Aboriginal Spirituality
What does Terra Nullius mean?
From at least 60,000 B.C., Australia was inhabited entirely by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with traditional, social and land rights. To the Aborigines the land was everything to them and is closely linked to their Dreaming stories. Dreaming is the belief system which explains how the ancestral beings moved across the land and created life and significant geographic features.
In consideration, the Indigenous Australians are a people with a close relationship with the land, and through the land they maintain the spiritual links to the ancestral beings. The land is sacred, and for many thousand years, Aboriginal people lived in harmony on their land.
After the arrival of the British colonies in 1788, Australia was declared “Terra Nullius”, which is a Latin term meaning land belongs to no one. As a result of this, Captain Cook, the British captain of the first fleet of ships to arrive at Australia’s shore, claimed that all of the east coast of Australia belonged to Britain.
The underlying argument was that Aboriginal people were so low on scale of human development that their needs were discounted. Because Aboriginal people did not farm the land, build permanent houses on it or use it in other familiar ways, the British decreed that they did not have rights over the land nor did they have any proof of land ownership. Another reason was that there was no identifiable hierarchy or political order which the British government could recognise or negotiate with.
Once European settlement began, Aboriginal rights to traditional lands was disregarded and the Aboriginal people of the Sydney region were almost obliterated by introduced diseases and, to a lesser extent, armed force. First contacts were relatively peaceful but Aboriginal people and their culture was strange to the Europeans as well as their plants and animals. Consequently, Terra Nullius continued on for over 200 years.
Figure 1: Eddie Mabo
Figure
From at least 60,000 B.C., Australia was inhabited entirely by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with traditional, social and land rights. To the Aborigines the land was everything to them and is closely linked to their Dreaming stories. Dreaming is the belief system which explains how the ancestral beings moved across the land and created life and significant geographic features.
In consideration, the Indigenous Australians are a people with a close relationship with the land, and through the land they maintain the spiritual links to the ancestral beings. The land is sacred, and for many thousand years, Aboriginal people lived in harmony on their land.
After the arrival of the British colonies in 1788, Australia was declared “Terra Nullius”, which is a Latin term meaning land belongs to no one. As a result of this, Captain Cook, the British captain of the first fleet of ships to arrive at Australia’s shore, claimed that all of the east coast of Australia belonged to Britain.
The underlying argument was that Aboriginal people were so low on scale of human development that their needs were discounted. Because Aboriginal people did not farm the land, build permanent houses on it or use it in other familiar ways, the British decreed that they did not have rights over the land nor did they have any proof of land ownership. Another reason was that there was no identifiable hierarchy or political order which the British government could recognise or negotiate with.
Once European settlement began, Aboriginal rights to traditional lands was disregarded and the Aboriginal people of the Sydney region were almost obliterated by introduced diseases and, to a lesser extent, armed force. First contacts were relatively peaceful but Aboriginal people and their culture was strange to the Europeans as well as their plants and animals. Consequently, Terra Nullius continued on for over 200 years.
Figure 1: Eddie Mabo
Figure