For millennia, the indigenous people maintained and cultivated the land that’s now called Australia.
All this changed in 1771, when Captain James Cook, a British explorer, arrived on its shores. He proceeded to claim that the land was now under the British Crown. At the time, he didn’t think it was important to consider the fact that there were millions of people already living on the land for generations. And that they may have a bigger claim on the said land than the person who had just arrived on its shores.
To nobody’s surprise, this became a problem. And so the British came up with a ‘workaround’ to this problem. And no, it was not to agree that the indigenous people may have rights on the land…Nope. They came up with ‘Terra Nullius’.
In this article, we will look at what Terra Nullius is and how it shaped the Australian land. And the laws that challenged it.
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What is the Terra Nullius?
‘Terra Nullius’ is a Latin term that translates to ‘Land Belonging to No One’.
This served as an administrative tool to ‘fix’ the land conflict faced by the British.
You see, the indigenous law defined land as a living relative that required protection. And so the ownership rights were determined by oral contract between the local families and tribes.
This was the opposite of the European idea of property, which viewed land as something humans could ‘own’. Under the 18th-century British laws, land ownership required three specific Eurocentric Markers, namely:
- Permanent City
- Fenced Agricultural Plots
- Drawn Paper Borders
The British argued that since the indigenous people didn’t follow the three rules that they had recently set, they didn’t have the right to the land that they had lived on for centuries. And so since the land belonged to no one, the British were free to claim ownership of this ‘free’ land. Thay didn’t need to negotiate treaties or secure consent.
The result of Terra Nullius was, unsurprisingly, catastrophic. All of the tribes were forcefully displaced from their ancestral homelands.
How Eddie Mabo Challenged Terra Nullius
Terra Nullius survived for over 200 years and was the basis of Australian property law.
Then, an indigenous man, Eddie Mabo, decided to challenge this law. He went to court to demand that his people’s historical land ownership should be taken into account.
In 1992, the High Court finally ruled in his favor. However, in this ruling, the judge went on to say that Terra Nullius was a historical fiction and that the indigenous people had always had a right to the land.
In any case, the filter that had governed Australian land ownership was gone. Today, Australia is still navigating the cultural damage done by the two Latin words: Terra Nullius.