From Loaded Dog to Dead Dog: The Dog as Myth and Mate in Australian Story

The dog, in the form of the dingo, entered Australia around 3500 years ago. As the first exotic domesticate to reach mainland Australia, we can reconstruct in broad outline the effect on local ecology. This included the extinction of the two largest marsupial carnivores, and probably much more as changes worked their way through natural systems. We can only guess at the effect the dingo had on Aboriginal society and folkways, but it must have been quite an impact. Dingoes began to appear in rock art. The dingo was absorbed into Aboriginal skin group nomenclature, and there are records of individual dogs buried with all the elaboration given to human interments.