uropean settlement, the Aborigines obtained the means for subsistence through hunting and gathering techniques, and thus a deep connection established between their natural world and themselves played a critical role in the development of their culture (sec. II). Living as hunter/gatherers, Aborigines had a relatively high quality of life. A discovery in 1948 of Arnhem Land Aborigines' average workday of less than six hours, while managing a life well above a level of bare sufficiency, was enough evidence to question the notion that food-foraging peoples are so concerned with finding food that they lack the time for any of life's more pleasurable activities (Haviland 23).
             With regard to obtaining food, the Aborigines were skillful pragmatic chemists in that few edible items were thrown away because of their poisonous characteristics, before treatment (Hiatt 160). For instance, Northern Aborigines learned to remove the poison from the seeds of cycad plants, and these seeds were subsequently ground into flour from which was made a type of bread (Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia, sec. III, A, 1). Aborigines enjoyed a mixed and oftentimes abundant diet of plant and animal foods that varied as a function of season and local environmental conditions (sec. III, A, 1). The earliest Aboriginal occupants were coastal dwellers and thus relied heavily on fish for food; this being the case, they built large and complex underwater stone-walled traps to increase their catches and utilized large nets composed of plant fibers to also aide in the predation of aquatic life (sec. III, A, 1). Not merely relegating themselves to an exclusive diet of fish, the coastal dwellers also ate a variety of plant foods consisting of yams, coconuts, and the roots of bulrushes (sec. III, A, 1). Inland Aborigines ate acacia seeds, and many types of tubers while also including in their diet wallabies, ostrich eggs, lizards, insects, snakes, rodents, fr...