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76. If he arrived in any populated places, known or unknown, the residents were to be treated as owners of the land. In Western Australia, water law reform has been ongoing for over a decade. Glen Mackie made this series of boats to tell the story about his great, great grandfather Yankee Ned Mosby, an American who came to the Torres Strait region in the mid-1800s. We had come to reside among them, he reasoned, therefore in point of strictness and analogy to our law, we were bound to obey their laws, not they to obey ours. These arguments did not prevail. 0000001999 00000 n A Yolngu word meaning to come together after a struggle. Abolishment of Terra Nullius On 3rd June 1992, after a decade long battle in the legal system, the High Court of Australia overturned the doctrine that Australia was Terra Nullius at the time of British occupation. 0000002466 00000 n But his solution was not to give the land back, or to change the law so as to prohibit future seizures. 27. 30. 26. What great inducement does the monotonous and toilsome existence of the labouring classes in civilized communities offer, wondered the government surveyor Clement Hodgkinson, to make the savage abandon his independent and careless life, diversified by the exciting occupations of hunting, fishing, fighting, and dancing? But most British Australians seemed to think that the Aborigines possessed an incapacity for improvement rather than a genuine preference for traditional ways. This was our land. While historians debate how and when the terra nullius legal concept was used to justify the colonisation of Australia, it is likely that Cook considered that the land belonged to no-one. Mabo Day is marked annually on 3 June. In 1835, for example, John Batman negotiated an agreement with the Wurundjeri elders in Victoria to take ownership of their land in exchange for goods. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples should be advised that there may be images of people who have passed away., Terra nullius is today used as a catch-all phrase to explain how Australia was founded; to justify and legitimise the dispossession, dispersal, and inhumane treatment of First Nations peoples. Why a First Nations Voice should come before Treaty Ben-nil-long gave repeated assurances, that the island Me-mel close by Sydney Cove, was his own property; that it had been his fathers, and that he should give it to By-gone, his particular friend and companion. Collins recognized that this conception of the relationship between people and land was similar to the British conception. Torrens to Grey, Dec. 1835, CO 13/3, p. 161, PRO; First Annual Report of the Colonization Commissioners for South Australia, 14 June 1836, British Parliamentary Papers: Colonies: Australia, 4:480; Second Letter of Instructions by the Colonization Commissioners for South Australia to James Hurtle Fisher, Esq., Resident Commissioner in South Australia, 8 Oct. 1836, British Parliamentary Papers: Colonies: Australia, 5:192. J. C. Yardley (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994), 27; Virgil, Georgics, trans. I want to begin by honouring and quoting the words of the now late chief justice of the High Court of Australia, Sir Gerard Brennan,the words he wrote in his lead judgement in the Mabo case: The common law itself took from Indigenous inhabitants any right to occupy their traditional land, exposed them to deprivation of the religious, cultural and economic sustenance which the land provides, vested the land effectively in the control of the imperial authorities without any right to compensation and made the Indigenous inhabitants intruders in their own homes and mendicants for a place to live. . Warning: (London: George Routledge, 1840), 475; Matthew Flinders, Observations on the Coasts of Van Diemens Land, on Basss Strait and its Islands, and on Part of the Coasts of New South Wales (London: John Nicholas, 1801), 20; T. Dove, Moral and Social Characteristics of the Aborigines of Tasmania, Tasmanian Journal of Natural Science 1 (1842): 249; Joseph Orton, Aborigines of Australia (London: Thoms, 1836), 3.