Effects Of Colonisation On Indigenous Culture

The world over, but to address Australia in particular, colonisation can be regarded as a well-known and impactful entity.
To completely understand this impact of colonisation on indigenous cultures however, we must first define the meaning of the word ‘colonisation’. We will then examine the various effects, both positive and negative that colonisation has had on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
Issues of dispossession and culture will be discussed, as well as the ideologies that underpinned these actions.
This paper intends to argue that one particular element of colonisation for Indigenous communities in Australia – Christianity – was a more positive force for Torres Strait Islanders than for Aboriginal peoples.
According

European ideologies differed immensely to the of the indigenous cultures and as the European settlement moved from Botany Bay outwards and settlers claimed land for economic purposes. Bringing their Christian beliefs and laws to Australia, the first settlers saw land as a material possession to be owned whereas the Aboriginal spirituality is deeply linked to the land and that the land owns the Aboriginal people.
Initially, relations between the explorers and the Aboriginal inhabitants were generally hospitable and based a relationship on an understanding the terms of trading for food, water, axes, cloth and artefacts. These relations however, became hostile as Aborigines realised that the land and resources upon which they depended and the order of their life were seriously disrupted by the on-going presence of the colonisers. (Australia.gov.au

The Torres Strait Islanders were fishermen, hunters and agriculturalists and, because they gardened and were fearless defenders of their territories, they were generally considered Europeans to be superior to mainland Aboriginal people. Pre-contact Torres Strait Islanders were not a single homogeneous or unified group with the islands regulated by senior men and organised through totemic clan membership. It was a society based on kinship and reciprocal obligation.
In 1863 the first European settlement was established on Albany Island, and after commercial amounts of pearlshell being discovered, attracted a multitiude of foreign seamen to Torres Strait and subsequent contact with non-Torres Strait Islander peoples.
Almost a decade later in 1871, the first of the Christian Missionary teachers arrived at Erub (now Darney Island), placed there by the London Missionary Society (Nakata, 2007) with the aim to use Torres Strait as a stepping-stone to evangelise New Guinea (RACGP, 2012).
Christian missionaries aimed to attend to the material and spiritual welfare of the Torres Strait Islander peoples who experienced enormous change from their interaction with European culture and