Australia Cultural Groups

Online Resources

 * Aboriginal People in the Register of Aboriginal Reserves, index. This index includes the names of approximately 80 Aboriginal people. It is not a complete list of Aboriginal people living on reserves in NSW in the period of 1875-1904.
 * Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Biographical Index (ABI)
 * Pedigree charts of Torres Straits Islandersat FamilySearch, images.
 * Aboriginal Resources: An Overview of Records, New South Wales
 * 19th Century Aboriginal Population Records at New South Wales Government State Archives and Records]
 * Correspondence, etc., 1843-1869 at FamilySearch, images. Includes 1851 censuses of 3 aboriginal tribes.
 * Finding your Aboriginal history South Australia State Archives
 * Guides to Aboriginal History South Australia State Archives
 * Croatian and Slav pioneers of South Australia and Victoria at FamilySearch, images.
 * 1788-1849 Irish Convicts to NSW 1788 - 1849, index
 * Tracing your Chinese Australian Genealogy
 * Religious and Ethnic Communities in Tasmanian History

Indigenous Australians

 * There are two indigenous groups of people in Australia: the Aborigines and the Torres Strait Islanders. Neither groups had a written language; consequently, records generated about them are found in other sources listed in this outline such as biography, civil registration, and church records.
 * Births for aborigines and island children were not recorded in civil registration.
 * There are no oral genealogies in the FamilySearch Library because it is considered, by most Aboriginal communities to be extremely offensive to mention the names of the dead or have pictures of them.


 * The original inhabitants of New South Wales were the Aboriginal tribes who arrived in Australia about 40,000 to 60,000 years ago. Before European settlement there were an estimated 250,000 Aboriginal people in the region.
 * The Wodi wodi people are the original custodians of the Illawarra region of South Sydney. Speaking a variant of the Dharawal language, the Wodi Wodi peoples lived across a large stretch of land which was roughly surrounded by what is now known as Campbelltown, Shoalhaven River and Moss Vale.
 * The Bundjalung people are the original custodians of parts of the northern coastal areas.
 * There are other Aboriginal peoples whose traditional lands are within what is now New South Wales, including the Wiradjiri, Gamilaray, Yuin, Ngarigo, Gweagal, and Ngiyampaa peoples.


 * The Stolen Generations (also known as Stolen Children) were the children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent who were removed from their families by the Australian federal and state government agencies and church missions, under acts of their respective parliaments. The removals of those referred to as "half-caste" children were conducted in the period between approximately 1905 and 1967, although in some places mixed-race children were still being taken into the 1970s. Official government estimates are that in certain regions between one in ten and one in three Indigenous Australian children were forcibly taken from their families and communities between 1910 and 1970.
 * States arranged widespread removal of (primarily) mixed-race children from their Aboriginal mothers. In addition, appointed Aboriginal protectors in each state exercised wide-ranging guardianship powers over Aboriginal people up to the age of 16 or 21, often determining where they could live or work.
 * The exact number of children removed is unknown. Estimates of numbers have been widely disputed. The Bringing Them Home report (produced by the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families in 1987), says that "at least 100,000" children were removed from their parents.

19th Century Aboriginal Population Records

 * Aboriginal Resources: An Overview of Records
 * 19th Century Aboriginal Population Records at NSW Government State Archives and Records]
 * Blanket lists and returns of Aboriginal people: Aboriginal people of the cooler southern parts of Australia traditionally wore cloaks made of animal skin. These were very warm but could take up to a year to make. Governor Macquarie initiated several actions to encourage the ‘civilisation’ and cooperation of Sydney’s Aboriginal people, including an annual feast and distribution of supplies at Parramatta in 1814. Blankets were later distributed by local magistrates or the police in conjunction with the Queen’s Birthday on 1 May. Local colonial authorities such as the magistrates and police were required to report to the Government on the distribution of blankets and on the conditions of Aboriginal people in their area. These reports, or returns, resulted in detailed lists of individuals and communities. Initially many blanket lists, or returns, are found amongst the Colonial Secretary’s papers. Later some court houses and police stations kept records of their distribution of blankets. Police also reported on the conditions of Aboriginal people in the districts, in some cases producing detailed returns on Aboriginal people and their communities.

