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 The first recorded European sighting of the West
Australian coast was the Dutch captain Dirk Hartog who in 1616 left an
inscribed pewter plate on an island off Shark Bay. Other Dutch sailors, and
possibly some Portuguese, may well have seen the WA coast prior to Hartog.
Another Dutchman, Abel Tasman, charted sections of the coastline in 1644.
The English explorer William Dampier continued to map the coast in 1688 an
then again in 1699 – he covered the area between the Swan River and
Broome. In 1826 the British, worried that the French might claim the area,
hastily sent a team of troops and convicts to set up a base near the present
day Albany. In 1827 Captain James Stirling was sent from Sydney to find a
potential site for a settlement. The first settlers, numbering about 300,
arrived in 1829 and established themselves at a site Stirling had noted
about 16km upstream on the Swan River which was named Perth. At first the
new colony rejected convict labour and struggled to advance. However the
effect on the local Aboriginal population was similar to elsewhere in
Australia – misunderstanding, mistrust, murder as the Aborigines and their
lands were cleared for agriculture. Right through the 1800s the European
incomers had economic problems until gold discoveries in the 1890s which
enabled the colony to rapidly achieve statehood autonomy in less than a
decade.
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It is thought that northwest Western Australia was the arrival point for the
first indigenous Australians, probably more than 50,000 years ago. Certainly
stone tools from an archaeological find confirm that Aborigines were living
as far south as Perth about 40,000 years ago. Despite the vastness and
isolation of WA, the Aboriginal people here suffered from European
settlement just like their kin in the east of the continent. Colonisation
changed the indigenous ways of Aborigines throughout WA. Conflict and
assimilation policies resulted in massacre, disease, incarceration,
dispossession of traditional lands and loss of basic rights. The Western
Australian Aborigines Act (1905) allowed the authorities to relocate
children, control employment and restrict movement. This discrimination
lasted right through until 1972 when there was a full repeal of repressive
legislation. Since then there have been more than 120 land claims by
indigenous peoples in WA with many of these still going through mediation.
In a tribute to their resilience, WA is now home to some of the strongest
Aboriginal communities in Australia and about 16% (58,500 persons) of
Australia’s Aboriginal people live in the state. In particular large
numbers of Aborigines live in the Pilbara and Kimberley regions in the
north.
