The First Fleet & our First Nations people here in Australia.

When I see this photo I immediately think of the First Fleet: the fleet of ships that arrived from the United Kingdom with the intention of populating Australia with its citizens.

Our history books told us it 1788 when the First Fleet arrived on our soil, here in what we now call "Australia". At the time I believe it was called "Terra Nullius" by those arriving on these beautiful shores. I have a sense of this term (it does not feel good in my body at all) and this website confirms the actual translation from Latin to English: "nobody's land".

The problem is that it wasn't "nobody's land"; there were groups of people living on this land who had a very long history of living here (potentially up to 100,000 years). There were approximately 260 different language groups with somewhere between 300,000 and almost a million people in total living on this land. (Source)

We know these people as "Aboriginal" (although there was also a very small group at the very north of this island continent we call "Torres Strait Islanders" who are also their own people but are often lumped together with Aboriginal people).

Aboriginal is another word for Indigenous; they were the first people (or "First Nations" people) and the rightful owners of the land which I and more than 25 million other Australians call home.

The land was never ceded (given up) but rather was just forcibly taken from these groups of people. There was murder, bloodshed, huge losses of life due to exposure to new infectious diseases and a devastating loss of culture, language, traditions, amazing knowledge, communities and connection to land.

Much of what I was taught at my high school (which was full of white kids and almost no Aboriginal kids in the 1000+ students) was focused around "our arrival" as the colonists, the explorers, the builders of a new nation. So little of what we were taught was about what was already here and what was lost.

This makes me very mad and very sad.

So while this photo of this ship is beautiful I think that the very first photo I ever saw of a ship like this was in history lessons about the First Fleet. And since, over time, I came to learn that the First Fleet was far less about the exciting exploration of new land and far more about the beginning of something brutal and horrific, the photo leaves me feeling huge feels in my chest.

I love this country. I love this land. I am so grateful to live here. And I was, like so many others I know, born here.

But that does negate the past. I'm not interested in painting a pretty picture over what was done and how it still impacts our First Nations people today.

We heal the past by being willing to look at it. So that's what I'm doing.

---

Photo credit here.

Post prompt here.

This is Day 21 of #HiveBloPoMo.