Prior to European contact, Indigenous Australians in WA primarily recorded their history through oral tradition.
In 1886 an Aboriginal Protection Board was established with five members and a secretary, all of whom were nominated by the Governor, Sir Frederick Napier Broome.
The minutes of the board show they mostly dealt with matters of requests from religious bodies for financial relief and reports from Resident or Police Magistrates pertaining to trials and convictions of Aboriginal people under their jurisdiction.
[2] The department operated as a subdepartment of the Treasury, with a very small staff under the Chief Protector of Aborigines, Henry Charles Prinsep.
The Act limited the expenditure on Aboriginal welfare to a five thousand pounds per annum rather than the one percent of revenue that was required under the Constitution.
The passing of the Mabo and Wik High Court Decisions, which recognised Aboriginal people as in possession of the land at the date of European settlement, is an appendix to these changes.
In October 2015, the Recognition Bill 2015, recognising the Noongar people as the traditional owners of Western Australia's southwest, including Perth, was introduced to the state parliament.
[citation needed] The "stolen wages" whereby up to 75% of the money earned by Aboriginal workers was seized by the state until 1972 was estimated[when?]
There is a large number of absolutely worthless black and half-castes about who grow up to lives of prostitution and idleness; they are a perfect nuisance; if they were taken away from their surroundings of temptation much good might be done with them.
The Moseley Royal Commission heard evidence in 1934 that the Moore River Native Settlement a "woeful spectacle", buildings over-crowded (by at least 50%), buildings and clothing was vermin ridden, there was no vocational training except for the chores given by staff, the diet lacked all fresh fruit, vegetables, eggs, milk, and health of inmates was seriously affected.
In 1936 Sections 8 and 12 of the new Native Administration Act the Chief Protector's guardianship powers were increased still further by a new definition of "native child" to mean any child with any Aboriginal descent, and further widened the scope of the Chief Protector's guardianship and therefore jurisdiction over all Aboriginal people in Western Australia.
However amendments to the Native Welfare Act in 1963 repealed all previous legislation and abolished the Chief Protector's powers to remove children of Aboriginal descent from their biological parents.
Nevertheless, the removal of Aboriginal children continued under the arbitrary implementation of the broad provisions of the Child Welfare Act of 1947.
The creation of the AAPA led to a state housing integration program[9] and the end of the "Stolen Generation" as for the first time policies were enacted which allowed children of Aboriginal descent, considered at risk of neglect, to be fostered first and foremost by other members of their families.
In 2014 the Australian commonwealth government put responsibility for funding essential services in Aboriginal communities back onto the states, but reduced spending by $30 million.
The most significant collection in the twentieth century was that of Ronald and Catherine Berndt at the University of Western Australia Anthropology department.
Anna Haebich[14] has written of the Moore River Native Settlement[15] and the "Stolen Generations", which refers to the systemic removal of Aboriginal children from their families for almost a century ending in the late 1960s.
Advances in archaeology since the 1950s, through the work of such scientists as Sylvia Hallam[16] and Charles Dortch,[17] has increased what is known of the history of Aboriginal people in that area.
These Ranges are within the Balanggarra Native Title determination and are made of large vertical sandstone formations containing many shelters at various elevations.
[18] Located in the traditional lands of the Martidja Banyjima people in the Pilbara region, the first occupation of the Djadjiling Rockshelter has been dated to 35,000 BP.
[19] Excavations of the two sites Juukan-1 and Juukan-2 within the Rio Tinto Brockman 4 mining tenement provide further evidence for occupation of the Pilbara region during the Last Glacial Maximum.
Aboriginal coastal dwellers in both the south and the north of Western Australia, not only preserve stories about extinct Australian megafauna, but also preserved stories about the rising sea levels and the loss of lands offshore as a result of the sea level rise of the Flandrian transgression, at the end of the Pleistocene Ice Age.