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.
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.
Indigenous opinions of the British
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.
From 1788, Australia was treated by the British as a colony of settlement, not of conquest. Aboriginal land was taken over by British colonists on the premise that the land belonged to no-one ('terra nullius').
Almost 70% of Australians accept that Aboriginal people were subject to mass killings, incarceration and forced removal from land, and their movement was restricted.
In Australia, between 1910 and the 1970s*, governments, churches and welfare bodies forcibly removed many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families. These children became known as the Stolen Generations.
Whilst the reactions of the Aboriginal inhabitants to the sudden invasion by the British were varied, they became hostile when their presence led to competition over resources, and to the occupation of their lands.
In an analysis by Guardian Australia based on the data, Aboriginal deaths were estimated to be 27 to 33 times higher than coloniser deaths. Between 11,000 and 14,000 Aboriginal people died, compared with only 399 to 440 colonisers.
Background to status of Aboriginal Australians prior to 1967
When the Australian constitution took effect on 1 January 1901, each individual state acquired the primary lawmaking power over Aboriginal people. Consequently, the legal status of Aboriginal people shifted from British subjects to wards of the state.
There is no one Aboriginal word that all Aborigines use for Australia; however, today they call Australia, ""Australia"" because that is what it is called today. There are more than 250 aboriginal tribes in Australia. Most of them didn't have a word for ""Australia""; they just named places around them.
Some of the Eora—the Aboriginal peoples of the Sydney area—welcomed the newcomers. The leader of the British colony, Arthur Phillip, directed the colonists to treat the Aboriginal peoples respectfully.
James Cook was a British explorer, navigator and cartographer, he reached the south-eastern coast of Australia on 19 April 1770, his expedition became the first recorded Europeans to have encountered Australia's eastern coastline.
In the 1860s, Victoria became the first state to pass laws authorising Aboriginal children to be removed from their parents. Similar policies were later adopted by other states and territories – and by the federal government when it was established in the 1900s.
Researchers have noted that once in the AIF, they were treated as equals, paid the same as other soldiers, and generally accepted without prejudice. Returning home after the First World War, Aboriginal ex-servicemen received little public or private support. They were denied access to soldier settlement schemes.
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.
Colonisation has resulted in inequity, racism and the disruption of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. In fact, it has been the most detrimental of the determinants of health that continues to significantly influence Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health outcomes today.
In April 1971, Mr Justice Blackburn delivered his judgment that, under the Australian law as it then stood, Aboriginal people had no legal claims to land.
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.
This history of injustice has meant that many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have been denied access to basic human rights, such as rights to health, housing, employment and education. Did you know that there were over 250 distinct Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages at the time of colonisation?
The islands were settled by different seafaring Melanesian cultures such as the Torres Strait Islanders over 2500 years ago, and cultural interactions continued via this route with the Aboriginal people of northeast Australia.
The Bringing Them Home report (produced by the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families in 1987), says that "at least 100,000" children were removed from their parents.
It's estimated that as many as 1 in 3 Indigenous children were taken between 1910 and the 1970s, affecting most Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in Australia.
The National Parks and Wildlife Act 1972 (SA) authorises hunting by Aboriginal persons outside reserves and wilderness protection areas which would otherwise be illegal under the Act. The Living Marine Resources Management Act 1995 (Tas) creates in s 60 an offence of fishing without a licence in state waters.
The claim that a “Licence To Shoot Aborigines” was distributed in Australia as part of a 1965 pest control law is false. The supposed licence is a fake and can be traced back to a racist propaganda leaflet distributed in the 1990s. Indigenous history experts confirmed no such licence ever existed.