E. Kozlová
Aboriginal Australia
Aboriginal Art
The traditions of aboriginal people are reflected in aboriginal art. There are traditions of painting and engraving on rock. The drawing in red ochre, show human figures in action, running, hunting, dancing.The aboriginal painters usedearth colors from natural ingrediens. They made pictures of Birds, animals, fish, daily life but also abstract designes. Many of them were conected with religions.
There is also a tradition of sculpture and carving, producting of wood, clay and fiber. Products of wood were also boomerangs, clubs, shield. They made many things from animal and vegetable fibers.
Traditional Food
Aboriginal Ausralians ate rich and balanced diets of seasonal fruits,nuts,roots, vegetables, meats and fish. The ones still eat kangaroos, emus, birds and snakes.The ones living on the coast eat fish, crabs, oysters and turtles and whales. The aboriginal people ate also insects-moths and worms, honey-ants.
Customs, rules, religion govern most aspects of the cooking and eating food.
Aboriginal Languages
Before Europeans, there are tribs and they had own territory and their own language.
The 600-700 trib nations spoke 200-250 languages. Languages are different from each other as are French or Japanese,but they belongs to one language family. These language have complex grammars, similar to Latin and Greek and large vocabularies. The stories and songs were passed from generation to generation in Australian languages. Each trib had own song style and use special words, witch were not used in everyday language. Many tribs had a special avodience style of speaking witch had to be used in the presence of a relative in formal contact. The pronunciation of Australian languages is phonetic.
Coming Europeans had a devasting effect on Australian languages. No more than 20 or 30 languages being used in every day life and being learnt by children.
For generation, Aboriginal children learnt to write and read only in English but now children learn to write and read in their language first and than in English. There are some important means how to preserve Aborigial languages – language centers, Aboriginal media associations.
There are number of words that have been adopted into English-boomerang, kangaroo, dingo.