British ‘Are’ Failed Humans: Chapter 8

Conquering Australia and New Zealand.

Australia and New Zealand are two countries part of the ‘white’ group called ‘Five Eyes’. It is an intelligence sharing network created by USA. Both are part of the British Commonwealth and the British King is their reigning monarch. The ruling class of both the countries is visibly ‘white’ and is apparently of European descent. Both have recently concluded Free Trade Agreements with India and the Prime Ministers of both countries frequently visit India or invite the Prime Minister of India.

In their speeches, leaders of both countries refer to themselves as part of the Asia-Pacific, never as part of Europe or Britain. It is not to please India. The reason is a bloody history with Europe, and with the British in particular.

They call themselves Asia-Pacific today. The 215 children buried without names in British Columbia did not get that rebrand.

The Map

We believe that empires are expanded by sweat and blood. But that comes later. Often it is a humble cartographer who uses his mighty pen to announce the arrival of empire on the doorstep.

Captain James Cook (1728–1779) was a British Royal Navy officer, explorer, navigator, and cartographer. He undertook an exploration of the Pacific Ocean. He charted the east coast of Australia in 1770 and claimed it for Britain by naming it New South Wales.

The empire having been expanded on the map, the problem was now how to own it on the ground. Lawyers came to the rescue of the empire with a doctrine in Latin called Terra Nullius.

A Continent Declared Empty

Terra Nullius, translated from Latin, means “land belonging to no one.” There was an entire civilization living and thriving on the island-continent of Australia. How could it be declared empty? How could the British declare that the people already living on the land did not legally exist?

It needed one more audacious lie. The British did not prove the land was uninhabited. They declared the inhabitants were not human enough to hold legal title to it.

Thus, the British looked at the Australian continent in 1788 and invoked Terra Nullius. They looked at 60,000 years of continuous human civilization and declared it legally empty. It did not matter to their conscience that it was the oldest surviving civilization on earth.

Dumping the Human Refuse

The British did not send pioneers, settlers, or pilgrims to Australia. Their gift to this land was ships full of felon convicts. The first fleet landed at Botany Bay, Sydney.

Britain had previously dumped its unwanted criminals in America. When the American War of Independence closed that pipeline in 1783, the British had a problem: where to put the criminals? The answer was Australia.

The eleven ships of the First Fleet carried 736 convicted criminals under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip. Most convicts had committed petty crimes. They were the human refuse of a British society that had no more space in its overflowing prisons.

The founding date of modern Australia is January 26, 1788. It is celebrated as Australia Day. Aboriginal Australians call it Invasion Day.

The Original Habitat

The Aboriginal Australians who watched the First Fleet arrive at Sydney Cove had lived on that continent for at least 60,000 years. They were not primitive wanderers. They were masters of the landscape. Experts in land management, water conservation, astronomy, medicine, and complex social governance.

They had traded with Papua New Guinea, maintained complex legal and ceremonial systems, managed the landscape through controlled burning, and sustained rich cultural traditions through oral history and art. European archaeologists and anthropologists continue to discover new dimensions of their civilization to this day.

All of that counted for nothing under Terra Nullius. The land was no longer a civilization. It became a sheep farm.

The Sheep Farm

The British did not negotiate. They did not sign a treaty. They simply declared the land owned by the Crown and began carving it up into pastoral leases for sheep farmers and cattle ranchers.

The wheel of Australia’s colonial economy was wool. British textile mills in Manchester and Bradford devoured raw wool. Australia’s vast open plains were perfect sheep country. Land was the single resource needed to run sheep, and land was taken from Aboriginal communities by force and by law.

Aboriginal peoples resisted the theft of their ancestral waterholes and hunting grounds. Their survival depended on it. They protested and resisted. Suddenly they were classified as a threat to colonial property. The colonial government’s response was massacre.

Frontier massacres of Aboriginal Australians were so systematic and so numerous that researchers at the University of Newcastle have mapped over 400 confirmed massacre sites on the Australian mainland, where an estimated 65,000 Aboriginal people were killed in frontier violence between 1788 and 1930. Other estimates place the national total at no less than 100,000 killed.

Australia’s founding mythology is obsessed with the idea of a “fresh start” in a “new land.” For the original inhabitants, the fresh start was brutal. These were not isolated incidents. This was British policy.

By the late 1830s, pastoral expansion into the Liverpool Plains and Gwydir River region in north-western New South Wales had led to intense conflict. Settlers and stockmen were seizing Aboriginal land for cattle stations. Aboriginal people resisted by attacking stock and sometimes killing stockmen. In response, settlers and colonial mounted police carried out widespread punitive killings.

There was an atmosphere of mutual hatred. Hunting and killing Aboriginal groups had become normal.

