Aboriginal and non Aboriginal perspectives on land ownership and the colonisation of Australia

Résumé du document

The question of land ownership has created quite a few issues. The main issues induced by this controversial concept is based on colonial hypocrisy, fundamental difference between two cultures, grief and trauma concerning the identities and lives of the Aborigines. It is imperative to reconsider the entire history of the land we now call Australia, and to try to understand the Aborigines and their attachment to nature in their culture, along with political, social and religious aspects. We have to consider the Australian colonization as an opposition between the laws and radically different conceptions that exist in Australia.

Extraits

[...] Aboriginal people were in fact in possession of their land both in respect of the international law and of the common law. It was totally ignored that the same landscape, perceived by the newcomers as alien, hostile or having no coherent form, was to the Indigenous people their home, a familiar place, the inspiration of dreams” ( Jones p185). It is incredibly worst than if Aboriginal people had been forced to sell their land for nothing, they were not even legally considered as living on it, consequently nor treaties or selling act has been signed .It as if, in one instant, the Aboriginal thousands long cultures and history has never existed. [...]

[...] It is question of bloodshed, but it is also question of a cultural massacre, which has gradually contributed to the way Australia was colonised, without paying attention to the Aboriginal people, by hoping that, isolated from their traditional places and ways of lives, they will soon disappear. The fact that Aboriginal people relation to the land is define and characterized by different means than Western cultures has obviously influenced the way Australia has been colonised. It has also totally disrupted the Aboriginal people way of life, even if their lands were not took directly by the settlers. The relation of the Aboriginal people with their land is many-sided. [...]

[...] In a disconcerting paradox, the situation of the farmers and miners obliged to use violence to protect” their” land against possible Aboriginal takeover was a very often used subject of article The colonisation of Australia has been legally made according to the concept of Terra Nullius. The assertion, by the first settlers, that Australia was a terra Nullius, a land belonging to no-one, has been partly justified by concepts developed by some seventieth and eightieth century's philosophers such as Locke, Wolff, Vattel or Grotius. [...]

[...] Moreover, according to the Aboriginal perspectives, the land is also the basis of all the social, cultural and political life. Aboriginal people see the landscape as cyclic process which through the passage of seasons transforms each of these lands, and which them the availability of plants or animals, which in turn predicate the pattern of life of the people themselves” ( Jones p 195). That is to say that Aboriginal people do not consider that they own the land in the same way we define it. [...]

[...] Moreover, the land does not have to be disturbed without necessity because it is also full of religious meanings. Here is a story tells by Galarrwuy Yunupingu a former chairman of the Northern Land Council ( Maddock p 132) : day I went fishing with Dad. As I was walking along behind him I was dragging my spear on the beach which was leaving a long line behind me. He told me to stop doing that. He continued telling me if I made a mark, or dig, with no reason at all, I've been hurting the bones of the traditional people of that land. [...]