I am perhaps naively hopeful that the education curriculum has evolved since you were at school, although quite likely not. The genocide part is not a palatable discussion to most people and probably a little heavy for high school.
The British knew full-well what they were doing. The legal maneuvering necessary to dispossess the indigenous population is not unique to Australia’s colonial history - and the British had plenty of practice subjugating more aggressive native populations before they founded Sydney.
You’re quite right - the Dutch, and to a lesser extent the French were already aware of the Australian continent and must have made some contact with Aboriginal people. There were also informal outposts of whalers and seal-hunters that were probably established to some extent several years before British occupation.
There were many aboriginal people living on the continent when Cook and Banks dropped anchor in Sydney. The earliest accounts usually mention seeing smoke from campfires all along the coast. Most of the initial deaths were from disease. The British took smallpox cultures to Sydney with the first fleet in 1788 - within a year of their arrival in Sydney, disease killed between 50 and 90 percent of the indigenous population. Whether the British deliberately introduced smallpox to the aboriginal population is still debated, although I don’t know why else they would carry smallpox cultures on the first fleet - maybe they already knew how to vaccinate with it - but I would think you could get the cultures from an infected person were that the case. What other reason for carrying smallpox to Australia on the first fleet could there be, unless it was a biological weapon?
In Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) the resistance to the settlers moving in on aboriginal hunting grounds became so troublesome that the government set up a program to capture or exterminate all native people in 1830 - by which time the Aboriginal population had already been reduced by 90 percent since settlement - the remaining few thousand aboriginal people were extremely hostile to the encroaching settlements and they were raiding and burning houses, killing settlers.
As in all conflicts, there are nuances and factors that we can’t fully appreciate or empathize with from our current perspective, but what happened to the Aboriginal population during Australia’s settlement should be a cause for national introspection - this makes the referendum result last week seem so disappointing to those who would like to see a more open acknowledgement of the darker history of Australia’s founding - and greater efforts made to redress it.
I am perhaps naively hopeful that the education curriculum has evolved since you were at school, although quite likely not. The genocide part is not a palatable discussion to most people and probably a little heavy for high school.
The British knew full-well what they were doing. The legal maneuvering necessary to dispossess the indigenous population is not unique to Australia’s colonial history - and the British had plenty of practice subjugating more aggressive native populations before they founded Sydney.
You’re quite right - the Dutch, and to a lesser extent the French were already aware of the Australian continent and must have made some contact with Aboriginal people. There were also informal outposts of whalers and seal-hunters that were probably established to some extent several years before British occupation.
There were many aboriginal people living on the continent when Cook and Banks dropped anchor in Sydney. The earliest accounts usually mention seeing smoke from campfires all along the coast. Most of the initial deaths were from disease. The British took smallpox cultures to Sydney with the first fleet in 1788 - within a year of their arrival in Sydney, disease killed between 50 and 90 percent of the indigenous population. Whether the British deliberately introduced smallpox to the aboriginal population is still debated, although I don’t know why else they would carry smallpox cultures on the first fleet - maybe they already knew how to vaccinate with it - but I would think you could get the cultures from an infected person were that the case. What other reason for carrying smallpox to Australia on the first fleet could there be, unless it was a biological weapon?
https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/smallpox-epidemic
In Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) the resistance to the settlers moving in on aboriginal hunting grounds became so troublesome that the government set up a program to capture or exterminate all native people in 1830 - by which time the Aboriginal population had already been reduced by 90 percent since settlement - the remaining few thousand aboriginal people were extremely hostile to the encroaching settlements and they were raiding and burning houses, killing settlers.
https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/the-black-line
As in all conflicts, there are nuances and factors that we can’t fully appreciate or empathize with from our current perspective, but what happened to the Aboriginal population during Australia’s settlement should be a cause for national introspection - this makes the referendum result last week seem so disappointing to those who would like to see a more open acknowledgement of the darker history of Australia’s founding - and greater efforts made to redress it.