1987
It was only a small step from admitting that the Aborigines were the original possessors of Australia to accepting that they had ‘a birthright in the soil’. South Australia’s Governor Gawler informed his superiors in London that the natives had ‘very ancient rights of proprietary and hereditary possession.’ Charles Sturt, his Land Commissioner, referred to their ‘natural indefeasible rights . . . vested in them as a birth right.’ The Methodist missionary Joseph Orton believed the Aborigines had a ‘right of property in the lands of their birth right’, G.A. Robinson thought they were ‘the legitimate proprietors of the soil’ because it was ‘the land of their forefathers’. A South Australian pioneer argued that the ‘rights of the original possessors’ were all affected by Acts of Parliament or Commissioners instructions: their right rests upon principles of justice. It is impossible to deny the right which the natives have to the land on which they were born, from which age after age they have derived support and which has received their ashes.
The belief that the Aborigines were the original proprietors of Australia and had an interest in the soil took deep root in colonial society between 1820 and 1850. A minority of settlers took the view that the Aborigines were, therefore, the proper, the legitimate owners of the soil and the British usurpers and brigands. But the great majority continued to accept that Europeans had a right to colonize the world, to turn ‘waste’ lands to better use and to subdue and replenish the earth. The obvious way to reconcile the interests of settlers and indigenes was to give compensation for lands acquired by the Europeans. The need to provide ‘an equivalent’ runs through much of the public discussion of the period. There was debate about what sort of compensation, and how much, but very few people opposed the idea itself. The editor of the Sydney paper The Colonist argued in 1838 that it was ‘now a settled doctrine’ with both the Imperial government and Parliament, and the ‘virtuous portion’ of the public that the right to ‘take possession of barbarous countries’, rested entirely upon the principle ‘of a full equivalent being given by the invaders’. Almost everyone accepted that the Aborigines had lost something as a result of settlement, that they had therefore, originally owned something as well. At the inaugural meeting of Sydney’s Aborigines Protection Society in 1838 a local barrister, Sydney Stephens, remarked that, ‘the great question was, whether we were to give them no equivalent for that which we had taken from them. Had we deprived them of nothing? Was it nothing that they were driven from the lands where their fathers lived, where they were born, and which were endeared to them by associations equally strong with the associations of more civilized people?’
The Law of the Land, Henry Reynolds, Penguin, Melbourne, 1987