BEFORE THE ARRIVAL of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove, Aboriginal societies, which were many and diverse, made up a multicultural complex. They had in common that they were all, perforce, adapted in their different ways to the physical realities of the territories of Australia. The words ‘Aborigines’ and ‘Australians’ are both European coinages. ‘The Aborigines’ was used for convenience to generalise the earlier groups of disparate people, making the same confusion between nationality and ecological provenance as is still made with plants. In the case of the Aborigines, the process is now in reverse, with a return to pre-invasions groupings like Nyoongah in south-western Australia, the Kaurna of the Adelaide area or Krautungalung of Gippsland. This is healthy, since the European generalisation is both imposed and inaccurate in its implication that the various groups were ‘here from the beginning’, the literal meaning of the term.

‘Australian’ in a different way is just as arbitrary, whether applied to people, plants or animals. ‘Australian’, if taken literally, means ‘of the southern hemisphere’, which includes New Zealand, most of South America, half of Africa and all of Antarctica. It is one more linguistic example of the European global domination that has characterised the last three hundred years. The corresponding term, Borealians, of the northern hemisphere, is not heard, for the obvious reason that it would include Asians as well as Europeans and a variety of North Americans.