Читать книгу Australian History For Dummies - Alex McDermott - Страница 55

While the British were happy enough to strike treaties with Native Americans and New Zealand Maori, they didn’t even accept that Indigenous Australians owned the land they lived on. This was because Indigenous Australians were nomadic. The British logic was that if they didn’t build and live in houses, didn’t fence land and grow crops, Aboriginal people didn’t own the land, they only lived on top of it. Indigenous Australians were pretty clear in their minds that they did own the land they lived on, and that it was incredibly precious to them. But the British saw differently (this was a debate that wouldn’t be fully resolved until the Mabo and Wik cases in the 1990s — see Chapter 21).