AUSTRALIA, March 31, 2016 (BBC): A top Australian university has rejected claims it is trying to rewrite the nation’s colonial history. Students are being encouraged to use the term “invaded” rather than “settled” or “discovered”, and avoid the word “Aborigines.” The University of New South Wales (UNSW) Indigenous Terminology guide states that Australia was “invaded, occupied and colonized.” But UNSW says it does not mandate what language can and cannot be used.
“The guide suggests referring to Captain [James] Cook as the first Englishman to map the continent’s East Coast is ‘more appropriate’ than referring to his ‘discovery’ of Australia,” a UNSW spokesperson said in a statement to the BBC. Captain James Cook claimed possession of the east coast of what is now Australia on behalf of the British crown in 1770, following more than 160 years of mapping and exploration mainly by the Dutch.
There were already more than 250 tribes of Aboriginal people living on the land, each with their own language, customs and territories. Then began a process of colonisation and land confiscation which denied Aboriginal rights to land, citizenship and equal status – rights which in many cases were only finally bestowed in recent decades.
The authors of the terminology guide explain their approach at the start, saying that while all staff and students rely heavily upon language, it “is also a vehicle for the expression of discrimination and prejudice… [and] cannot be regarded as a neutral or unproblematic medium”.