This article argues that the colonization of Australia was justified by denying that
Indigenous peoples possessed recognizable societies, law, property rights or
sovereignty. This denial, in turn, rests upon the supposition that Indigenous
Australians were living in a ‘savage’, pre-civilized state: the
state of nature of liberal theory. Such concepts, deeply embedded in western
political thought, informed the view that Australia was a terra nullius or
unowned land. Consequently, the contrast between ‘savagery’ and
its counterpart, ‘civilization’ formed a critical element of
colonial arguments that Australia could be colonized without either a war of
‘conquest’, or making a treaty. We argue here that more than 14
years after the rejection of terra nullius in Australian law, its legacy
and the assumptions that underpinned it persist in the concepts more recent debates
deploy as well as in the concept of terra nullius that some of these
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