New South Wales
Family Records Service, Aboriginal Affairs NSW Level 6 201 Coward Street MASCOT NSW 2020 Telephone: 1800 019 998 Fax: 02 8362 6688 Email: enquiries@aboriginalaffairs.nsw.gov.au Family history email enquiries: familyhistory@aboriginalaffairs.nsw.gov.au
 * AANSW will check indexes to identify if there any records relating to your request. If there are and they approve your application the AANSW will either send you copies of the records or send you a letter authorising access and/or copying of the relevant records at NSW State Archives. If you receive a letter you will need to present the letter authorising you to view the records when you visit NSW State Archives. If you are viewing original records you will also need to apply for reader's ticket. You will need one form of identification to obtain a readers' ticket.

Australian Institute of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) Family History Unit GPO Box 553, Canberra ACT 2601 Freecall: 1800 352 553 Email: familyhistory@aiatsis.gov.au
 * Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies(AIATSIS) https://aiatsis.gov.au/research/guides-and-resources/how-search-collection]

Queensland
Department of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Partnerships Communities and Personal Histories Freecall: 1800 650 230 (toll free within Australia) Email: enquiries@datsima.qld.gov.au

Western Australia
State Records Office of Western Australia Aboriginal Family History Alexander Library Building James St West Entrance Perth Cultural Centre, Perth WA 6000 Telephone: (08) 9427 3360 Email: sro@sro.wa.gov.au

Dept of Communities, Personal and Family Information Family Information Records Bureau 189 Royal St, East Perth WA 6004 Telephone: (08) 9222 2555 Freecall: 1800 000 277 (in WA)

Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries Aboriginal History Research Unit PO Box 3153 East Perth WA 6892 Telephone: 1300 651 077

Chinese Australians
For a full Wiki article, with many online links, see Chinese in Australia.
 * The very early history of Chinese Australians involved significant immigration from villages of the Pearl River Delta in Southern China i.e. mostly from the Cantonese subgroup. More recent Chinese migrants include Mainland China, Taiwan, etc which include those from Mandarin and other Chinese dialects or forms.
 * The Australian Gold Rushes are what first lured thousands of Chinese to the country. In 1855, in Melbourne there were 11,493 Chinese arrivals.
 * Due to the widespread racist sentiments in parliament and on the goldfields, the first of many immigration restrictions and Chinese targeting laws was passed in late 1855. However, due to the long, poorly regulated borders between the colonies of Australia the numbers of Chinese on the goldfields continued to swell.
 * Upon the goldfields Chinese peoples faced many hardships. There were violent anti-Chinese riots; the Buckland Riot, the Lambing Flats Riots, as well as general discrimination and prejudice.
 * However, there were many establishments in this period that would have a lasting effect on the history of Australia and the history of Chinese in Australia. One of these establishments were the Chinese camps, which most often, later, became Chinatowns in Australia.
 * There was also the establishment and the consolidation of power for Chinese societies, many of these are still active in Australia today. These societies provided support and community for the Chinese in the colonies.
 * After the gold rushes the numbers of Chinese living in the cities swelled and their businesses and industries contributed much to growth of Melbourne and Sydney in the late 19th century.
 * There were very few Chinese women migrating to Australia. At one point in the 1860s the numbers of Chinese in Australia was around 40,000. Of these, it is believed only 12, were women. This gender imbalance meant that some Chinese men married women of European descent but many had it in their hearts to return to China.
 * Some of the first Acts of the new Federation of Australia would establish the White Australia Policy. This policy made it almost impossible for anyone new to migrate from China to Australia. After federation the population of Chinese in Australia steadily declined.
 * The final end of the White Australia Policy from the 1960s saw new arrivals from the Chinese diaspora and for the first time significant numbers from non-Cantonese speaking parts of China. The first wave of arrivals were ethnic Chinese refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia during the 1970s.
 * This was followed by economic migrants from Hong Kong and Taiwan in the 1980s and 1990s, whose families often settled in the capital cities.
 * New institutions were established for these arrivals and old ones such as the Chinese Chamber of Commerce revived, while numerous Chinese language newspapers were once again published in the capital cities.
 * Ethnic Chinese settlers from Peru settled Australia following the dictatorship of Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces of Peru in 1968.
 * After the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, then-Australian Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, allowed students from China to settle in Australia permanently. Since the 2000s, with the rapid development of China's economy, there has been an explosion in the number of immigrants from China, which have frequently been Australia's largest source of new immigrants since 2000. In 2015-16, China (excluding Hong Kong and Macau) was the second largest source of immigrants to Australia behind India. China (excluding Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan) is now the third largest foreign birthplace for Australian residents, after England and New Zealand.

