Name: Living with the Oldest Culture on Earth (Indigenous Australians)
Uploaded: 2026-01-18T09:09:06.000Z
Duration: 12 min 37 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

When you think of ancient civilizations, what comes to mind?

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The pharaohs of ancient Egypt building the pyramids almost 5,000 years ago?

Or maybe the cradle of civilization in the Middle east dating back about 10,000 years ago.

But what if I told you that the there was an ancient culture of people whose history dates back further than any other culture on earth and that that culture still exists today?

I'm talking about Indigenous Australians, also known as Aboriginals or First nations people.

It's estimated that this culture's origins date back further than 60,000 years, which means they've been around since the world looked like this.

And if you think Australian animals today are dangerous, it's been confirmed that ancient Indigenous Australians lived alongside megafauna like this that are now long extinct.

Indigenous Australians have never had any form of written language, yet they have their own version of recorded history passed down for generations over tens of thousands of years in the forms of stories, art, songs and dance.

Some of these stories to outsiders might just sound like fairy tales, but

but they have later been confirmed by science to be factual events passed down through generations for centuries.

These are just a few of the mind blowing facts from over 60,000 years of rich ancient history that is abundant in this culture.

But what has now become one of the most crucial parts of their history is that over the course of 250 years, it was almost entirely erased.

This is the story of the first nations people of Australia.

For the past few weeks, we've been traveling around Australia seeking adventures.

And one of the most important parts about exploring a new country is getting to know the culture that makes it unique from other countries.

However, for this episode, it won't just be our international team that will be learning more about the culture.

apart from the three years that I lived in la, I've hardly been anywhere outside of my home city.

And as it turns out, Australia is a pretty big place.

So to say that there's a lot I still have to learn about the country would be an understatement.

Like many British colonised countries, Australia has a complicated relationship with our Indigenous people.

And as a white man educated through the Australian public school system, I only recently began to realise just how little I know about the Indigenous culture.

So this episode would give me the opportunity to learn more.

We have gone on a bit of a road trip today, driven about four hours out to join the Budj Bim Indigenous Cultural Tour.

We're going to be walking around, around on country, learning about the Indigenous people that used to live on these lands thousands of years ago.

So it'll be a lot to take in, Which is welcome, brothers and sisters, to Gundijmara, Kerep, Gundidj and Gilgarh, Gundidj country.

Australia, being a similar geographic size to the United States, is home to hundreds of different Indigenous groups, each with their own distinct culture and traditions.

In fact, There are over 700 different languages and dialects from around the country.

That's one of the things that's important about Aboriginal culture.

Our history has always been passed down orally.

If you can go out and tell a story, you know, you can live forever.

Unfortunately, Indigenous Australians have experienced significant marginalisation and discrimination throughout much of Australia's history.

In fact, it wasn't until 1967 that that indigenous Australians were even legally counted as part of the population.

However, one of the most egregious acts perpetrated against Indigenous Australians is what is now referred to as the stolen generation.

The term stolen generation refers to a dark chapter in Australian history which took place between the late 1800s and the 1970s.

During this time, tens of thousands of Indigenous children around the country were forcibly removed from their families by the Australian government and placed into institutions like church missions or with white families.

That's where the mission church was, just over here, where the cross is here?

Yeah, just to the left of it a little bit.

For those who don't know what happened for those decades with missions popping up around the country and what the government was trying to do with Aboriginal children, basically.

Is that something that happened here as well?

This is a breeding ground for a lot of that trauma from the stolen generation from, you know, the forced labour.

People were working to provide for their families, but

they never got paid whilst they lived on the mission.

The work that they did was only paid in rations, and that was flour, sugar, tea.

And so understanding that the work that they would do inside this gate here, it was not for themselves, it was not for each other, it was for the church.

At these church missions, these stolen Indigenous children were forced to speak only English and had to believe in Christians, Christianity.

They were not allowed to speak their native language or about where they came from.

This was in an attempt to make them forget everything about Indigenous culture so that it would eventually cease to exist.

When you came through that gate, when you came onto the mission, you know, you were punished.

If you were caught teaching culture, speaking about culture, you'd be punished and your punishment was severe.

It was, you know, you weren't fed, your children were taken off you, you know you were moved off to another mission, and

so you didn't want that sort of punishment.

Most of these indigenous children were stolen so young that they had no idea where they came from.

And they were severed from their true families for the rest of their lives.

This is what we call the children's dorm.

If you were to disobey the rules of the mission manager, your children would be taken off you and placed in the children's dorm.

A black car would come down that driveway, pick them up, take them to Ballarat, and they would.

You'd never see them for another 18 years.

See, my dad was taken as a young kid and part of the stolen generation.

To draw attention to the fact that we're talking one generation ago, that this was at the latest that this was happening.

My dad was part of the Stalin generation too.

And, yeah, he was one of the first tour guides.

So for him to come back and do that after being stolen from his culture at such a young age, you know, that speaks volumes to the person that he wanted to be and that he was able to become.

Going forward, what do you want the message from this video to be?

And in terms of what we can continue to do, all of us, to move forward?

If you're trying, you know, that's one step.

If you're not trying at all, you're sort of behind the eight ball.

So seek it out is exactly what we intended to do because me, Tommy and DEZ were about to travel to the other side of the country to immerse ourselves in a remote indigenous community called Jadingen.

We have officially arrived, Western Australia.

That rental car guy, didn't it still me with a lot of confidence.

He's like, you know what you're doing, right?

I've never been anywhere like this kind of terrain before in Australia.