Language Shift and Death of Indigenous Languages in Australia

After the arrival of the first British prisoners and settlers in Australia, the British considered Australia an “inhospitable land, an empty wasteland [… and a so-called] ‘terra nullius’” (Fesl 1993: 4) without a present society and landowners. But having recognized that several indigenous communities already existed, the British were forced to resort to drastic means in order to build up the colony.

As the British invaders wanted to take land from the Aborigines without paying for it, and use it for their purposes of cattle breeding and farming, they had to use methods that were suitable to ban the Aborigines from that land. One of these means was to kill the members of indigenous communities, which inhabited those territories. Two direct and one more indirect methods in killing Aboriginal people became common.

As many native Australians were at the brink of starvation because the settlers’ grazing animals destroyed Aboriginal vegetable foods, poisoning of food and water was an easy direct means to kill Aborigines and decimate the population of indigenous people.

The second direct method in killing Aborigines was shooting them. The indigenous people were rounded up or driven to a swamp or river and shot or drowned. The idea of forcing them to a swamp or river contained the advantage of getting rid of the corpses as “they [were] floated out to sea [or] if there were no sea, the bones sank in the mud and were buried” as Gilmore wrote in 1935 (quoted in Fesl 1993: 62). Like Fesl reported, studies were made to find out the times and sacred places of Aboriginal rituals in order to be able to kill as much people as possible at the same time (cf. Fesl 1993: 61-62). The common practice to keep this violence secret, allegiance was sworn by the participants. Due to this, occasions in which cases of killings were taken to court were very rare. But cases like the one of Myall Creek in 1838 where 28 Aborigines were shot, and the seven murderers were taken to court shows that the chances to charge the murderers for their acts of brutality were very small because the negative attitude towards indigenous people did not change. As Christie reports in 1979: