Duty Of Care
...idea of immigrating to Australia, I took it upon myself to read and learn about the history of the country; however, as my knowledge expanded I have come to appreciate the real history as told by the First People and come to realise that Australia was not ‘colonised’ and Australian history does not start with the discovery of Captain James Cook. This new insights gave me a better understanding and empathy to the plight of Aboriginal people in their quest to take back what was forcibly taken.
Captain James Cook ‘discovery’ of Australia in 1770 and his declaration that the land was ‘terra nullius’ – an uninhabited land belonging to no-one; had paved the way for the European settlement of Australia as a penal colony of England. As Britain took formal possession of Australia, they encountered an unfamiliar land occupied by people they didn’t understand. Although no-one knows exactly when Indigenous Australians first arrive to inhabit the continent of Australia, archaeological evidence points to at least 40,000 years or perhaps longer. McGrath (1995) states “Aboriginal civilisation dates back somewhere between 50 000 and 100 000 years”. Before white settlements, there are hundreds of language groups living in harmony with their environment and each other. Each had its own territory, religion, laws, language and culture. Over many thousand of years, Indigenous people with their deep understanding and respect of nature had developed a sustainable way of living from the land considered by the early Europeans to be desolate, inhospitable, and barren through a complex system for land ‘ownership’ and management.
The popular myth that Captain James Cook discovered Australia for the British Empire and its subsequent colonisation remains today a highly contested issue. For many Indigenous Australians the coming of the British people has become known as the European...
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