Living Cultures, Not a Single Historical Religion

Australian Aboriginal peoples maintain the oldest continuous cultural traditions documented anywhere in the world, with archaeological evidence of continuous occupation and cultural practice on the Australian continent extending back tens of thousands of years, and Aboriginal religious and ceremonial life continues today as an actively practiced, living set of traditions among many Aboriginal communities, alongside considerable engagement with Christianity introduced through colonial-era missionary activity and, for many Aboriginal Australians, alongside significant ongoing impact from historical dispossession, forced removal policies and other consequences of colonization that Australian truth-telling and reconciliation processes continue to address. Given the genuine diversity of distinct Aboriginal nations and language groups across the continent, each with its own specific relationship to country and its own specific ceremonial traditions, and given the explicit community protocols restricting outside representation of sacred material, this entry treats the appropriate scope of a general reference source as limited to recording the existence, general character and specific restriction of this material, deferring entirely to Aboriginal communities and their own cultural authorities for any more detailed or specific engagement with actual ceremonial or prayer content.