INTRODUCTION
Some two thousand generations of men and women have lived and died since the first Aboriginal walked upon the soil of this land, now known as Australia. Think of your mother or father, your grandparents, then your great grandparents. Now, including you, that makes four generations, and goes back over 100 years. To go back as far as the first Aboriginal, you need to go back over 40,000 years. That's a very long time indeed!
The Aboriginal people speak in many different languages - about two hundred and thirty have been counted - and an enormous number of dialects in each of those languages. There are several reasons why there are so many different languages. Firstly, in spite of the size of Australia the number of Aboriginal people has always been few - about 300,000 Aboriginals were in Australia when the first European settlers arrived in the 1780s. This number of people would fit into one large town today, but the Aboriginal people were scattered in tribes all over the country. These tribes lived so far apart that they did not need a common language, and thus each developed a different one.