Duty of Care

Let me start by recounting a personal experience. A decade and a half ago, when I first entertained the idea of immigrating to Australia, I took it upon myself to read and learn about the history of the country; however, as my knowledge expanded I have come to appreciate the real history as told by the First People and come to realise that Australia was not �colonised’ and Australian history does not start with the discovery of Captain James Cook. This new insights gave me a better understanding and empathy to the plight of Aboriginal people in their quest to take back what was forcibly taken.

Captain James Cook �discovery’ of Australia in 1770 and his declaration that the land was �terra nullius’ – an uninhabited land belonging to no-one; had paved the way for the European settlement of Australia as a penal colony of England. As Britain took formal possession of Australia, they encountered an unfamiliar land occupied by people they didn’t understand. Although no-one knows exactly when Indigenous Australians first arrive to inhabit the continent of Australia, archaeological evidence points to at least 40,000 years or perhaps longer. McGrath (1995) states “Aboriginal civilisation dates back somewhere between 50 000 and 100 000 years”. Before white settlements, there are hundreds of language groups living in harmony with their environment and each other. Each had its own territory, religion, laws, language and culture. Over many thousand of years, Indigenous people with their deep understanding and respect of nature had developed a sustainable way of living from the land considered by the early Europeans to be desolate, inhospitable, and barren through a complex system for land �ownership’ and management.

The popular myth that Captain James Cook discovered Australia for the British Empire and its subsequent colonisation remains today a highly contested issue. For many Indigenous Australians the coming of the British people has become known as the European invasion rather than colonisation. According to Henderson-Yates (2008, p.4) “Many Aboriginal people in Australia used the word �invasion’ … to best describe the coming of the British to Australian soil” and “there are many ways in which countries are able to go in and take control”. She further identified them as follows:

a) language

b) technology including the used of weapon

c) experiences

d) surveillance and

e) control through welfare.

This Blackboard discussion will look at some of the ways in which British people were able to invade Australia from Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders' points of view and the impact and effect it had on Indigenous Australians.

Modern history tells how the British invaded and took control of Australia without consent and without negotiating with the Indigenous people because right from the start Britain did not recognise the country as being inhabited because the natives live a nomadic life and did not cultivate the land, and were, therefore, "uncivilized". Chisholm and Nettheim (1988, p. 8) writes:

[They] never negotiated treaties for the purchase of aboriginal land … in spite of some insistence from London … that Aboriginal land rights be recognized … [due to] the fiction … that the land is �terra nullius’ … and there were only scattered groups of people along the coast”.

The British promoted the notion of �terra nullius’ because in 1788, under British law and accepted international laws , there were only three ways for a colonising nation to legally gain sovereignty over new territories: first was by conquest whereby the colonising nation was obliged to negotiate full and just reparations and compensation to the colonised population; second was by ceding (surrender and relinquish) their sovereignty to the colonisers; and third was to declare a land terra nullius, meaning the land was devoid of human inhabitation thereby removing the need to negotiate compensation with an indigenous populace. Morris, Cook, Creyke, Geddes and Halloway (1998, p. 27) states “Traditionally, international law recognised three ways for a country to acquire new territory: conquest, cession and settlement”.

When the First Fleet arrived they brought with them their own laws and ways of doing things which contradicted greatly with the Indigenous Australians way of life. At first contact, the natives were quite friendly and welcoming; however, as more settlers came and demand for land increases the vast difference in their cultures soon clash and cause havoc for the Aborigines as it interfered with their traditional way of living.