Prehistory of Australia

Prehistory, also called pre-literary history, is the period of human history between the first known use of stone tools by hominins c. 3.3 million years ago and the beginning of recorded history with the invention of writing systems. The use of symbols, marks, and images appears very early among humans, but the earliest known writing systems appeared c. 5,200 years ago. It took thousands of years for writing systems to be widely adopted, with writing having spread to almost all cultures by the 19th century. The end of prehistory therefore came at different times in different places, and the term is less often used in discussing societies where prehistory ended relatively recently. It is based on an old conception of history that without written records there could be no history. The most common conception today is that history is based on evidence, however the concept of prehistory has not been completely discarded.

In the early Bronze Age, Sumer in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley Civilisation, and ancient Egypt were the first civilizations to develop their own scripts and keep historical records, with their neighbours following. Most other civilizations reached their end of prehistory during the following Iron Age. The three-age division of prehistory into Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age remains in use for much of Eurasia and North Africa, but is not generally used in those parts of the world where the working of hard metals arrived abruptly from contact with Eurasian cultures, such as Oceania, Australasia, much of Sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of the Americas. With some exceptions in pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas, these areas did not develop writing systems before the arrival of Eurasians, so their prehistory reaches into relatively recent periods; for example, 1788 is usually taken as the end of the prehistory of Australia.

Australian art is a broad spectrum of art created in or about Australia, or by Australians overseas, spanning from prehistoric times to the present day. The art forms include, but are not limited to, Aboriginal, Colonial, Landscape, Atelier, and Contemporary art.

The visual arts in Australia have a rich and extensive history, with Aboriginal art dating back at least 30,000 years. The country has been the birthplace of many notable artists from both Western and Indigenous Australian schools. These include the late-19th-century Heidelberg School plein air painters, the Antipodeans, the Central Australian Hermannsburg School watercolorists, and the Western Desert Art Movement. The Australian art scene also features significant examples of High modernism and Postmodern art.

Bronisław Kasper Malinowski (Polish: [brɔˈɲiswaf maliˈnɔfskʲi]; 7 April 1884 – 16 May 1942) was a Polish anthropologist and ethnologist whose writings on ethnography, social theory, and field research have exerted a lasting influence on the discipline of anthropology.

Malinowski was born and raised in what was part of the Austrian partition of Poland, Kraków. He graduated from King John III Sobieski 2nd High School. In the years 1902–1906 he studied at the philosophy department of the Jagiellonian University and received his doctorate there in 1908. In 1910, at the London School of Economics (LSE), he worked on exchange and economics, analysing Aboriginal Australia through ethnographic documents. In 1914, he travelled to Australia. He conducted research in the Trobriand Islands and other regions in New Guinea and Melanesia where he stayed for several years, studying indigenous cultures.