Later, when it was clear that the whites were not re-born
relatives, Aborigines thought of European occupation of their
land as a temporary phenomenon. Even though they were
excluded from their land and their sacred sites, the land and
the sites were still theirs, and they would be able to recover
them.

They rarely expressed, overtly, anxiety that the land as such
could be removed from their own possession. It was being
ruthlessly exploited. Despite that, they simply did not envisage
their land as being alienated. It had always been theirs; it was
their country, and it would always be there, no matter what
happened. Even when they were living on mission stations
or settlements away from their own local group territories, the
expectation was that they would eventually return to them--
or that those territories would still be there when they were
ready to return.

Even if the European take-over of the land had been peaceful
and benign, and even if adequate compensation had been
paid to the Aborigines, the diametrically opposed views of
the land held by the white settlers, on the one hand, and the
Aborigines on the other, meant that the Aborigines believed
they had been done an irreparable injustice for which there
could be no really satisfactory compensation. The Aborigine's
whole identity as a person was bound up with a particular
piece of land, so that financial compensation for being
dispossessed of that land was beside the point.

As we know, the European invaders were far from peaceful
and benign in dispossessing the Aborigines of their land.

Ceremonial and religious life was disrupted by the settler
incursion. Important sacred sites were desecrated, albeit
unwittingly in many cases, access to them denied and large
ceremonial gatherings often dispersed by anxious
frontiersmen or officious police detachments. Cave paintings
were daubed with graffitti, sacred boards stolen. Members of
the Horn Scientific Expedition of 1894 found a cave of great
religious significance in central Australia. They took sixty
wooden sticks and fifteen stone tablets but left axes, knives
and other bric-a-brac. 'Sufficient commercially, they thought,
'to make the transaction an equitable one.'

-18-