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To the cultivation of the ground they are utter strangers, reported the marine Watkin Tench. The men who ran the Colonial Office in the 1830s and 1840s were sympathetic to arguments that the indigenous people inhabiting British colonies should be better treated. In 1835, for example, John Batman negotiated an agreement with the Wurundjeri elders, in Victoria to take ownership of their land in exchange for goods. Richard Bradley was sent to negotiate. Minimum of 8 characters, cannot re-use a previously used password. The doctrine of terra nullius remained the law in Australia throughout the colonial period, and indeed right up to 1992. Rep. 1148 (K.B. Sydney Gazette, 20 April 1827, 2; Australia: An Appeal to the World on Behalf of the Younger Branch of the Family of Shem (Sydney: Spilsbury and MEachern, 1839), ix; New Holland, South-Asian Register 2 (1828): 115. Cunningham, Two Years in New South Wales, 2:46; James Grant, The Narrative of a Voyage of Discovery, Performed in His Majestys Vessel The Lady Nelson (London: T. Egerton, 1803), 167; David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales (London, 17981802) (Christchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1910), 299. The brute fact was that terra nullius, once underway, was extraordinarily difficult to reverse, because every British landowner in Australia depended on it. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica ([Cambridge, Eng. 0000001818 00000 n Why might not then the like be done in Afric, in Europe, and in Asia? The absurdity of the idea implied that a people could not legitimately claim property rights in too big an area. 35. Reversing terra nullius would have posed a terrible administrative problem for settlers and their government. Grey to Mercer, 14 April 1836, Historical Records of Australia, series I, 18:390. He managed to secure the consent of a local chief to sell the island of Lemane, 400 miles up the Gambia River, for an annuity of 7 pounds 10 shillings a year. They go quite Naked, the naval lieutenant Newton Fowell was startled to discover, and I believe have no proper place of abode. William Bradley was a lieutenant on the same ship as Fowell, and he was likewise taken aback by how the Aborigines appear to live chiefly in the caves & hollows of the rocks. Some blamed the Aborigines lack of clothing or shelter on their stupidity. [14] There is, Cicero declared, no such thing as private ownership established by nature. They agreed that there had once been a time, long ago, when property was unknown, when, as Seneca put it, the bounties of nature lay open to all, for mens indiscriminate use.[15] They knew of far-off primitive peoples like the Scythians, who lacked property even while the Greek and Roman civilizations were at their peak.