Early Australian History 1

In 1770 Captain James Cook led his crew on a search for the Eastern coast of the imagined Southern continent [and]...with the consent of the natives...[took] possession of convenient situations in the country in the name of the King of Great Britain.

Cook did not obey his orders very well. Instead of consulting with the Aboriginal people who inhabited the territory upon which he landed, Cook simply declared the land "terra nullius", or an empty land devoid of a sovereign power.

The British empire declared the land as its own. The first Europeans settled in Australia in 1788, led by Captain Arthur Phillip, to help cure Britain's overcrowding problems by using Australia as a penal colony. The settlers tried to ignore the people who had lived there for over 60,000 years. Since 1788, the continent has become heavily populated by European peoples. The Aborigines who once made up 100% of the population now make up only 1% of it. While the rights of the European settlers have been created, the rights of the Aborigines have been removed.

Before 1788, there were at least 750,000 aborigines living in Australia. Between 1788 and 1850 the English sent over 162,000 convicts to Australia in 806 ships. The first eleven of these ships are today known as the First Fleet and it carried convicts, marines, crewman, officials and children.

By 1806, racism from colonizers and soldiers reached a very high point. Not only were sacred Aboriginal places violated and desecrated, the Aboriginals themselves became hunted like kangaroos for pleasure and fun, like trophy prizes. The soldiers used to visit Aboriginal villages offering gifts, while the real purpose of the visit was to contaminate the village water supply with arsenic. Whole communities including children, elderly, women and men were removed by arsenic poisoning.

Rum, initially imported from England, was freely offered to Villagers. The introduction of rum made many villagers drunk for a whole week until death arrived from alcoholic comas. The English soldiers took advantage of this stage of alcoholism to create wars between friendly villages, leaving them to kill each other.

The Black War refers to a period of conflict between the British colonists and Tasmanian Aborigines in Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) in the early years of the 19th century. The conflict has gained a notorious reputation as a genocide resulting in the almost complete obliteration of the Tasmanian Aboriginal population, though there are presently many thousands of individuals descended of Tasmanian Aborigines.