Between 40,000 and 12,500 years ago

• Different groups of Aborigines moved across the vast area that connected Victoria to Tasmania. They were from the area west, central and east. Different language groups and cultural practice- burial customs, ceremonial expressions, song and dance, taboos etc 
• People lived in caves and under rock shelters. The climate was freezing cold, the air dry, with icebergs floating off the coast. The vegetation was tundra like with small pockets of forest clinging to the deep river valleys in the southwest. The people were hunters of red necked wallaby and 
• Many sites are now under the Bass Strait but imagine people living on that vast area between King Island and the Furneaux Group for many thousands of years. 
• As the rising seas flooded the area from the west to the east the people retreated on both sides of what was to become the Bass Strait.