The Myall Creek Massacre

About 35–40 Wirrayaraay people, a clan of the Gamilaraay nation, mostly women, children, and older men, had sought refuge at Henry Dangar’s Myall Creek cattle station near present-day Bingara. They were not hostile to the settlers. The men were working for the settlers.

On June 10, 1838, a group of twelve white stockmen rode to the Wirrayaraay camp at Myall Creek in New South Wales. The Aboriginal men were away working on a nearby cattle station. The stockmen bound together at least 28 Aboriginal women, children, and elderly men with ropes, marched them into the bush, and slaughtered them in cold blood with swords and guns. They then tried to burn the bodies to destroy the evidence.

Seven of the twelve men were arrested, tried, convicted, and hanged.

This outcome shocked colonial Australia. Not because of the cold-blooded massacre. That was commonplace. It was the trial and conviction of white men that shocked colonial Australia.

The idea that the killing of Aboriginal people constituted murder punishable by death was considered a radical and dangerous precedent. Newspaper editorials of the time warned that holding settlers accountable for frontier killings would “hamper the development of the colony.”

The seven were hanged anyway. They remain the only white Australians ever judicially executed for the killing of Aboriginal people.

The Stolen Generations

As the frontier massacres slowed, British colonial policy changed its target. If you cannot kill the adults fast enough, take the children.

Between approximately 1910 and 1970, successive Australian governments systematically removed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families. These children, who became known as the Stolen Generations, were placed in institutions or white foster homes. Their purpose was explicit.

In the words of the Commonwealth’s Chief Protector of Aboriginals, A.O. Neville, writing in 1937:

“Are we going to have a population of one million blacks in the Commonwealth, or are we going to merge them into our white community and eventually forget that there ever were any Aborigines in Australia?”

The objective was the deliberate erasure of an entire people by erasing their identity, language, culture, and memory of family. Children were forbidden to speak their languages. Removed girls were trained as domestic servants. Removed boys were trained as farm laborers. Many suffered severe physical and sexual abuse inside the institutions that claimed to care for them.

The position of Maori civilization in neighboring New Zealand was no different.

New Zealand: The Other Island

A Dutch explorer Abel Tasman was the first European to sight New Zealand, in December 1642. He initially called it Staten Landt, thinking it might be connected to a landmass near South America. Later Dutch cartographers renamed it Nieuw Zeeland, after the Dutch province of Zeeland. In English this became New Zealand.

Captain James Cook was the first European to circumnavigate and accurately map both main islands. He recorded Maori names for the islands, such as versions of Te Ika-a-Maui for the North Island and Te Waipounamu for the South Island, while also giving English names to bays, capes, and straits: Bay of Islands, Poverty Bay, Queen Charlotte Sound, Cook Strait.

The Dishonoured Treaty

Across the Tasman Sea, the British used a different method in New Zealand. They used a piece of paper to rule.

On February 6, 1840, British representatives and Maori chiefs signed the Treaty of Waitangi. To the British, it transferred sovereignty over New Zealand to the Crown. To the Maori chiefs who signed it, based on the Maori-language version of the treaty, it guaranteed them full authority (tino rangatiratanga) over their lands, villages, and treasures, while simply granting the British a limited right to purchase land with Maori consent.

Two versions of the same treaty. Two contradictory promises. One winner, decided by the gun.

Within months of signing, British settlers began arriving in large numbers. The New Zealand Company was a private British colonization corporation. It had already been selling Maori land to settlers before the treaty was signed, without Maori consent.

New Zealand Wars (1845–1872)

By the 1860s, the British were fighting full-scale wars against Maori tribes who refused to surrender their lands.

After military defeat, vast tracts of Maori land were confiscated by the Crown as “punishment for rebellion.” The rebellion was against a treaty the Crown had already refused to honour.

Maori people who had owned virtually all of New Zealand in 1840 owned less than 5 percent of it by 1900.

The Haka That Survived

The haka is the ceremonial war dance of the Maori. It is part of a broader formal welcome ceremony called the powhiri. Today it is one of the most recognizable cultural performances in the world. The New Zealand All Blacks perform it before every rugby match. Western audiences find it thrilling, powerful, and exotic.

Throughout the colonial period, the British systematically suppressed Maori cultural practices. Tohunga (spiritual leaders and healers) were criminalized under the Tohunga Suppression Act of 1907, which made the traditional practice of Maori medicine and spiritual ceremony a criminal offence. The Maori language was banned from schools.

The same pattern from Tasmania to Jamaica to South Africa: suppress the culture first, because a people without a culture are a people without resistance.

The haka survived only because the British found it useful for rugby.

