by Beth Szczepanski

Created on: July 08, 2008   Last Updated: August 02, 2008

"Until we give back to the black man just a bit of the land that was his and give it back without provisos, without strings to snatch it back, without anything but generosity of spirit in concession for the evil we have done to him - until we do that, we shall remain what we have always been so far: not a nation, but a community of thieves." -John Xavier, 1978

When British colonizers arrived in Australia in the eighteenth century, they found the land occupied by Aboriginal peoples. European settlers did not understand the economic system of the Aboriginal people, which dictated that the newcomers should share their resources in exchange for living on the land and using the resources previously used only by the Aborigines. The misunderstandings that arose from the Aboriginal assumption that the British should share what they had, and the fact that the Aboriginal people did not engage in farming or mark their territories with fences, led the colonizers to categorize the people as wandering thieves with no claim to the land.

In the early years of colonization, the relationship between the Aboriginal people and the colonists was marked by massacres of the native people and kidnapping of native children by the British and raids on sheep farms and other agricultural outposts by Aboriginals. Now seen as a terrible injustice, the displacement of the native people from their land seemed to the British to be the only reasonable option as their needs for land to use as prisons, farms and cities grew.

While the British viewed the Aboriginal people as entirely nomadic, in fact they have strong ties to certain areas of land. During Dreamtime ceremonies, Aboriginal people sing songs that recount the importance and location of a variety of geographical spots within their traditional lands. These include places of religious import, such as burial ground and other sacred sites, as well as useful roads, watering holes and other locations vital for survival in the bush. By displacing these people from their land, the British disrupted the spiritual life of the Aborigines and reduced their capacity to thrive as they lost lands upon which they knew well how to survive.

It was not until the 1950s that legal action began in earnest to restore certain sacred sites to Aboriginal control. In 1956, the Pitjantjatjara Lands Act ceded control of some land in south Australia to the Pitjantjatjara people. This act did not, however, help other indigenous groups in Australia. In 1976, the

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