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When the First Fleet arrived at Sydney Cove under Captain Arthur Phillip on January 26, 1788, was Great Britain invading Australia? Some think so. In Victoria, a keynote speaker at an “Invasion Day” rally congratulated those who had decapitated a statue of Captain Cook.

In fact, over 150 municipal councils will not be holding citizenship ceremonies on Australia Day this year. There is a growing movement to abolish the holiday because “there is nothing to celebrate.”

But was Australia really “invaded”, as some experts have suggested? No, it wasn’t. Here’s why.

The Goal of the First Fleet was Not Invasion

Intent matters, and the “invasion” argument ignores what Britain wanted to do. As historian Geoffrey Blainey explains in The Tyranny of Distance: “Australia held commercial, logistical and diplomatic importance for the British who were competing with the French and in need of the Flax timber along the eastern coast.” In fact, the first legal officer of New South Wales, David Collins, wrote in 1788 that the goal of the First Fleet was not to invade the country, but to occupy small areas of land:

“By the definition of our boundaries, it will be seen that we were confined along the coast of this continent to such parts of it as were navigated by Captain Cook, without infringing on… the right of discovery [and] Of that right…Great Britain alone has followed up the discoveries she has made in this country by at once establishing in it a regular colony and civil government”.

Historian Bain Attwood, in his ground-breaking book Empire and the Making of Native Title, explains that Governor Phillip’s administration never perceived a need to negotiate because the small colony “merely comprised a small garrison settlement and so had little need for land beyond the beachhead it occupied.”

The British wanted to form strategic outposts and source flax wood in a race with the French. That is why the second settlement after Sydney Cove was the remote and uninhabited Norfolk Island, 1,700 kilometres away. As Blainey explains, “Its inhabitants [on Norfolk Island] certainly have no reason to talk of Invasion Day.”

Aboriginal People Did Not See British Colonisation as an ‘Invasion’

How did Aboriginal people react to the arrival of the British? The answer is complicated. Anthropologist Peter Sutton documents the very mixed reactions of Aboriginal people. Sutton writes,

First encounters with Europeans were arguably experienced by Aboriginal people in anything but territorial terms. They were most often, it seems, primarily an encounter with relatives who had gone to the spirit world and returned…

What about the First Fleet? Attwood says:

“In the beginning, Phillip’s party found it difficult to forge a relationship with the Aboriginal people. Indeed, several months after the British had landed, Phillip reported that the local people repeatedly avoided them. In due course, a good deal of cross-cultural exchange did in fact occur…”

From early Dutch encounters to January 26, European encounters with the British were mostly characterised by indifference. Labelling Australia Day an “invasion” ignores the fact Aboriginal people never viewed early European encounters as territorial usurpation.

Aboriginal People Did Not ‘Own’ Land

Since 2006, activists have begun referring to Australia Day as “Sovereignty Day”. The “core of the issue is the concept of Sovereignty”, writes SBS, “which means the inherent jurisdiction of Indigenous Australians over their lands… that existed before European arrival and was never ceded.”

Is this true?

An invasion involves alienation of ownership. But if land is not owned, it cannot be “invaded” in the conventional sense of the word. Peter Sutton again points out in his article on early European contact,

“For most Aboriginal people of a classical cast of thought, there was no publicly ordained conception of territory as something that could be annexed, by force or without force. It was a sacred endowment and not a secular achievement.”

It would be more accurate to say that Aboriginal people believed that the Land owned them.

For Europeans this connection, real as it was to Aboriginals, was invisible. As Geoffrey Blainey explains in Triumph of the Nomads, many did not stay in one place for long periods, “While many aboriginals spent every month of their life in their traditional territory, others might spend most of their life in alien territory.”

Did Europeans appreciate Aboriginal attitudes towards land? “There can be no doubt,” writes Attwood, “that some colonists believed that Aboriginal people had been the original possessors of the land and that consequently they had a moral duty to ensure that the natives were recompensed.”

This does not excuse violent interactions between the British and Aboriginal people after 1788, but it does show January 26 was not an invasion.

Many Aboriginal People were Never Dispossessed

When Aboriginal activist Michael Mansell turned down an Australia Day award, he wrote in The Guardian, “The British were armed to the teeth and from the moment they stepped foot on our country, the slaughter and dispossession of Aborigines began.”

The truth is more complicated.

An early expert on Aboriginal culture, William Stanner, showed in White Man Got No Dreaming that many Aboriginal people chose to migrate to colonised areas for work and opportunity.

“… for every Aboriginal who, so to speak, had Europeans thrust upon him, at least one other had sought them out. More would have gone to European centres sooner had it not been that their way was often barred by hostile Aborigines. As late as the early 1930s I was able to see for myself the battles between the encroaching myalls and weakening, now-sedentary groups who had monopolised European sources of supply and work.”

Stanner never encountered an Aboriginal who wanted to return to a traditional way of life in the bush, even if they were living in misery in a town or city. They “went because they wanted to, and stayed because they wanted to.”

The Coming of the British was Less Violent than Aboriginal Tribal Warfare

Michael Mansell argued that Australia Day celebrates “the coming of one race at the expense of another”. Many believe that it “marks the beginning of a long and brutal colonisation of people and land.” But would life have been less violent if the British had never “invaded”?

Edward Stone Parker, an assistant protector of Aborigines in the early 19th century, famously remarked, “On the whole, their way of life was a satisfying one, and could have been almost idyllic – but for their frequent fighting and the persistent fear of revenge.” Before the British arrived, one Aboriginal told him, “The country was strewed with bones, and [they] were always at war.” Indeed, “whole tribes have been exterminated by sudden attacks on nocturnal surprises.”

William Buckley, an escaped convict who lived with a friendly Aboriginal group, testified that fighting was brutal and constant. After two women in his group were killed, an ambush soon followed in which several women were wounded and later beaten to death. Their limbs were removed by sharp stone axes and shells. Environmental historian Tim Flannery writes:

“Buckley records fourteen conflicts involving the violent death of a tribe member over the thirty-two years that he lived with the Wallarranga. Nine of the casualties were women, seven children and seven men. Ten enemies (two of whom were children) were killed in revenge. Buckley also documents the massacre of a tribe near Barwon Heads… Buckley cites just two principal causes for the conflict: disputes over women, and ‘payback killings’ following a death by natural causes.”

There are even incidents of invasion and groups pushing out traditional holders of territory. For example, the Goonyandi people in the Kimberley region of Western Australia occupied an area larger than the American state of Connecticut, but were displaced by a neighbouring tribe, the Walmadjari. In the words of Blainey, ‘the loss of territory must have been a frequent event.’ He observers in The Story of Australia’s People:

“Such comparisons reveal that the annual death rate through warfare in that corner of Arnhem Land was nearly six times as high as that of the United States during an average year of its participation in the Second World War. Even the direct drain on Japan’s population through the loss of fighting men in China, the Pacific and all other theatres of war between 1937 and 1945 was not quite as high, statistically, as warfare’s drain on the population of Arnhem Land. In the Second World War, only the armed forces of the Soviet Union and Germany suffered losses of higher relative magnitude.”

Calling Australia Day “Invasion Day” ignores the harsh realities before 1788 and paints a one-sided view of history.

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According to recent polling, 69 percent of Australians still want to celebrate Australia Day on January 26. The holiday commemorates our British legacy – which includes the rule of law, politics, science and technology, sport, education, music, literature, and our common language. Abolishing Australia Day would undermine the unity our forebears worked so hard to create, based upon a view of our history which is simply not true.

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Republished with thanks to Mercator.