Australian Aboriginal Hunting

Information on Aboriginal Hunting in Australia

By paddynapper

Australian Aboriginal People were hunters and gatherers. Typically, women were gatherers and they collected plants and small animals, while men were hunters and they hunted large birds and animals. Here is some information on how the hunting was done.

By g_kat26

As with many other things like food, weapons, clothes and the local culture, Aboriginal hunting techniques depended on where in Australia the tribe lived. Because Australia is a large country covering various climatic regions from inland deserts to tropical rainforests and snowy mountains, the conditions and resources were very different for different tribes.

The tribes in deserts for example hunted large kangaroos and emus, while coastal communities ate a lot of seafood, and also large marine animals like turtles, dugongs and whales.

In the inland tribes, Australian indigenous people were very clever animal trackers. They could tell from the grass where large animals had passed recently and in what direction they had gone. In these areas men often hunted in groups when they had to kill large animals. They often used hunting boomerangs to damage the knees of kangaroos, and cut through the neck of emus.

In the coastal areas, much of hunting was done in the water. There, indigenous people were very clever using harpoons and spears when killing dugongs and whales but also fish and other smaller sea animals. To let Aboriginal People to live in their traditional way, they are still allowed to catch these animals and do some whaling. This is of course nothing like the scale of commercial whaling that once happened in Australia. Aboriginal people were traditionally very sustainable and well aware of the fact that resources wouldn’t last if hunted too much or in wrong seasons. After all, they could live in Australia for tens of thousands of years and make sure the food resources would always last.

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NOTE: This website is written in British English, which is the English we use in Australia. You will find words like "traveller", "harbour" and "realise", and they are all correct in the language used in Australia.

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