Aboriginal Ingenuity, Ch 16: Housing

Abstract

ABC Education offers a 4min 17-sec video that could be a valuable part of your organisation’s reconciliation activities.

How do homes in northern Australia differ from those in the south?

How do people build for the conditions in which they live?

In the 19th century, British explorers came upon a variety of Indigenous dwellings and wrote about their comfort, cleanliness and suitability for the prevailing weather conditions.

In this chapter, we learn about the remains of large villages of stone houses that can still be seen at Lake Condah.

We hear from the early explorers who describe coming across villages of comfortable and well-designed homes.

Aboriginal people were using stone, timber, bark, rope and other technologies to build houses designed for the varying conditions across the country.