Irish Australians

 * Irish Australians have played a considerable part in the history of Australia. They came to Australia from the late eighteenth century as convicts and free settlers wanting to immigrate from their homeland. Some of those who were transported to Australia, were prisoners of war, mainly those who fought in the 1798 Irish rebellion for independence; others were settlers who could not find a life during the Irish famine and the harsh years in Ireland afterwards.
 * Around 40,000 Irish convicts were transported to Australia between 1791 and 1867, including at least 325 who had participated in either the Irish Rebellion of 1798, the rebellion of 1803 or the Young Ireland skirmishes in 1848.
 * Other than convicts, most of the laborers who voluntarily emigrated to Australia in the 19th century were drawn from the poorest sector of British and Irish society. After 1831, the Australian colonies employed a system of government assistance in which all or most immigration costs were paid for chosen immigrants, and the colonial authorities used these schemes to exercise some control over immigration. While these assisted schemes were biased against the poorest elements of society, the very poor could overcome these hurdles in several ways, such as relying on local assistance or help from relatives.
 * Most Irish emigrants to Australia were free settlers. The 1891 census of Australia counted 228,000 Irish-born. At the time the Irish made up about 27 percent of the immigrants from the British Isles. The number of Ireland-born in Australia peaked in 1891.
 * Over four thousand young female orphans from Irish workhouses were shipped to the Australian colonies at the time of the Great Famine (1848–50) to meet a demand for domestic servants. Although a number eventually died in poverty, others made upwardly mobile marriages, often surviving older husbands to experience long widowhoods.
 * The Catholic Church only became involved in the 1870s, when its relief agencies in England were overwhelmed with Irish immigration. Even so, only about 10% of the resettlements were through Catholic agencies until after World War II. Australian Catholic groups began importing children in the 1920s to increase the Catholic population, and became heavily engaged in placing and educating them after World War II. The practice quietly died out during the 1950s.

Catholic Australians

 * The permanent presence of Catholicism in Australia came rather with the arrival of the First Fleet of British convict ships at Sydney in 1788. One-tenth of all the convicts who came to Australia on the First Fleet were Catholic, and at least half of them were born in Ireland. A small proportion of British marines were also Catholic.
 * Some of the Irish convicts had been transported to Australia for political crimes or social rebellion in Ireland, so the authorities were suspicious of Catholicism for the first three decades of settlement.
 * Catholic convicts were compelled to attend Church of England services and their children and orphans were raised by the authorities as Anglicans.

Indian Australians

 * Indian immigration from British India to Australia began early in history of Australian colony. The first Indians arrived in Australia with the British settlers who had been living in India.
 * In the late 1830s, more Indians started to arrive in Australia as indentured labourers when the penal transport of convicts to New South Wales (which at the time also consisted of Queensland and Victoria) was slowing, before being abolished altogether in 1840. The lack of manual labourers from the convict assignment system led to an increase demand for foreign labour, which was partly filled by the arrival of Indians who came from an agrarian background in India, and thus fulfilled their tasks as farm labourers on cane fields and shepherds on sheep stations well.
 * Some adventurers followed during the gold rush of the 1850s. A census from 1861 indicates that there were around 200 Indians in Victoria of whom 20 were in Ballarat, the town which was at the epicenter of the gold rush.
 * Thereafter, many more came and worked as hawkers - going from house to house, town to town, traversing thousands of kilometers, making a living by selling a variety of products."
 * From the 1860s, Indians, most of them Sikh, worked as merchants, industrialists, and businessmen to operate throughout outback Australia, as 'pioneers of the inland'. The 1881 census records 998 people who were born in India but this had grown to over 1700 by 1891.
 * Between 1860s to 1900 period when small groups of cameleers were also shipped in and out of Australia at three-year intervals, to service South Australia's inland pastoral industry by carting goods and transporting wool bales by camel trains, who were commonly referred to as "Afghans" or "Ghans", despite their origin often being mainly from British India, and some even from Afghanistan and Egypt and Turkey.
 * Majority of cameleers, including Indian cameleers, were Muslims with a sizeable minority were Sikhs from Punjab region, they set up camel-breeding stations and rest house outposts, known as caravanserai, throughout inland Australia, creating a permanent link between the coastal cities and the remote cattle and sheep grazing stations until about the 1930s, when they were largely replaced by the automobile.

Histories About Cultural Groups
Over the years many Cultural Groups, including Jews, Italians, and Chinese, have immigrated to Australia. To learn about the ethnic, racial, and religious groups of your ancestors, you might study a history of Jews in Australia, Italians in New South Wales, or Chinese in the gold fields of Victoria. This historical background can help you identify where your ancestors lived and when they lived there, where they migrated, and the types of records they might be listed in.

Histories have been published about some cultural groups in Australia. The includes  histories on the, , , , , , , , , , , , , , and  in Australia.