During the colonial times and until recently, all of the indigenous people of Australia were in the midst of a disastrous population crash from which the country has yet to recover. Unfortunately, in some cases such as that of the native Tasmanians, no recovery is possible. The prompt causes of this mass death varied; deliberate killing of native people by Europeans greatly contributed to the weakening of the Aboriginals, as did the spread of measles and smallpox. Between disease, conflict, famine, and conscious policies of kidnapping and re-education of native children, the Australian region’s indigenous population waned from well over a million in 1788 to just a few thousand by the early 20th century. With the development of a European led globalised world to the Australia continent in the late 18th century, the English settlers sighted fear and genocide on indigenous Australians to seize their …show more content…
As hunter-gatherers, the land use of indigenous people was different from the European way of land use. The British colonisers used this as pretence in taking the land of indigenous people calling it terra nullius. As mighty was right in colonialism, the British settlers used this ideological discourse and genocide to extinguish all indigenous rights to land and other resources. These actions involved multiple deliberate killings and a series of genocidal massacres. As killing escalated, racial justification did too; colonial officers said, “Disgrace would it be the human race to call them men”. Colonial terrorism in Australia involved the destruction of an essential foundation of the lifestyles of indigenous people in economic, political, social cultural, biological, physical, religious, and moral
Australia was imperialized by England for land, and for space for their conflicts. The conflicts were there to farm food for the English people. At the same time England had already had other countries under their control at this time. Australian people were not very happy with the English
Not only did sickness kill many people, but the foreigners that came to Australia killed locals. Western Aranda says “when the whites arrived there were 250 languages” along with 450 different dialects there was a total of 700 languages and now there is only 70 languages left. Luckily now there are radios that play the aboriginal’s
The term Terra Nullius causes a lot of pain for Indigenous people as it can be translated to “A land that belongs to no-one” (“Terra Nullius defined,” 2013). This simply means that the British settlers completely disregard...
After the First Fleet arrived on the continent in 1788, the British tried to set up a relationship with the Aborigines that was benevolent and peaceful, as Governor Philip instructed; however their actions did not reflect this same idea. Their interactions commonly ended with violence, and occasionally death, particularly in the Myall Creek Massacre. On June 10, 1838 there were twelve British men came into contact with thirty of the Aboriginals, or people of Wirrayaraay, at Myall Creek. Up until this time, the British people who settled in the area became increasingly skeptical of the native Australians, and this nervousness led to a series of conflicts with these native people; these conflicts ended with the death of the thirty aboriginals at Myall Creek. This massacre is a prime example of how the natives were impacted by the British settlers, because it was one of the most tragic of the frontier conflicts between the peoples. Not only were these natives killed on June 10th, these Wirrayaraay people were first rounded up, and then tied together before being killed by the British settlers soon after. The British settlers who tied up and murdered these natives were British convicts who were freed, and allowed to pursue the native tribes. This massacre exhibits the impacts of the British settlers on the Australian natives, because it shows how they were affected by the brutal treatment by the British convicts, who made up a majority of the British
We as Australians are completely unaware of all the suffering, sorrow and sadness we’ve placed upon the Aboriginal people since we set foot on their land. We’ve killed them in cold blood as we’ve had several disagreements with the Aboriginal people. Evidence even shows that all Tasmanian Aboriginals were killed and become completely extinct. We’ve given them diseases which they never used to contract and have wiped out the majority of their people and we even took Aboriginal children away from their own biological parents. The idea behind this was so they would then breed with other Australians which would rid of their full-tribal blood, making them become extinct. Thes...
