Closure: returning cultural artefacts back to country sbs.com.au - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from sbs.com.au Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Distributed throughout the landscape, the archaeology of First Nations Australia is everywhere. Stone artefacts are not rare, but ubiquitous, common, and yet each is unique; as individual as the hands that made and used them.
While the dictum of Terra Nullius was overturned by the High Court with the Mabo decision of 1992, the idea of the ‘emptiness’ of Australia largely retains its power in the imaginative consciousness of white Australia.
The livelihood of its original inhabitants has historically been seen as marginal and precarious, and the population thought of as thinly spread therefore a narrative built on the damage wrought by European diseases and social displacement and violence in the early decades of colonisation.