To go back as far as the first Aboriginal, you need to go back over 40,000 years. The Aboriginal people speak in many different languages - about two hundred and thirty have been counted - and an enormous number of dialects in each of those languages. There are several reasons why there are so many different languages. Firstly, in spite of the size of Australia the number of Aboriginal people has always been few - about 300,000 Aboriginals were in Australia when the first European settlers arrived in the 1780s. This number of people would fit into one large town today, but the Aboriginal people were scattered in tribes all over the country. These tribes lived so far apart that they did not need a common language, and thus each developed a different one. Secondly, the Aboriginal people have never used a written language. To communicate, they talked, but they never wrote letters or books. This meant there was no common written language or alphabet for all tribes like thee is for the English, Greeks, or Italians. All the world's peoples have a concept of how the world was formed. The Aboriginals believe that, in the beginning, the earth was featureless, flat and grey. There were no mountain ranges, no rivers, no billabongs, no birds or animals - in fact not one living thing. Then long, long ago came the Dreamtime. The Dreamtime was a time when giant creatures rose up out of the grey plains where they had been slumbering for countless ages. These mythical Beings looked like animals or plants or insects, but they behaved just like humans. They wandered across the vast grey wastes, digging for water and searching for food and as they searched, because of their giant size, they made huge ravines and rivers in the land. Thus the world took on the shape it has today.