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Paperback Terra Nullius: A Journey Through No One's Land. Sven Lindqvist Book

ISBN: 1847080057

ISBN13: 9781847080059

Terra Nullius: A Journey Through No One's Land

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Book Overview

Long before the word "genocide" was coined, the British invasion of Australia had annihilated approximately nine-tenths of the continent's original population of Aborigines. The creation of white Australia depended upon the legal fiction of "terra nullius"--no man's land--the claim that Aboriginal lands were inhabited by people who would soon die out and who could be helped on the way to extinction if they lingered.Sven Lindqvist, the widely acclaimed and internationally renowned author of "Exterminate All the Brutes" and A History of Bombing, brings his original sensibility to bear as he travels 7,000 miles through Australia in search of places where belief in the rights of the white man and the annihilation of the "lower races" were put into practice. While Australia continues to reckon with its violent past--echoed in the United States' treatment of Native Americans and Europe's colonization of other continents--Lindqvist evokes a shocking history in which young boys were kidnapped to dive for pearls, then whipped and abandoned when the bends ruined them for work; "half-caste" children were taken from their mothers; and natives were misdiagnosed with STDs, put in neck irons, and sent to internment camps on remote islands. Lindqvist also recalls the work of ethnologists who brought their own prejudices to bear in studying Aborigines as primitives close to the origins of civilization, later inspiring Freud and Durkheim. At the same time he describes a beautiful and strange land, sacred to the native people who had inhabited it for centuries and celebrated in a long tradition of richly symbolic art.A movingly idiosyncratic travelogue and a powerful act of historical excavation, Terra Nullius is the illuminating and disturbing story of how "no man's land" became the province of the white man. This description may be from another edition of this product.

Customer Reviews

4 customer ratings | 4 reviews

Rated 5 stars
Every Australian should read - but they won't

Sven Lindqvist has never written a bad word, and the abuse and destruction of Aboriginal and nomadic peoples is one of his pet subjects - see his work on the destruction of the Hetero peoples in "Exterminate All The Brutes". Now he turns to Australia and the dismal treatment of the Aboriginal population by both settlers, anthropologists, "protectors" (possibly one of the most grotesque misuses of a word in the history of the...

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Rated 5 stars
Eye Opener

In the last few years Sven Lindqvist has become one of my favorite nonfiction authors. He probes some of the worst situations in human history, yet always ends up with giving us some hope for our future. In earlier books, such as Exterminate All The Brutes he chronicles the history of European genocides in Africa, and in The Skull Measurers Mistake he chronicles a history of men and women who spoke out against racism. In this...

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Rated 5 stars
A tour of force

Literary historian Sven Linqvist was introduced to Australia at a young age. An 1896 book described how white European invaders viewed and treated the Aborigines. The story depicted a trio of young European boys encountering a group of Aborigines at a meal. Tucked away in a deep cavern, which to the boys meant the Aborigines couldn't have hunted the meal, the boys immediately concluded the group was engaging in cannibalism...

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Rated 5 stars
Withering Report on the Antipodean

With 'Terra Nullius', Sven Lindqvist turns his ascerbic, post-colonial attention on the great antipodean continent of Australia, ancient land mass, ancient indigenous cultures and one of the greatest of C18th Enlightenment experiments. The grim life of what was essentally a prison developed when the option of the United states was closed due to the War of Independence, is well documented by Robert Hughes in his, 'Fatal Shore'...

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