Clap sticks have been used by Indigenous people in ceremonies and rituals since the earliest times. The sticks pictured were made in contemporary times, and were decorated using a heated wire.

Australia’s Indigenous people are believed to have inhabited the Australian continent for more than 65,000 years.

They lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle until European settlement, which began in 1788 when English convict ships arrived at Botany Bay, at what is now known as Sydney.

It is believed that there were more than 300,000 Indigenous people on the continent when European settlers arrived – more than 200 years later in 2001 the Indigenous population was about 60,000, or about 2.4 per cent of the Australian population.

The Indigenous population growth rate is double that of the general community and is particularly high in south-eastern Australia. The Indigenous population is also comparatively young – for example, the proportion of under 15-year-old Indigenous people is almost double that of the total population.

‘Indigenous’ is now the officially agreed upon term for the country’s first inhabitants and refers to anyone of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander ancestry who identifies as such.

Indigenous people have variously been referred to as ‘natives’, ‘Aborigines’ and ‘Aboriginals’, but these have been superseded by Indigenous.

(There was debate in the mid-1970s over the correct use of the adjectival and noun forms of Aboriginal and Aborigine. Aboriginal and Aboriginals were agreed upon at that time.)

Many Indigenous people prefer to be referred to by their local group names, such as WA’s Nyoongar, Wongi and Yamitji people and the Koori people of south-eastern Australia.

The word Aboriginal means from the original, and is a generic word for any group of people who have descended from the first people of a continent or region.

Indigenous Australians have been compared with the Inuits, who are spread across eastern Russia, Alaska, northern Canada and Greenland, because their culture has remained almost unchanged, despite the influence of western society.

After the 1967 Constitutional Referendum, which meant the Australian Commonwealth Government could pass laws affecting Indigenous people for the first time, the Commonwealth moved to change the definition of Aboriginality from one based on physical features alone, which included fractional mixtures or ‘castes’.

The change was to a definition based on cultural values: that an Aboriginal person is someone who has some Aboriginal biological descent, who identifies as Aboriginal and who is accepted as Aboriginal by an Aboriginal organisation.