The Invention of Terra Nullius

Book excerpt: Historical and Legal Fictions on the Foundation of Australia. History books, school curricula and legal texts all treat terra nullius as the defining doctrine in the foundation of Australia and the dispossession of the Aborigines. The High Court's Mabo decision was supposed to have overturned it. Michael Connor reveals terra nullius to be a mythical notion. It was never a phrase used in Australia in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. It was only injected into Australian political and legal debate in the 1970s. Since then it has meant whatever its users want it to mean. The foundation of Australia was based on entirely different concepts and terminology. The book investigates the historical writings of a number of prominent Australian academic historians and finds them sadly wanting. It finds them inaccurate and untrustworthy, not only on Australia's foundation but on subsequent relations between colonists and Aborigines. The evidence for a number of incidents of violence - especially the currently controversial Convincing Grounds Massacre at Portland, Victoria - is either exaggerated, wrong or recycled from very dubious sources. This book is not just a trenchant critique of recent historiography. It overturns the received interpretation of Australian history and puts a new perspective on this country's beginnings.