Cultural Survival

Before non-indigenous settlement, the Wet Tropics rainforests were one of the most populated areas of Australia. Rainforest Aboriginal people's environment provided everything - spirituality, identity, social order, shelter, food and medicine. Aboriginal people also had an excellent economic system in place that involved the bartering of resources amongst different tribal groups.

For these people, the rugged rainforest mountains and inaccessible coastal wetlands provided some protection when Europeans arrived in the mid-nineteenth century. Rainforest Aboriginal people continued to practice their culture and language and their knowledge of ecology, native foods, and access routes was invaluable to the newcomers. But, as more land was cleared, competition became fierce between the settlers and the people of the rainforest.

Many Rainforest Aboriginal people died from introduced diseases like the common cold. Others starved when they could not access their traditional country and their food resources. They were shot and poisoned when they hunted the introduced cattle and horses the new settlers had brought. This aggression from the settlers was not met with passivity. Rainforest Aboriginal people fought for their land and continue to campaign to get their land back.

To visitors, many of the Wet Tropics waterfalls are places of extraordinary beauty, but for many Rainforest Aboriginal people, apart from maybe being an important story place, they can also be places of immense sorrow - places their people were driven over and massacred.

Rainforest Aboriginal people had to survive on the margins of the new culture that brought with it many foreign laws and government policies that imposed great restrictions on Aboriginal peoples' lives. The new laws were quite often discriminatory towards Aboriginal people on the basis of their race. Many Aboriginal people from this region provided work unpaid for rations (sugar, flour, tea and tobacco) as maids, farm labourers, stockmen and timbercutters, helping to shape the rural landscape you see today.

Many more were forcibly removed to Christian missions at Mission Beach, Mona Mona, Murray Upper, Palm Island, Yarrabah and Wujal Wujal, and suffered hardships through the splitting up of their families. Many Aboriginal people from other parts of Queensland were also removed to missions in the Wet Tropics. Today over 18,000 Aboriginal people live in urban centres, country towns, Aboriginal communities (some are former missions) and small settlements within the World Heritage Area.

Despite these massive changes, Rainforest Aboriginal people's stories, language and culture have survived and people continue to have a strong sense of their relationship with their country. These relationships are mapped out in shared stories and places. Some shared stories connect and identify tribal groups. Other story places are personal, given to individuals when they are born - a practice which continues today.

In spite of the imposition of a Western land ownership (tenure) system and significant changes to land management brought about by European settlement and development, Rainforest Aboriginal people continue to maintain and care for country through their traditional beliefs, knowledge and practices. Their cultures continue to live and grow, and lifestyles today contain a mix of traditional and contemporary practices and information that is still handed down from one generation to the next.

Like the forests, their culture survives in the landscape features that remain. In this way, the landscape continues to hold the key to indigenous culture and identity. It tells the story of a complex traditional culture, and also of the tragedy, hardship and the strength of Rainforest Aboriginal people in a hundred years of European settlement.