From the early stages of the British colonisation of Australia right up until the 1960s, Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders were used as unpaid labour in many sectors such as the pastoralist industry, beche-de-mer harvesting, pearling, the boiling down industry, marsupial eradication, and prostitution, ...
The non-recognition of slavery in Australia is supported by the Slavery Abolition Act, 1833, which provides that “slavery shall be and is hereby utterly and forever abolished and declared unlawful”.
In 1960, Aboriginal people were mostly denied the vote, were not counted in the Census, were still subject to extreme controls by bureaucrats, in some parts of Australia were confined to reserves or lived around our towns and cities in humpies and car bodies.
Starting in 1794, mass killings were first carried out by British soldiers, then by police and settlers – often acting together – and later by native police, working under the command of white officers, in militia-style forces supported by colonial governments.
However, once European settlement began, Aboriginal rights to traditional lands were disregarded and the Aboriginal people of the Sydney region were almost obliterated by introduced diseases and, to a lesser extent, armed force.
It is true that there has been, historically, a small number of claims that there were people in Australia before Australian Aborigines, but these claims have all been refuted and are no longer widely debated. The overwhelming weight of evidence supports the idea that Aboriginal people were the first Australians.
Answer and Explanation: It was never legal to shoot any Aborigine but it was an occurrence that was ignored and discounted. On September 18, 1973, capital punishment throughout Australia was abolished.
Between 11,000 and 14,000 Aboriginal people died, compared with only 399 to 440 colonisers. The tallies of the dead are not the only measure of what took place, according to Dr Bill Pascoe, a digital humanities specialist and key researcher on the project. “We are always using conservative estimates,” Pascoe said.
The research project, currently in its eighth year and led by University of Newcastle historian Emeritus Professor Lyndall Ryan, now estimates more than 10,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lives were lost in more than 400 massacres, up from a previous estimate of 8,400 in 302 massacres.
Apparently, most infants were killed by burying them alive. Rev. Frederick August Hagenauer (1829–1909), a Moravian missionary in Gippsland, stated that Aboriginal tribes would “bury new-born babes alive in the sand”, which was formerly “a common practice”.
Based on the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) projections, the number of Indigenous Australians in 2021 was estimated to be 881,600. The Indigenous Australian population is projected to reach about 1.1 million people by 2031 (ABS 2019b).
In the 1860s, Victoria became the first state to pass laws authorising Aboriginal children to be removed from their parents. Similar policies were later adopted by other states and territories – and by the federal government when it was established in the 1900s.
From the first federal electoral Act in 1902 to 1965, when the last state changed its law, tens of thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were subject to regulations which prohibited them from voting at federal and state elections.
Seeds of slavery in Australia
In the pastoral industry, employers exercised a high degree of control over “their” Aboriginal workers, who were bought and sold as chattels, particularly where they “went with” the property upon sale. There were restrictions on their freedom of choice and movement.
Australia was held to the Slave Trade Act 1807 as well as the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, which abolished slavery in the British Empire.
Aboriginal origins
Humans are thought to have migrated to Northern Australia from Asia using primitive boats. A current theory holds that those early migrants themselves came out of Africa about 70,000 years ago, which would make Aboriginal Australians the oldest population of humans living outside Africa.
It's estimated that as many as 1 in 3 Indigenous children were taken between 1910 and the 1970s, affecting most Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in Australia. This all took place under past Australian Government policies.
Aboriginal people were subjected to a range of injustices, including mass killings or being displaced from their traditional lands and relocated on missions and reserves in the name of protection. Cultural practices were denied, and subsequently many were lost.
The Waterloo Creek massacre, also known as the Australia Day massacre. A New South Wales Mounted Police detachment, despatched by acting Lieutenant Governor of New South Wales Colonel Kenneth Snodgrass, attacked an encampment of Kamilaroi people at a place called Waterloo Creek in remote bushland.
Under the laws of the Australian Government, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were not included as citizens. Instead, in many cases they were treated as foreigners in their own land.
The Bringing Them Home report (produced by the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families in 1987), says that "at least 100,000" children were removed from their parents.
Although the Aboriginal Tasmanians were almost driven to extinction (and once thought to be so), other Aboriginal Australian peoples maintained successful communities throughout Australia.
"Captain Cook, as good as a man as I think he was, he was not cruel or sadistic. He had a great humanity to him. But he fired at the first indigenous warrior he saw. "And here we are, 249 years down the track, and we Australians didn't know that.
From 1788, Australia was treated by the British as a colony of settlement, not of conquest. Aboriginal land was taken over by British colonists on the premise that the land belonged to no-one ('terra nullius').
Establishment of the colony: 1788 to 1792. The territory of New South Wales claimed by Britain included all of Australia eastward of the meridian of 135° East.