Yes and no.

In Henry Reynolds' The Other Side of the Frontier, a revolutionary book that took a close look at Indigenous life on the Australian frontier, Reynolds uses European explorer, castaway and frontiersman accounts to explore how Aboriginal Australians adapted to colonial invasion.

According to Reynolds, Aboriginal tribes usually learned about Europeans through intertribal trading and diplomacy (often from relatives) or from refugees fleeing inland. Generally, there was far greater interest in European goods/materials, and far less in European culture. Pieces of scrap metal, tiles, wire and broken glass were valuable items traded far inland well beyond the reach of the colonial frontier.

The same was true of European animals, which escaped and were encountered well before European people in many instances, and European ships, which sailed past remote coastal areas without stopping. Most Indigenous people had no indication that these two phenomena were connected to strange people from distant lands until they met with people from tribes that had already been overrun by these invaders - although some did find shipwrecked Europeans and learn through them, they usually remained skeptical and conservative in approach.

The initial reaction, depending on how the news about Europeans was given to them, was generally one of anticipation, with fear and caution conflicting with the desire for European materials. However, some tribes were proactive, being either welcoming or defensively hostile - explorers were always stalked, but only occasionally approached or attacked.

But it is unlikely that most tribes fully comprehended that Europeans would destroy their way of life, nor that they came from across the sea, or were so fundamentally different from Indigenous Australians. To most, Australia was the world, the oceans were where spirits lived, and they had always and would always live on their land. War was eternal, but so were the people and their ownership of the land.

Some may well have had experience or stories of encounters with the Dutch, French or English explorers from the 1600s onwards, but Australia is an enormous and diverse place, these encounters sporadic and dispersed. Spotting whalers or explorers would have taught them little about European motives, and hardly prepared them for European colonialism.

There were many indigenous tribes/groups (in excess of 200) in Australia prior to colonisation.

These groups, while nomadic, could only roam certain areas, otherwise running the risk of travelling over another groups territory and inviting conflict. In addition a written language was not developed at the time of colonisation. All information was spread by word of mouth or stories.

When the British colonised Australia it started from various points on the east coast (Sydney and Hobart were the original ones) that had penal colonies. These colonies were pretty small to begin with and didn’t really expand quickly. Obviously the aboriginals in the area were aware and stories might have been told to other friendly groups, however how far these stories got is unknown.

Once free settlers came out with livestock did the white population start to move inland in great numbers to find land for their livestock to graze on.

It was at this point that most first contact occurred. Geoffrey Blainey wrote in his book “The story of Australia’s First People” that the initial contact ranged from hesitantly friendly to outright hostile. Blainey notes that in a lot of instances tribal groups heard stories about colonisers from other groups in the area before they were struck down with western illnesses that preceded actual contact. This was often the start of the collapse of aboriginal culture. If the first contact was hostile the depleted aboriginal warriors would generally be decimated.

It should be noted that Australia is massive and the population density pre contact was very low so some nomadic aboriginal persons might have lived a full life post colonisation and not come into contact with a white man.

In fact there were aboriginal groups that were having first contact as late as the 1970s in the Western Desert.