Charity Or Compensation

While some colonial authorities recognised that indigenous people were owed compensation when their land was taken, Australian legal tradition contains little recognition of such debt.

However, it is possible to look back to the nineteenth century and find moments when colonists themselves came close to admitting they had a duty to compensate aborigines. And, had this sense of duty prevailed, reserves and rations would have represented far more than acts of charity.

But the colonists' sense of innate supremacy prevented this. And so indigenous Australians were perceived as a new species of the poor, dependent on white man's philanthropy.