Truth-telling on treaties and constitutional recognition

There was no system of government in Australia before Captain Phillip. No title Europeans could recognise, and no wars.

There were also hardly any people.

Population estimates of Australia at the time of settlement range between 300,000 and 1,200,000. This yields a population density in a range between one person per 25.64 to 6.41 square kilometres.

Compare this to the Americas where the most likely population density at the time was something like one person per 0.85 square kilometres, or the UK where it was one per 0.15 square kilometres. At the time, and to this day, Australia was the most lightly populated continent, save Antarctica.

The low population density combined with the lack of a sophisticated governance system meant there was no one to negotiate with for land, and a lot of land available.

So like the previous Aboriginal colonists before them, the new arrivals just squatted, and there was a legal theory and practice to support it. Had the Aborigines been more numerous and more technologically and socially advanced, there would have been treaties. But they weren't.

And the British applied British law to the whole continent, making the Aborigines subjects of the Queen. So any hostilities were subject to civil and criminal law, not military or international law. Not only was there no room for treaties, but unauthorised conflict on either side was subject to the full force of the law, and the victims to the full protection of the law – white or black.

Both Aborigines and Europeans were punished for frontier violence, sometimes by death.

So what about the constitution claims?

Well, the Canadians recognised its "First Nations" a lot earlier than the claimed 1980. Are they in the Canadian Constitution? They are, because the Canadian Constitution isn't one document but a series of documents and includes the treaties with native peoples.

Right idea but wrong date, and so what, it was a different set of circumstanes?

New Zealand is like Canada – it doesn't have a single constitutional document but a number, of which the Treaty of Waitangi is one. It is an interesting case because part of the reason for the Treaty was that the Maori wanted the British to impose order on the country which was riven by intertribal fighting as well as the deprivations of some colonists and traders who had bought land or concessions from the Maori. They also wanted protection from the French.