Mabo 25 years on: let's look at the vast, absurdist fiction this ruling toppled | Paul Daley

Submitted by Paul Daley on Sat, 03/06/2017 - 8:28am

James Cook was instructed to take possession of country ‘with the Consent of the Natives’. So who told him: ‘Sure, Captain – take it all’?

A quarter of a century to the day since the high court overturned the proposition of terra nullius in the Mabo case, it’s worth contemplating just how laughable was the British assertion that this land belonged to no one when Captain Cook sailed in.

The marks of Indigenous civilisation stretching to 60,000 years were all over this vast continent when Cook arrived at Kamay – now Botany Bay – aboard the Endeavour in autumn 1770. For starters, some 750,000 Indigenous people lived here and their elaborate life signs – shell middens as high as today’s city buildings, age-old tracks, multi-generational camps, boats traversing the waterway trade routes, scarred trees from which canoes had been cut, elaborate rock carvings and paintings, fire-controlled grasslands, ancient burial grounds – prevailed.