Reynolds, H. (1976). The Other Side of The Frontier: Aboriginal resistance to the European invasion of Australia. Queensland, Australia: James Cook University
This has involved, among other things, a re-examination of the methods by which British sovereignty was acquired over Australia, and of the appropriateness of the classification of Australia as a settled colony which was an integral part of that process. Thus, it is said, it is necessary to recognise that Australia as a country was conquered, not settled. To take the view that Australia was settled is, on this view, to continue the =convenient fiction ‘296 (Coe v Commonwealth of Australia (1979) 24 ALR 118, 137 (Murphy J).) that on settlement it was uninhabited in the sense of having neither civilised inhabitants nor settled laws. In the words of the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, the Hon Clyde Holding
This means looking back at the arrival of Europeans, particularly the legal and political system that were used in the apparent legitimisation of the invasion. Colonisation occurred in 1700’s when Australian soil first became ‘occupied’, not by the indigenous Australians who had lived with and upon the land for centuries before but rather by European colonial fleets who had been in search of undiscovered land. The act of occupation occurred through compliance with international law and the legal doctrine of discovery of uninhabited land; terra nullius. The Australian land was declared void not of inhabitants but rather of ‘organised society united permanently for political action.’ It was declared that those who inhabited the land when it was discovered had no local laws, and as such no
The connection Indigenous Australians have with the land was established, and maintained, by The Dreamings, passed down through generations binding Indigenous Australians to the land (National Film & Sound Archive, 2015). National Film & Sound Archive (2015), highlight that land and being can not be separated for Indigenous Australians as they form part of the land and are accountable for the preservation of the land. Indigenous Australian land rights originated from an intricate social process constructed on traditional core values; where the rights of the land were established on principles of descendants, kinship and marriage (Dodds, 1998). However, despite this, the British colonisation of Australia in 1788 brought about change when the land was declared Terra Nullius (Short, 2007). Short (2007) stated that as a result of Australia being declared Terra Nullius, Indigenous Australians had no legitimate claim to their land. Hence, British colonisers dispossessing Indigenous Australians of their land rights as the customs established by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were not recognised or taken into consideration by the British Government (Short,
Within Australia, beginning from approximately the time of European settlement to late 1969, the Aboriginal population of Australia experienced the detrimental effects of the stolen generation. A majority of the abducted children were ’half-castes’, in which they had one white parent and the other of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent. Following the government policies, the European police and government continued the assimilation of Aboriginal children into ‘white’ society. Oblivious to the destruction and devastation they were causing, the British had believed that they were doing this for “their [Aborigines] own good”, that they were “protecting” them as their families and culture were deemed unfit to raise them. These beliefs caused ...
Since the time of federation the Aboriginal people have been fighting for their rights through protests, strikes and the notorious ‘day of mourning’. However, over the last century the Australian federal government has generated policies which manage and restrained that of the Aboriginal people’s rights, citizenships and general protection. The Australian government policy that has had the most significant impact on indigenous Australians is the assimilation policy. The reasons behind this include the influences that the stolen generation has had on the indigenous Australians, their relegated rights and their entitlement to vote and the impact that the policy has had on the indigenous people of Australia.
In the early 20th century, it was commonly thought that the Indigenous people in Australia would eventually die out. However the growing population of Aboriginal people of mixed race, led to the government to adopt the ‘assimilation policy’........... This was a new form of control, which was intended
There is little said about aboriginal people in early Australian history books. What we do know is that the view of Non-Aboriginal people was very ethnocentric. The opinion was that Aboriginal was that they were savages and little regard was made for the fact that Aboriginal people had to live off this land that was now being used for agriculture. Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal relations during the nineteenth century consisted of violent disputes over the ownership of land, food and water. During this period Aboriginal children were taken from their families and used as a source of labour for European farmers. “The greatest advantage of young Aboriginal servants was that they came cheap and were never paid beyond the provision of variable quantities of food and clothing. As a result any European on or near the frontier, quite regardless of their own circumstances, could acquire and maintain a personal servant” (Arrufat 1930).
The reason as to why we are asked to question and comprehend the effect of an 'imagined history' is to further develop our understanding of Indigenous and non-Indigenous experiences that will contribute to the contemporary pedagogies of today – to see how they will influence the classroom and students of the current and future generation. Since the White Australians predominantly believed in the act of driving Aboriginal racial extinction, its important to investigate the positioning and power the White people held over the Indigenous people through colonial possession – their values and beliefs controlled and wrote the history of Australia in their self centralized form.
The perception that Australia was quietly “settled” without conflict with the Aboriginal people, an idea that, it has been argued, enabled the concept of “terra nullius” to be maintained, has been substantially revised in recent years. It is now generally acknowledged that resistance took place right from the first tentative encroachments by European nations into Australian waters. The Dutch sailed into the Gulf of Carpentaria in 1606 and one Dutch sailor was killed by the Tjungundji (whose hero was the warrior Sivirri). Another Dutch ship visited the area in 1623, but in attempting to kidnap people was met by 200 warriors who drove the sailors away. James Cook, in spite of the popular misconception, also met with some resistance in Botany Bay. Two Tharawal men, after sending away the women and children, stood firm against Cook’s landing. According to Cook’s account of the incident: “We then threw them some nails, beads etc. ashore which they took up and seem’d not ill pleased in so much that I thought that they beckoned to us to come ashore, but in this we were much mistaken, for as soon as we put the boat in they again came to oppose us upon which I fired a musket between the two which had no other effect than to make them retire back where bundles of their darts lay, and one of them took up a stone and threw at us w...