The English settlers and their descendants expropriated native land and removed the indigenous people by cutting them from their food resources, and engaged in genocidal massacres.
As white settlers moved further away from the centre of government, random shootings of Aboriginals and massacres of groups of men, women and children were common. The most infamous massacre in New South Wales occurred at Myall Creek station in 1838. Twenty-eight Aboriginals were murdered in cold blood by stockmen.
European colonisation had a devastating impact on Aboriginal communities and cultures. Aboriginal people were subjected to a range of injustices, including mass killings or being displaced from their traditional lands and relocated on missions and reserves in the name of protection.
Aboriginal Land
However, once European settlement began, Aboriginal rights to traditional lands were disregarded and the Aboriginal people of the Sydney region were almost obliterated by introduced diseases and, to a lesser extent, armed force.
After European settlers arrived in 1788, thousand of aborigines died from diseases; colonists systematically killed many others. At first contact, there were over 250,000 aborigines in Australia. The massacres ended in the 1920 leaving no more than 60,000.
The initial reaction of Australia's Indigenous people towards the British was confrontational. The Indigenous people did not know who the British people were and so they reacted with aggression in an attempt to make them leave, so as to protect their land.
Early relations were typically friendly, and the British government instructed the colonists to respect Indigenous rights. But as the colony spread inland from the coast, competition for land and resources bred conflict. The consequences of colonization on Indigenous Australians were devastating.
Since the colonisation of Australia by European settlers, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians have experienced extreme hardships, ranging from the loss of traditional culture and homelands to the forced removal of children and denial of citizenship rights.
The Black War was a period of violent conflict between British colonists and Aboriginal Tasmanians in Tasmania from the mid-1820s to 1832. The conflict, fought largely as a guerrilla war by both sides, claimed the lives of 600 to 900 Aboriginal people and more than 200 European colonists.
At the time of Federation, Aborigines were excluded from the rights of Australian citizenship, including the right to vote, the right to be counted in a census and the right to be counted as part of an electorate.
Because of colonial genocidal actions like state-sanctioned massacres, the First Nations population went from an estimated 1-1.5 million before invasion to less than 100,000 by the early 1900s (4).
Why were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children taken from their families? The forcible removal of First Nations children from their families was based on assimilation policies, which claimed that the lives of First Nations people would be improved if they became part of white society.
Colonisation severely disrupted Aboriginal society and economy—epidemic disease caused an immediate loss of life, and the occupation of land by settlers and the restriction of Aboriginal people to 'reserves' disrupted their ability to support themselves.
1788. The first conflict between the First Fleet arrivals and Aboriginal people takes place near Rushcutters Bay, Sydney. Two convicts are killed. Arabanoo is the first Aboriginal person captured by Europeans.
The first years of settlement were nearly disastrous. Cursed with poor soil, an unfamiliar climate and workers who were ignorant of farming, Phillip had great difficulty keeping the men alive.
Slavery was sanctioned by Australian law
Legislation facilitated the enslavement of Aboriginal people across the Northern Territory, Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland.
There were to be no sales of Amerindian lands without official authorization and settlers unlawfully established on Indians' lands were to be evicted.
As in previous invasions and colonisations around the world the British First Fleet arrived in 1788 carrying new and deadly epidemic diseases such as tuberculosis, influenza, measles and smallpox.
For Indigenous communities, colonisation means violence, massacre, loss, and disease. European colonisation also resulted in stolen generations within Indigenous Australia–these stolen generations are comprised of Indigenous people who were taken away from their communities and families when they were children.
Past treatment such as loss of land and culture, stolen wages and violence transmits poverty and other disadvantages from generation to generation. Under government policies from 1910 to the 1970s, children were forcibly removed from their families in the hope that they would assimilate into white society.
The colonisation of Australia has caused much trauma among Aboriginal people. Because they couldn't cope with what was happening many developed mental illnesses. The dispossession, loss of identity, loss of land, this has all led to a whole lot of lost people.
In 1915, the Aborigines Protection Amending Act 1915 (NSW) was introduced, this Act gave the Aborigines' Protection Board the authority to remove Aboriginal children without having to establish in court that the children were subject to neglect.
They were placed in over 480 institutions, adopted or fostered by non-Indigenous people and often subjected to abuse. The children were denied all access to their culture, they were not allowed to speak their language and they were punished if they did. The impacts of this are still being felt today.
It's a story that has been repeated for generations of Aboriginal families in Australia, and it's still happening today. In 2019/20, 952 Aboriginal children across NSW were removed from their families, a 2.6% increase on the year prior.
In 1803, British colonisation began and in 1876, Truganini died. She was the last full-blood and tribal Tasmanian Aboriginal. Within her one lifetime, a whole society and culture were removed from the face of the earth.