund, their stories no longer are the centre of the operation of their life, the brutal and barbarous ways have given way to the English law and civilisation.