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Charity Or Compensation
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While some colonial authorities recognised that indigenous people were owed compensation when their land was taken, Australian legal tradition contains little recognition of such debt.

However, it is possible to look back to the nineteenth century and find moments when colonists themselves came close to admitting they had a duty to compensate aborigines. And, had this sense of duty prevailed, reserves and rations would have represented far more than acts of charity.

But the colonists' sense of innate supremacy prevented this. And so indigenous Australians were perceived as a new species of the poor, dependent on white man's philanthropy.
Aborigines mourn the father of land rights
Newspaper
Jan, 23, 1993
Arnhem Land, Gove, Gove Case, Marika, Roy, Whitlam, Gough, Yirrkala
Assimilation
Topic
 
assimilation, Australia, Australia, indigenous Australians, racism, Stolen Generation
Dispossession
Topic
 
colonisation, dispossession
Hierarchies Of Land Use
Topic
 
barbarism, colonisation, terra nullius
Justifications
Topic
 
barbarism, colonisation, terra nullius