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First contacts

In 1788 Captain Phillip came to Port Jackson with instructions to remain in harmony with the Aboriginal inhabitants. However, the establishment of a settlement of some 1300 people could not be achieved without dispossessing the original inhabitants from at least a certain area of their land.

The accounts of British officers such as Phillip, Collins and King all mention the names of Aboriginal groups that lived around Port Jackson; they realised, moreover, that each group was associated with a particular area of land. However, the Aboriginals had no fixed residences, no gardens with crops or domestic animals, and there were no persons in obvious control with whom treaties might be signed. So the British considered (according to their laws) that the Aboriginal people had no real claim to the country. It was treated as an unoccupied country, as terra nullius (no one's land). The settlers did not understand the Aboriginals' complex social organisation, their subsistence practices, their religious and political systems, or the relationship between the people and the land.

Initial contact between Aboriginals and people from the First Fleet was quite friendly. However, it soon became obvious that the whites were more than short-term visitors - they were changing the landscape by cutting down the trees, using food resources and raw materials. and denying Aboriginals access to their land. The Aboriginals showed their disapproval by attacking individuals or small groups of people who went out from the settlement.

Phillip did not realise that it was the very presence of the British settlement that was the main cause of conflict. At first he thought the attacks were merely retaliation for offences committed by the convicts, and he took no action against the Aboriginals. However, at the end of 1789 Phillip sent out the first punitive expedition when his gamekeeper was fatally speared by Pemulwy, the most active Aboriginal resistance leader in the early years of the colony.

As the settlement expanded, the situation developed into one of reprisals and counter-reprisals as Aboriginal people resisted being driven off their land and the whites protected 'their property' and their lives.

At the same time introduced diseases - such as smallpox. measles and influenza - were causing the deaths of many Aboriginal people, who had no resistance to them. Within the first two years of white settlement. a disease that was probably smallpox wiped out almost half the Aboriginal population around Port Jackson. Some years later the first white explorers observed people with smallpox scars in areas well beyond Sydney.

Source:
Aboriginal Australia Aboriginal People of NSW
Produced by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission 1997
(c) Comonwealth of Australia 1997
ISBN 0 664 10152 0