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.