 Aboriginal people of Western Australia practised an oral tradition with no written language before contact with European people.Aboriginal history in Western Australia has been grouped into five periods of time from before contact through to settlement and into recognition as a people.The early 1840s colonisation of Western Australia by Europeans, under James Stirling, created a generation of colony-born men who engaged in hostilities and imprisonment of Aborigines.The colonisation proceeded with the expropriation of land, the exploitation of cheap labour, and the quashing of Aboriginal resistance.