The Invention of Terra Nullius
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Michael Connor AUSTRALIAN HISTORY WILL NEVER BE THE SAME AGAIN In The Invention of Terra Nullius, Michael Connor writes: “Until comparatively recently academic historians believed that terra nullius was a phrase used by government officers and settlers in the eighteenth century. It wasn’t. In any other field of intellectual work, the realisation that the basic building block of a particular area of study was flawed would have sent practitioners immediately back to see what happened. In Australia, thus far, HISTORIANS HAVE PROTECTED THEIR SHAMBOLIC OLD WORK, FOR THEIR CAREERS ARE BASED ON IT, and are pretending that nothing has changed. It has. “Terra nullius set the scene for the dispossession of the Aborigines, was CRAZILY ILLOGICAL, INTRODUCED RACISM AS A FATAL FLAW in our society, and served to tarnish the present.’ “THE MABO DECISION IS WRONG on its classification of Australian sovereignty as occupation of a terra nullius. That judicial error reaches into and corrupts all else. “A DISEASED AND SENILE HISTORIOGRAPHY, accepting any evidence, without scepticism, without the enthusiasm to test its truthfulness or accuracy, produces exactly the sort of late twentieth century history writing we are chained to. This almost corpse, (there is still a beating heart – the pacemaker funded by a grant), which we are dragging into the new century needs revisionism, freedom from political bonds, new writers. OUR HISTORY NEEDS TRUTH. No inverted commas are necessary, small truths will do.” Historical and Legal Fictions on the Foundation of Australia istory books, school curricula and legal texts all treat terra nullius as the defining doctrine in the foundation of Australia and the dispossession of the Aborigines. The High Court’s Mabo decision was supposed to have overturned it. Michael Connor reveals terra nullius to be a mythical notion. It was never a phrase used in Australia in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. It was only injected into Australian political and legal debate in the 1970s. Since then it has meant whatever its users want it to mean. The foundation of Australia was based on entirely different concepts and terminology. The book investigates the historical writings of a number of prominent Australian academic historians and finds them sadly wanting. It finds them inaccurate and untrustworthy, not only on Australia’s foundation but on subsequent relations between colonists and Aborigines. The evidence for a number of incidents of violence””especially the currently controversial Convincing Grounds Massacre at Portland, Victoria””is either exaggerated, wrong or recycled from very dubious sources. This book is not just a trenchant critique of recent historiography. It overturns the received interpretation of Australian history and puts a new perspective on this country’s beginnings. Hard Cover, 216 x 140mm, 362 pages, footnotes, bibliography, index ABOUT THE AUTHOR Michael Connor was born in Queenscliff, Victoria, and educated at Queenscliff and Geelong High Schools. He taught English in North Africa, was assistant house manager at Sadler’s Wells theatre in London, and has worked in Australia in publishing and bookselling. In 1997 he graduated from James Cook University with first class honours and a university medal. In 2002 he completed a PhD in Australian colonial history at the University of Tasmania. His other books are Pig Bites Baby! and More Pig Rites Baby! – collections of colonial journalism from Australia’s first newspaper, the Sydney Gazette. His historical play Colonial Ways was performed by the Old Nick Company in 2004. Michael Connor lives in Hobart. Macleay Press  |
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