Pauline Hanson offers qualified apologies to Indigenous Australians and Anthony Albanese
One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has offered two qualified apologies, including to Indigenous Australians who she labelled “the most primitive race on Earth”.
Senator Hanson says she apologises if she has offended people by using the term “primitive”.
She also addressed criticising the amount of time that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s mother Maryanne lived in public housing, arguing the remarks were not “derogatory”.
Tall claims, totally unfounded:
What are these ‘sophisticated systems of law and governance’ that were able to exist without writing and where, therefore, is the proof of their existence?
As for land ‘management’, burning the bush to force prey out is hardly ‘land management’. It’s a form of hunting.
The majority of Thomas Mayo’s father’s ancestors appear to be from Malaysia, the Philippines, Nuie, Vanuatu, Indonesia (Borneo) and Singapore, as well as possibly some Aboriginal and TSI, while his mother was of Polish and English descent.
History is not a matter of feeling. It is constrained by numbers, capacity, logistics, and human organisation. When those constraints are discarded, history is not reinterpreted; it is fabricated.
For more than half a century, one of Australia’s most prominent historians, Keith Windschuttle, demonstrated how large parts of Australian historiography abandoned evidence in favour of politically useful invention. He showed how, once facts become inconvenient, they are quietly replaced with conjecture, inflation, and narrative assertion. The result is not a difference of emphasis, but the construction of an entirely fictitious past.
The modern claim that Australia was “invaded” in 1788 is sustained only by redefining invasion until it means nothing at all. It survives only by emptying the word invasion of all meaning and redeploying it as a delegitimising device: a term used not to describe what occurred, but to imply that the British settlement itself was unlawful or morally void from the outset.
Taken to its logical conclusion, this distortion no longer describes a historical event at all. Australia Day becomes not a commemoration of a specific occurrence, but a site of symbolic competition. Invasion Day, Survival Day, Day of Mourning — each renaming widens the moral claim while narrowing the history. The particular fate of the Gadigal is no longer examined on its own terms but abstracted into emblem and slogan, their world dissolved into an ever-renewing language of activism. As names multiply, meaning thins, and historical fact is progressively displaced.
An invasion presupposes organised defenders, opposing forces, surplus military power, and the violent seizure and holding of territory from a society capable of resisting. None of these conditions existed at Sydney Cove.
A Landing Is Not an Invasion
To say Australia was “invaded” because British ships landed at Sydney Cove is to collapse distance, scale, and political reality into a slogan. From a continental perspective, it is akin to claiming that France, Portugal, and Denmark were all invaded simultaneously because a number foreign vessels came ashore in Greece. A localised landing does not constitute the invasion of an entire continent, particularly where there was no relationship with, nor knowledge of the vast majority of that landmass. Australia, by scale alone, is roughly twice as large as Western Europe.
Although approximately 1,370 people arrived with the First Fleet, this headline figure is illusory. Ship crews soon departed, men were detached to Norfolk Island, and others were sent to Cape Town for supplies. Death, disease, and executions followed quickly. By the end of the colony’s first year, the population had fallen to little more than six hundred people, a settlement struggling to feed itself, barely capable of maintaining internal order, and hovering near starvation.
What existed in January 1788 was not a conquering force but a fragile penal settlement established in one isolated harbour. It lacked reinforcements, reserves, secure supply lines, or agricultural self-sufficiency, and for years hovered near starvation.
This was not an expedition capable of projecting force inland, let alone subduing a continent. The invasion narrative depends on retroactively inflating this settlement into a military power it did not possess.
The invasion narrative depends on retroactively inflating this settlement into a military power it did not possess.
Who Were the Gadigal?
“Gadigal” and “Eora” were not the names of sovereign peoples, tribes, or political units, nor were they used as collective self-identifiers in the manner later implied. They are labels applied by British observers to describe overlapping kin networks occupying parts of the harbour and coastal zone at the moment of contact. These terms did not denote bounded societies with collective authority, recognised leadership, or enduring institutional continuity. They functioned as descriptive conveniences rather than as the names of organised polities, and they cannot be retroactively endowed with the political or legal characteristics of nations, tribes, or peoples in the modern sense.
The people living around Sydney Cove prior to 1788 who are now referred to as the Gadigal were a small harbour-side estate group organised at the level of extended family. Their population has been estimated at no more than fifty to eighty individuals. They had no villages, no surplus, no standing authority, no chiefs, no councils, and no mechanisms for territorial defence.
This is not a later interpretation. It is the consistent testimony of those who observed them most closely.
Governor Arthur Phillip, charged with administering the new colony and seeking figures with whom he might negotiate or make agreements, repeatedly recorded his inability to identify any Aboriginal leader with enduring authority. He wrote that he could find “no one person who can be considered as having authority over the rest”. Influence, where it existed, was fleeting and situational, lasting only “for the immediate occasion”.
Watkin Tench confirmed the same reality, noting that although individuals might display personal prowess, “none appeared to exercise authority or command”. David Collins, the colony’s Judge Advocate, observed that no one could “answer for the conduct of others”, and that Aboriginal society appeared to exist “without any regular government”.
These men were not denying social life or custom. They were recording the absence of institutional authority. In legal and political terms, they encountered small kin-based groups governed by personal influence, not sovereign polities capable of territorial command, collective obligation, or any capacity for negotiation or overthrow.
The Limits of Numbers and Mobilisation
Even if one broadens the frame beyond the Gadigal to the entire Eora-speaking population of the Sydney Harbour region, the conclusion does not change. At most, the combined harbour population is estimated at around one thousand individuals, of whom no more than two to three hundred would have been adult males. These men were dispersed across numerous small, kin-based groups, each operating independently, without any overarching authority, coordinating mechanism, or obligation of collective action.
