Who said terra nullius

It is usually reached after a period of negotiation. Australia is the only major Commonwealth country referring to British settler colonial countries in the world that does not have a treaty with its First Nations peoples. Australian Museum Collection. The dhari is a traditional headdress from Mer also known as Murray Island in Queensland. This was the homeland which Eddie Koiki Mabo fought court cases to establish that First Nations peoples had legal rights to their traditional lands in the form of Native Title.

Sadly, the verdict was passed after the death of Mabo. However, his legacy continues to live on strong through the setting of legal precedent. We celebrate the High Court of Australia overturning terra nullius in this important court decision on Mabo Day every year on 3rd June, as part of National Reconciliation Week.

The dhari is a significant object for Torres Strait Islander people. It is worn by men in dance and ceremony and is the central symbol on the Torres Strait Islander Flag. The flag was designed by the late Bernard Namok of Thursday Island. Australian Museum Collection Acquisition. The invasion of Sydney by the First Fleet in has meaning for all Aboriginal peoples. The event marks the beginning of dispossession and genocidal practices that continue to have devastating effects on First Nations peoples today.

Glen Mackie, Yam Island Man Wood, glue, nails, ochre, thin steel wire, bamboo, nylon, raw cotton muslin, vinyl cut. Ned married a Kulkalgal woman and worked in local pearling lugger boats.

The colonists had destroyed within months a way of life that had outlasted British history by tens of thousands of years, and the people soon realised that the trespassers were committed to nothing less than total occupation of the land. To most settlers, the Aboriginal people were considered akin to kangaroos, dingoes and emus, strange fauna to be eradicated to make way for the development of farming and grazing. I have myself heard a man, educated, and a large proprietor of sheep and cattle, maintain that there was no more harm in shooting a native, than in shooting a wild dog.

I have heard it maintained by others that it is the course of Providence, that blacks should disappear before the white, and the sooner the process was carried out the better, for all parties. I fear such opinions prevail to a great extent. Very recently in the presence of two clergymen, a man of education narrated, as a good thing, that he had been one of a party who had pursued the blacks, in consequence of cattle being rushed by them, and that he was sure that they shot upwards of a hundred.

When expostulated with, he maintained that there was nothing wrong in it, that it was preposterous to suppose they had souls. In this opinion he was joined by another educated person present. Bishop Polding, Despite these impacts, Aboriginal people fought a guerrilla war for many years. In a place renamed Woodford Bay by the settlers, now in Longueville in Lane Cove Council, a stockade was built in to protect timber and grass cutters from attacks by local clans.

Smallpox had destroyed more than half the population and those not ravaged by disease were displaced when land was cleared for settlements and farms. Dispossessed of the land that had nourished them for so long, the Aboriginal people became dependent on white food and clothing.

Alcohol, used as a means of trade by the British, served to further shatter traditional social and family structures. European civilisation devastated, in what amounts to the blink of an eye, an incomparable and ancient people.

Because the vast majority of clans living in the Sydney Basin were killed as a result of the invasion, the stories of the land have been lost forever. Much of what we do know about the northern Sydney clans must be gleaned from their archaeological remains. Middens, shelters, engravings and art remnants of indigenous life are prolific throughout the region, but no one remains to reveal their particular meanings or ancient significance. There are no first hand witness accounts giving the Aboriginal perspective to what was happening.

Aboriginal history has been handed down in ways of stories, dances, myths and legends. The dreaming is history. A history of how the world, which was featureless, was transformed into mountains, hills, valleys and waterways. The dreaming tells about how the stars were formed and how the sun came to be.

In the metropolitan area of Sydney there are thousands of Aboriginal sites, over just in the AHO partner Council areas. These sites are under threat every day from development, vandalism and natural erosion. The sites cannot be replaced and once they are destroyed, they are gone forever. The sites that are located in Lane Cove, North Sydney, Willoughby, Ku-ring-gai, Strathfield and Northern Beaches Council areas are still in reasonable condition and hold an important part in our history.

Part of the explanation for the difference may lie in the fact that rather than implying mere emptiness, terra nullius could also be interpreted as an absence of civilised society. For example, the English common law of the time allowed for the legal settlement of "uninhabited or barbarous country". Although Australia was clearly not empty land, the presence of scattered and nomadic Aboriginal groups would have been widely perceived, through European eyes of the time, as evidence of a barbarous country and thus no legal impediment to settlement.

By contrast, most of the other territories ruled by Britain had significant native populations and well-established indigenous administrative codes as in the cases of India and New Zealand , for instance. Until the s , the doctrine of terra nullius was generally accepted in Australia on the grounds that the continent had been "settled", a classification which gives no legal consideration to indigenous customs. During the s historians revisited the colonisation of Australia, reassessing the degree to which force had been used to dispossess the native inhabitants.

This prompted a number of lawyers and activists to suggest that Australia should be reclassified in law as "conquered" territory, a distinction which requires the conqueror to recognise the customs of those conquered. Court cases in , and brought by or on behalf of Aboriginal activists challenged Australian sovereignty on the grounds that terra nullius had been improperly applied, therefore Aboriginal sovereignty should still be regarded as being intact.

These cases were rejected by the courts but the Australian High Court left the door open for a reassessment of whether the continent should be considered "settled" or "conquered". The concept of terra nullius became a major issue in Australian politics when, in , during a Aboriginal rights case known as Mabo , the High Court of Australia issued a judgement which some interpreted as an invalidation of terra nullius.

The ruling was, however, rather narrower than that.