 | The scientific theory is that people arrived on the north coast then slowly moved around the country, eventually settling the whole continent. |
| We do know that by 39,000 years ago Aboriginal people were living in the Swan Valley, north-east of Perth, using stone tools quarried from rock which is now under the sea. |
| They lived alongside the Swan River and cooked kangaroos, emus, lizards and other meat on campfires. When the river flooded, silt covered some of these campsites. |
| More silt, earthquakes and changing watercourses over thousands of years smothered old campfires, the tools and bones. These weren't uncovered till clay mining started in the last few years. |
| Then the old sites were revealed and their age discovered by carbon dating remains. This is done by measuring the rate at which radioisotopes deteriorate. |
| Bones found in caves in the South West, like Devil's Lair near Cape Leeuwin, show that Aboriginal people ate giant kangaroos and wombats, Tasmanian devils and other creatures which are now extinct. |
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Though Macassan fishermen (from the present Indonesian island of Sulawesi) had been visiting the Kimberley coast for centuries, Europeans only became aware of Australia's west coast in the 17th Century. |
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Many Dutch vessels on their way to Batavia (now Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia) were wrecked. Some survivors from the Batavia (1629), the Zuytdorp (1712) and other ships may have been befriended by Aboriginal people and intermarried. Whalers and sealers also worked the south coast and some kidnapped Aboriginal women. |
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The official British settlement of Western Australia came in 1826 in Albany, then 3 years later the whole area west of longitude 129 was proclaimed as a British Colony, 41 years after the First Fleet arrived on the East Coast. |
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The line selected, just east of Eucla on the South Coast and Kununurra in the Kimberley, bore no relation to geography or Aboriginal boundaries. |
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It was the so-called Pope's Line, determined in the 15th Century to separate the world into Spanish and Portuguese spheres of influence. |