There is no evidence: documentary, anthropological, or observational, of any capacity to mobilise as a coherent force, nor of any shared political loyalty extending beyond immediate family networks. The historical record instead describes withdrawal and avoidance. Aboriginal people observed the settlement from a distance and only gradually approached it over time, not as warriors or soldiers, but as curious individuals. The British response in these early encounters was marked not by suppression, but by restraint, gift-giving, and attempts at amicable contact.
The idea that such a population could mount organised resistance, let alone defend territory against invasion, is incompatible with both scale and structure.
Collapse, Not Conquest
What ended the Gadigal was not invasion but collapse.
The settlement at Sydney Cove was anchored to the Tank Stream, the only reliable year-round freshwater source immediately adjacent to the harbour. That stream had sustained Aboriginal occupation prior to contact and, for the first year, sustained both Aboriginal and British populations simultaneously. Neither party could abandon the site without forfeiting access to water.
This coexistence was imposed by ecological necessity, not political accommodation.
In May 1789, catastrophe struck. A smallpox epidemic swept through the Sydney region with devastating effect. Mortality reached catastrophic levels. Josephine Flood records that of the Cadigal, only three individuals are known to have survived from a population of around fifty. Two of these survivors came into contact with the British and were taken into care; one died, the other recovered and returned to the bush. The third disappears from the record. This is not the conduct of an invading force exercising conquest or removal. It is the record of humanitarian contact in the aftermath of catastrophe.
This was an extinction-level demographic event. Entire family groups vanished within a single generation. There was no surviving elder to transmit law, no intact kin network to maintain identity, and no authority capable of continuity.
Even for those who survived or may have moved into the area, by late 1789, the Tank Stream had been irreversibly fouled. Contemporary records attest to pollution caused by human waste, livestock runoff, erosion following clearing, and the absence of sanitation. Even British officials complained of declining water quality and were forced to seek alternatives through wells and engineering. For a population dependent on natural watercourses, Sydney Cove became uninhabitable.
For the few individuals who survived, there was nowhere to return. The Gadigal estate could no longer sustain life, and there was no surviving kin structure through which law, identity, or authority might be reconstituted. Absorption into neighbouring groups was the only possible outcome, but even that was constrained. Women and children could sometimes be incorporated through existing kin-formation practices or Elder claim particularly of women; unattached adult males, lacking kin ties and imposing immediate subsistence costs, faced far greater barriers. Survival, where it occurred, entailed dissolution of identity rather than continuity of it.
Absorption Is Not Survival
Three figures are often invoked to suggest Gadigal survival: Arabanoo, Bennelong, and Nanbaree. Properly understood, all three demonstrate the opposite.
Arabanoo, a Gadigal man taken by the British during early attempts at communication, died in April 1789 during the smallpox epidemic. He left no descendants and exercised no enduring authority.
Bennelong, frequently misrepresented as a surviving Gadigal leader, was not Gadigal at all but Wangal, from west of Sydney Cove. His prominence reflects individual adaptation and British patronage, not the persistence of a Gadigal society.
Nanbaree survived only as a child taken into British care and raised largely within colonial society. He did not inherit or transmit Gadigal law, did not exercise authority over land or people, and left no lineage capable of sustaining a Gadigal identity.
Where Aboriginal individuals survived the collapse of the harbour clans, they did so through two distinct pathways. In rare cases, as at Sydney Cove, individuals were incorporated into colonial society through British patronage, education, or dependency.
In Aboriginal social organisation, absorption is total. Identity derives from living normative systems, kinship, law, and obligation, not from distant descent or memory. Once a society’s normative structures dissolve, the group itself ceases to exist, even if biological descendants remain alive.
Individual survival, whether through colonial incorporation or Aboriginal absorption elsewhere, does not constitute continuity. It marks the end of the society from which the individual came.
Not an Anomaly, but the Pattern
The fate of the Gadigal was not anomalous. It was representative. What distinguished the Sydney Basin was not the structure of Aboriginal society, but the timing and visibility of its collapse.
Across the continent, Aboriginal societies operated at similarly small scale: kin-based groups without surplus, without villages, without institutional authority, and without mechanisms capable of sustaining territorial control or collective mobilisation. Where collapse occurred later or took different forms, the underlying process was the same. Smallpox was decisive in coastal New South Wales because it arrived early; elsewhere, different forces produced the same outcome. Pleurisy, tuberculosis, infertility, alcohol, opium, and sexual dislocation proved equally destructive in populations already operating at the margins of demographic replacement.
In most regions, Aboriginal people did not flee before settlement, nor did they mount organised resistance. They came in. They approached stations, camps, missions, and townships gradually and cautiously, drawn by food, protection, curiosity, or necessity. The historical record overwhelmingly describes avoidance followed by accommodation, not warfare followed by defeat. Settlement advanced not along a front line, but through repeated local contact with societies structurally incapable of coordinated defence.
This was not a moral failure, nor an intellectual one. It was an anthropological reality. In comparative terms, the Aboriginal societies encountered by the British in Australia occupied among the smallest and least structurally complex forms of social organisation documented by European colonial powers. Authority was personal rather than institutional; identity was fragile rather than durable; and continuity depended entirely on the survival of living kin networks rather than on law, polity, or abstraction. When those networks collapsed, through disease, infertility, or absorption, the society itself ceased to exist as a society.
History, Restored
To describe this process as “invasion” is not merely exaggerated; it is conceptually wrong. It applies the language of state conflict to societies that were not states, sovereignty to groups without sovereign structure, and conquest to demographic collapse rather than war. It does not deny tragedy. It denies invention.
History does not become false because it is painful, but it does become useless when it is fabricated.