The British Empire: A source for good or evil? February 2014 | Page 14

The Loss of culture in the colonies
➔ How the Aborigines lost their culture during the British
occupation ?

➢ Doc 1 : Aborigines offer a group of English visitors a ride in their boat,
circa 1870. Not all relations between the two groups were this
friendly /Hulton Archive

The example of the Australian aborigines
The colonization in the history of Australia was very similar to the colonization
of the Americas. Once the American Revolution began in 1776, the English

government needed a new place to send its prisoners, since the American
colonies would no longer take them. So in 1788, England sent a crew to
Australia, then known as New South Wales, and began building prisons.
As with the American Indians, the English forced the Aborigines off their
land. Many were beaten and killed. Others contracted diseases that were
foreign to them. The English forced many of those who weren't killed into
slavery. So from the arrival of the British in 1788 to about 1920 the
Aborigine population fell by about 90%.
Unfortunately, over the next centuries things got worse before they got
better. Besides losing hundreds of thousands of lives, the Aborigines also
lost much of their culture. They could no longer tell their stories and
traditions (for example the Dreaming), and in some cases, there was no
one to hear them. History was lost. At the time of colonization, Aborigines
spoke an estimated 250-300 different languages. More than half of these
have disappeared altogether.
QUESTIONS :
1. How are the aborigines represented on the picture ? (doc 1)
2. What is the attitude of the British with the Aborigines ? (doc 1)
3. What happened to the culture of the Aborigines ? (text and doc 2)

➢ Doc 2 : example of Aboriginal art a chameleon, Unknown Artist