FACTBOX: History of Australia's Aborigines

(Reuters) - Key dates, facts in the history of Australia's Aborigines.

* Carbon dating of rock paintings suggests Aborigines have been living in Australia for at least 40,000 years.

* 1770 - English explorer James Cook charts the east coast of Australia and claims it for Britain as an empty land, despite the existence of 315,000 to one million Aborigines.

* 1788 - First European settlers arrive to set up a penal colony on January 26, now Australia's national day but known as invasion day by Aborigines.

* 1901 - Australia becomes an independent nation. Its constitution, passed as an act of Britain's parliament, bans parliament from making laws for aboriginal people.

* 1966 - Aboriginal stockman Vincent Lingiari leads black workers in a strike at the Wave Hill cattle property in the Northern Territory over appalling work and living conditions. The strike lasts seven years and ignites a push for aboriginal land rights nationally.

* 1967 - Australians overwhelmingly vote to change the constitution to give Aborigines full citizenship rights, and allow parliament to make laws to benefit aboriginal people. Previously, Aborigines were governed under flora and fauna laws.

* 1975 - Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam pours dirt into Aborigine Vincent Lingiari's hands in a symbolic return of aboriginal land, an area larger than the United Kingdom.

* 1992 - Australia's High Court rules Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders owned Australia's landmass before Cook's arrival in 1770. The ruling dismisses the legal notion that Australia was an empty or uncivilized land before white settlement.

* 1995 - The aboriginal flag, its golden sun and black and red background representing Australia's sunburnt land and aboriginal people, becomes an official flag in Australia.

* 1997 - The "Bringing Them Home" report chronicles past assimilation policies in which aboriginal children were forcibly taken from parents to be raised as white children. It calls for a national apology and compensation to the Stolen Generation.

* 1999 - Conservative Prime Minister John Howard leads a parliamentary motion of "regret" for unspecified past injustices against Aborigines, but refuses to apologize, saying current generations should not be responsible for past actions.

* 2000 - More than 250,000 people march across Sydney Harbour Bridge to mark National Sorry Day and support an apology to the Stolen Generation. Tens of thousands of people attend similar marches across Australia.

* 2008, February 13 - Parliament apologizes for historic mistreatment of Aborigines, with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd saying it will "remove a great stain from the nation's soul".

2008 - Australia's 460,000 Aborigines make up 2 percent of the 21 million population and have a life expectancy 17 years less than white Australians. They have far higher rates of unemployment, imprisonment, alcohol and drug abuse and domestic violence.

(Compiled by James Grubel; Editing by Michael Perry and David Fogarty)