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Source 7.34. Photo of an Indigenous man at the opening of the Parliament House,
1927 from The Modern World Emerges (Lawrence et al., 1986, p. 281).
7.8 Category 5: General civil action led by Indigenous Australians
7.8.1 Discourses of land rights.
The majority of the Indigenous representations content in The Modern World Emerges
(Lawrence et al., 1986) is in the Introduction to Unit 3: Modern Australia emerges. This one
page section, which provides a brief overview of significant milestones leading up to
Australia’s Federation in 1901, contains a significant portion of content related to Indigenous
Australians, covering half the page. Focus is on the relationship Indigenous Australians have
with land and how this has been negatively impacted since the period of colonisation. For
example, the section starts with the statement “although relations with the Aborigines were at
first good, they quickly worsened as it became apparent that the British had not come to pay a
visit, or to trade, but intended to deprive the Aborigines of their land” (Lawrence et al., 1986,
p. 274). Indigenous knowledges are also respected in this section, with key phrases such as
“Aborigines...did not believe in individual ownership of land. Rather the land belonged to the
tribe” (Lawrence et al., 1986, p. 274) indicative of this. Indigenous Australians are included
in this introduction, justified by their relationship with non-Indigenous “British settlers”
(Lawrence et al., 1986, p. 274). Indigenous modern history is only included in relationship to
non-Indigenous events; rather than Indigenous history in and of itself. This is articulated
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