This paper tries to reconstruct the history of European Settlers coming to Australia in order to build up a new existence on foreign ground. The overall aim is to establish an understanding of the concept of terra nullius that labeled Australia literally into a no man’s land and thereby justified and enabled its annexation by the inrushing convicts, settlers, entrepreneurs and adventurers.
Within colonial discourse a colony was founded on the acquisition of land by occupation or settlement of a terra nullius. Although the presence of the Indigenous peoples was acknowledged, they were considered to be primitive and uncivilised. According to the colonial power without any visible political system the Indigenous peoples had no sovereignty over the land and no laws that would assert their land rights. Driven by the empowerment of terra nullius the newcomers claimed land as their own, mapped and named it.
With these insights the focus of this paper will shift to the historical novel The Secret River by Kate Grenville in order to follow the protagonist William Thornhill’s efforts to build up a new existence for his family in Australia and to present how the settlers’ motivations and methods of claiming and possessing of land were implemented. The dispossession of the Indigenous peoples of Australia was legally recognised through the Mabo judgement in 1992 that overturned the terra nullius fiction and acknowledged that Indigenous peoples had lived in Australia for thousands of years and enjoyed rights to their land according to their own laws and customs.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. The Key Concepts: Terra Nullius and Cartography
3. Settler Colony Australia
3.1. The History of the Settlers and the Beginnings of Settlements
3.2. Frontier Conflicts: European Settlers and their Expectations towards the Land and the Indigenous Peoples
3.3. Establishing White Hegemony at all Costs
4. Australia’s Unsettled History: The Secret River by Kate Grenville and its Implications for the “History Wars”
4.1. The History of Australia in The Secret River
4.2. The Concept of Terra Nullius through the Imperial Gaze and its Implementation by the Settlers
4.3. Land Acquisition: The Principle Of “First Come, First Serve” and William Thornhill’s Dream and Annexation of Land
4.4. The Indigenous View of Land and Land Ownership according to the Settlers
5. The Mabo Case and its Implications: Terra Nullius, a Fiction of Colonial Discourse
6. Conclusion
- Arbeit zitieren
- Meral Engin (Autor:in), 2017, From Terra Nullius to Mabo. The Appropriation of Land in Kate Grenville's Historical Novel "The Secret River", München, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/438933
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