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For thousands of years before 1788 native or indigenous peoples now referred to as Aboriginal peoples inhabited the continent that would become Australia. There is little known of the pre-history of this land which pre-dates the arrival of the English and the many changes to the life and times of the nomadic people in the years of pre-Australia. 

 

There is oral histories from current day Aboriginal peoples but obviously with the passage of time those histories may be subject to inaccuracies and particularly irrelevant when dealing with histories dating back hundreds and thousands of years old. 

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The indigenous people’s culture has been described as the oldest surviving culture on earth.  There is archeological evidence to indicate the existence of peoples and rock self art and middens to suggest at some aspects of life.  There is no direct evidence of the history of those peoples cultures, rituals or beliefs.  There is a belief without substance that the Aboriginal culture was static/unchanging culture..

 

At the time of discovery by Europeans the Aboriginal peoples may have been cut off from the rest of the world for over 50,000 years.  As the time of European discovery they were the most primitive peoples on earth, having remained in the stone age.

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The natives existed in bands or hordes of essentially family or kin groups, possibly of between 10 to 30 people per kin group, living nomadically in hunter-gatherer societies dispersed across the continent. It is estimated that there were over 250 language groups and over 800 dialects spread across the land without any form of government of any society or community.  There were no native or indigenous nations, states, communities, towns or villages or even semi-permanent habitations.

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We have no information of which language groups commenced living in particular areas and it is completely incorrect to conclude that the language group had lived there "since the beginning of time."  There has been and there will be skeletal remains of ancient peoples found in Australia but we will have no possible means of establishing their current day ancestors or    It is unknown but highly probably other races at one time inhabited Australia - indeed it would be illogical to assume that the Aborginals ... Darvidoians .... were the only humans to make it to this continent.  Indeed Melanesians must have made - the Torress Strait Islanders at Mer Island are only - although any such attemtpted landing in Cape York must have resulted in their death.

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There is clear evidence [rock paintings/rock shelf middens] that people inhabited but who they were and their associations and interactions, language, customs and rules will never be known.

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A population of approximately 400,000 speaking 800 dialects indicates that the bands were broken down into 500 people - although obviously the coastal region would have had dialect groups of 1,000 + people as the coastal areas were more capable of sustaining larger populations.

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Very often the population of an area would only be capable of supporting a certain number of hunter gatherer bands.

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An area like the Illawarra