Terra nullius

Sven Lindqvist travels 7,000 miles through Australia in search of places where belief in the rights of the white man and the annihilation of the lower races were put into practice. While Australia continues to reckon with its violent past - echoed in the United States' treatment of Native Americans and Europe's colonization of other continents - Lindqvist evokes a history in which young boys were kidnapped to dive for pearls, then whipped and abandoned when the bends ruined them for work; half-caste children were taken from their mothers; and natives were misdiagnosed with STDs, put in neck irons, and sent to internment camps on remote islands. Lindqvist also recalls the work of ethnologists who brought their own prejudices to bear in studying Aborigines as primitives close to the origins of civilization, later inspiring Freud and Durkheim. At the same time he describes a beautiful and strange land, sacred to the native people who had inhabited it for centuries and celebrated it in a long tradition on richly symbolic art. Terra Nullius is the disturbing story of how no man's land became the province of the white man.--BOOK JACKET.

Year

2007

Language

English

Publisher

Granta

Editions

1

Pages

248

ISBN

9781862078956

Data source: Wikidata