Indigenous peoples of Australia. Indigenous peoples is a term that includes both the Aboriginal peoples of Australia and the Torres Strait Islander peoples. The Aboriginal peoples of Australia are the first people who lived in mainland Australia, Tasmania, and a number of other nearby islands and their descendants. They include several hundred diverse peoples (groups), with distinct cultures and languages. The Torres Strait Islander peoples are a separate collection of peoples. They include the early inhabitants of the Torres Strait Islands and their descendants. The Torres Strait Islands lie off the northeastern corner of Australia and are part of the Australian state of Queensland. The Indigenous peoples of Australia are also known as First Australians and First Nations peoples.
According to Aboriginal traditions, the Aboriginal peoples of Australia have always lived in Australia. The ancestors of today’s Aboriginal peoples of Australia likely have lived in Australia for more than 65,000 years. Archaeologists (scientists who study the cultural remains left behind by past civilizations) estimate that these first people came by boat from Southeast Asia, the closest land that was inhabited by human beings at that time. By about 40,000 years ago, Aboriginal people had spread throughout Australia’s diverse regions, from the tropical rain forests to the central deserts. 
There were probably from 500,000 to 1 million Aboriginal people living in Australia when European colonizers first came to the continent in 1788. At that time, there were over 600 different groups, or tribes, of Aboriginal people, and they inhabited every part of the continent. These different groups spoke hundreds of distinct languages and dialects and had varied beliefs and cultural practices.
The Aboriginal peoples of Tasmania are descended from Aboriginal Australians who were coming to what is now the island of Tasmania, to the southeast of the continent, by about 40,000 years ago. At that time, a land bridge connected Tasmania to the Australian mainland. As the last ice age ended and sea levels rose over a period of several thousand years, the land bridge became flooded. Tasmania became a separate island about 12,000 years ago. The Aboriginal peoples of Tasmania became isolated from the mainland, and their cultures began to develop somewhat differently than the cultures of the mainland peoples. Neverthless, the Aboriginal peoples of Tasmania are still considered part of the larger population of Aboriginal peoples of Australia. 
The Torres Strait Islander peoples are descended from people who arrived in the Torres Strait Islands as many as 9,000 years ago. The people came from Melanesia, a region that includes New Guinea and some other Pacific Islands northeast of Australia. The Torres Strait separates northern Australia and New Guinea.