In July 2026, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Auckland on the first visit by an Indian Prime Minister to New Zealand in 40 years. He was welcomed with a formal Maori powhiri ceremony at Government House, which included the haka. Modi drew a parallel between the Maori concept of Manaakitanga (hospitality) and India’s own tradition of Atithi Devo Bhava, where the guest is God. Two ancient civilizations, both once targeted by British cultural erasure, recognizing each other’s survival.

The Land Beneath the Cricket Pitch

Today Australia is one of the world’s most enthusiastic cricketing nations. Nothing defines British imperial culture like cricket. The British played cricket everywhere they went. They brought it to India, to the Caribbean, to South Africa, and to Australia.

The British taught the conquered peoples of the world to play cricket, because a man absorbed in playing the empire’s game is a man not thinking about the empire’s theft of his land.

Australia’s most famous cricketing ground, the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG), sits on land that once belonged to the Wurundjeri people. No treaty was signed. No payment was made. The British simply built a cricket ground on land they declared legally empty under Terra Nullius.

Today, 100,000 fans cheer in the MCG. Beneath the turf, Terra Nullius lies buried, along with the truth.

The Apology That Cost Nothing

In 1992, the High Court of Australia finally did what no colonial court had done in 204 years. In Mabo v Queensland (No. 2), the court ruled 6 to 1 that Terra Nullius was a legal fiction that had never been valid. Eddie Mabo, a Torres Strait Islander man, had spent a decade fighting in court for the right of his people to own their ancestral island of Mer (Murray Island). The High Court agreed: the land had never been empty, the people had never been absent, and the foundational legal lie of British Australia was struck down.

The ruling came 204 years after the First Fleet landed. The land was not returned.

In 2008, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd stood before Parliament and apologized to the Stolen Generations. It was a moving speech. It acknowledged decades of state-sanctioned child abduction, cultural erasure, and deliberate family destruction.

Not one dollar of compensation was paid.

In New Zealand, the Waitangi Tribunal has been processing Maori land claims since 1975. Fifty years later, the process grinds on in courtrooms while the land itself remains in the hands of those who stole it.

The British invented a legal principle for taking things without permission (Terra Nullius), and a legal process for avoiding giving them back (the Tribunal system).

The theft was clean. The reparations are perpetually pending.

The act was repeated elsewhere. In 1947, when the British left India, they owed several billion pounds as debt accumulated from war supplies India had provided. They never paid it.

In the next chapter, we shall examine how the British model of conquest, including criminal deportation, Terra Nullius, and Stolen Generations, was refined and exported to North America.

References:

1. Reynolds, Henry. The Law of the Land. Penguin Books, 1987. ISBN: 978-0140097818. (Landmark legal history of Terra Nullius and the denial of Aboriginal land rights in Australia).

2. University of Newcastle, Colonial Frontier Massacres Project. Colonial Frontier Massacres in Australia, 1788–1930. Online database maintained by Professor Lyndall Ryan and team. URL: https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres (Documents over 400 massacre sites and approximately 65,000 Aboriginal deaths in frontier violence).

3. National Museum of Australia. Myall Creek Massacre, 1838. URL: https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/myall-creek-massacre (Official documentation of the Myall Creek killings and the trial and execution of the seven perpetrators).

4. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (Australia). Bringing Them Home: National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. HREOC, 1997. (The landmark parliamentary report documenting the Stolen Generations, including Neville’s 1937 statement).

5. Orange, Claudia. The Treaty of Waitangi. Allen & Unwin, 1987. ISBN: 978-0868613307. (The definitive scholarly account of the two versions of the Treaty of Waitangi and the Maori understanding of tino rangatiratanga).

6. Belich, James. The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict. Auckland University Press, 1986. ISBN: 978-1869400576. (Historical analysis of the New Zealand Wars 1845–1872 and subsequent confiscation of Maori lands).

7. Evans, Raymond and Orsted-Jensen, Robert. “I Cannot Say the Numbers That Were Killed”: Assessing Violent Mortality on the Queensland Frontier. Paper presented at the Australian Historical Association, 2014. (Estimates a national total of no less than 100,000 Aboriginal deaths in colonial frontier violence).

8. Press Information Bureau, Government of India. PM Modi’s Official Visit to New Zealand, July 2026. URL: https://pib.gov.in (Documents the first visit by an Indian Prime Minister to New Zealand in 40 years, the powhiri ceremony at Government House Auckland, and the elevation of India-New Zealand relations to a Strategic Partnership).

9. High Court of Australia. Mabo v Queensland (No. 2) [1992] HCA 23, (1992) 175 CLR 1. (The landmark ruling striking down Terra Nullius as a legal fiction with no valid historical basis, recognizing native title for the first time in Australian law; the land was not returned).