Aborigens have lived in Australia for al least 40.000 years before the european settlement, in trhe late 18th century. They were hunter-gatherers, with a complex oral culture and spiritual values bassed on reverence for the land and a belief in the Dreamtime (a sacred era in which ancestral Totem Sprit Beings formed The Creation).
The first recorded european landfall on the Australian continent was attributed to the Dutch navigator Willem Janszoom, on 26 February, in 1606.