Aboriginies :: miscellaneous

Aboriginies Question: The British settlers were justifiedin declaring Australia to be terra nulius? Were the British settlers justified in declaring Australia terra nulius? The British bought a lot of things to Australia by declaring it terra nulius, such as they took the land of the Aborigines; they introduced Australia to houses, farms, clothes and money. The British decided that the Aborigines weren’t living there or didn’t have a government before they checked the evidence, and they tried to replace the Aboriginal rules and culture with their own rules and cultures. The British took the land that the Aborigines had lived on for hundreds of years off of them because they didn’t believe that the Aborigines could live there if they kept moving around. The Aborigines moved around so that they could go to a new place with food so they could live. They would circle around their tribes land and in a year or two when they returned to a place that they had left all the tree and fruit would have re grown and the animals around that area would have had time to reproduce. So the Aborigines did not need or wish to stay in one place all the time. When the British introduced houses, farms and a money system to Australia, the Aborigines didn’t need or want any of these things. The British might have thought that they were doing the right thing by introducing them, but they only thought about what they would want, not the Aborigines. The Aborigines culture went down hill after they were made to wear clothes or live wear they were told to and be surrounded by fences. The Aborigines had to re adjust to everything that was going on around them, and while they did that the British took away their culture and gave them theirs. The British claimed that Australia was terra nulius before checking the facts about it. The Aborigines had elders which were the government for the different tribes, but the British either didn’t care or didn’t recognise that they had always been their. The British bought in their own government that they thought would help but really they didn’t help that Aborigines in any way, only the British settlers. The only way the government did help that Aborigines with was the punishment if a British settler did anything to an Aborigine, but like today, the law didn’t always work out and some of the guilty got away.