Discuss the Aboriginal people’s view of the land. How does it differ from the European view?

The European view of land, especially at the time when Europeans
first came to Australia, was that land belonged to those who occupied and developed it. There was
a doctrine called terra nullius that basically said that any land that was
not being lived on or developed by anyone was unowned and could be taken. To Europeans, then,
land was something to be parceled out, developed (with farms, buildings, etc) and
owned.

To the Aboriginal Australians, land had a more spiritual
significance. The land was not something to be owned so much as something to be lived with. It
was, in a sense, part of their culture and part of themselves. This was a much more spiritual
connection to the land, one that was different from the simple idea that people own and control
the land.

An important problem was that the Aboriginals did not use
the land in ways that the Europeans could recognize. They moved from place to place instead of
settling down in one are. Because the Europeans could not see that the land was being (in their
eyes) owned and used, they took it for themselves.