Frank wrote on Jan 29
th, 2017 at 9:21pm:
I think Terra Australis before 1788 WAS Terra Nullius.
There was no recognised or recognisable authority, government, anything to treaty with. Aborigines were so far back that there was no comparable institution to meet them at. They were wild, stone age humans unchanged in 60 thousand years, bypassed by all development in all those years.
They are very lucky to have been civilised by the British. Yes, civilised. It had to happen. It could have been the Belgians. Luckily for them, it was the British.
Desmond Morris' 'The Naked Ape' comes to mind.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.
It's just a little ungrateful that these current descendants of Australia's version of ground-dwelling hairless apes are now burning the flag of the very same people who rescued them from the oblivion that awaited them had any other nationality besides the English arrived here. Just a little churlish, one would think. Plucked them out of the dust, brushed them down, combed their hair, and groomed them in the ways of civilisation.