When the colonists arrived in Australia, they saw themselves as conquering both the continent’s land and its people. In many respects, they didn’t differentiate between the two.
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| ‘In every continent, humanity has always shaped nature, just as nature has always shaped humanity.’ |
The Bible commands believers (in Genesis 1:28) to “replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth”.
That injunction informed terra nullius.
The settlers never believed Australia empty. They knew of its Indigenous inhabitants. But they didn’t believe the natives practised agriculture – and without agriculture (that “subjugation of the land”) the continent could, they thought, only be a wilderness.
Read the opinion piece from The Guardian by Jeff Sparrow - “Thanks to humans the ‘wilderness’ no longer exists – but we can make things on Earth better.”
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