Page 5 - Indiginous Australians

Mary Alp
But we need to side- step for a moment before watching the DVDs. Some historical context & some knowledge of Indigenous Australian culture helps our understanding of the impact colonization had - & is still having – on the Indigenous Australian population – the descendants of the oldest continuing culture in the world.
Historical context
Cultural Disruption/loss - 4 main causes -1 Dispossession, 2 Diseases, 3 Conflict, 4 Government Policies
1.Dispossession – loss of land
To begin - very briefly - Colonization of Australia saw the meeting of two opposing cultures & ecologies – The British laissez faire capitalism with emphasis on individualism & exclusive private property rights & the Traditional Indigenous Australian culture with emphasis on community & communal property rights. One was materialistic exploitive with ‘high visibility’ & the other religious/spiritual
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sustainable with ‘low visibility’.
seen as ’primitive’. The chosen British bench-mark for land ownership was agriculture - meaning ‘that the land was ‘waste’ until people acquired property rights through mixing their labour with the soil’. On this basis, Indigenous people were deemed as non-agriculturists & therefore did not own their land. The land was ‘waste’ land - vacant – terra nullius -owned by no-one. As such in 1770 Cook claimed the east coast of Australia for the British Crown. The Indigenous people were dispossessed of land they had inhabited for over 60,000 years. This ‘selective’ use of international law over what constituted land ownership resulted
The former was seen as civilized & the latter was
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other colonized people such as the Maoris, North American Indians, Africans &
in the Indigenous Australians not been offered a treaty.
This was in contrast to
10 R. Broome , Aboriginal Australians, 1982 pp22-35; ‘Social Darwinism – History, ’Survival of the Fittest and Laissez-Faire Capitalism’ pp 1-2.
11 R. Broome, Aboriginal Australians, 2019 pp,17-20
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