A Historical Change: Captain James Cook’s expedition to Australia will be remembered in a different light. Photo by Roger T Wong via Flickr.

When Captain James Cook first sailed along the coast of Australia in April 1770, he noted in his journal that he spotted “several people upon the Sea beach, they appeared to be very dark or black colour”. Upon landing at Botany Bay, he recounted a brief but hostile encounter with members of the Gweagal people, in which musket fire was met with spear throwing. Some of those very spears are still on display at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge.

It was 18 years later, on January 26^th 1788, that the first group of soldiers and convicts arrived from Britain to set up a penal colony. This day is now, 200 years later, celebrated as “Australia Day”. However, for aboriginal Australians, including the descendants of those who first watched from the beaches as hostile ships such as Cook’s landed, it is not so much a cause for celebration as remorse, regret, and anger. It was soon after their arrival that the British declared the land to be terra nullius – a land without a people – and set about systematically settling and colonising the land, using wanton violence and brutality. This darker side to Australia’s history is often wilfully forgotten or deliberately ignored.

In response to pressure by aboriginal groups, who wanted their experience of the past 200 years to be recognised, the Sydney City Council last summer voted to replace the words “European arrival” with “invasion” in the official record. Councillor Marcelle Hoff said it would be “intellectually dishonest” to describe the settlement in any other way. The move was both applauded and criticised. John Pilger, the esteemed journalist, wrote that it marks “a new Aboriginal articulacy”, and that “having finally uttered the forbidden word, white Australians should stand with them”. New South Wales Aboriginal Affairs Minister Victor Dominello, however, argued the move was counter-productive, stating that ”reconciliation and progress can only be built on language that unifies us, not language that divides us.”

But this is more than a simply symbolic, “feel-good” gesture: Australia is set to have a referendum in the next couple of years in order to decide whether to remove two little-known sections of its constitution that would shock many within and outside Australia if aware of their existence. One permits the government to disqualify people such as aboriginals from voting, and the other allows it to make laws based on racial lines. Furthermore, there is no mention of aboriginals anywhere in the constitution, presenting a worrying space for manipulation of their otherwise fragile rights.

When Cook declared New South Wales to be a colony of Britain, he actually broke with conventional British practice at the time by not making a treaty with the local people. Australia remains the only former British colony not to have a treaty with the indigenous population. And it was this absence that allowed the island to be considered terra nullius in the first place; for the following 200 years aboriginals suffered this lack of recognition.

On Australia Day of this year – dubbed “Invasion Day” by its critics – the prime minister Julia Gillard and her entourage were chased away from an award ceremony by some 200 activists chanting “shame” and “racist”, frustrated by the way that their history was yet again ignored – save the token “tribal dance” that precedes many public events. But this is not simply a battle about history; it is about the ongoing survival of the world’s oldest people, who came to the land some 40,000 years ago.