Colonial occupation of New South Wales: the Aboriginals' experience

It is my intention in this paper to consider the initial stages of contact between the Aboriginals and Europeans that followed the first permanent European settlement. This will involve an analysis of the various phases of European expansion and the forms of interaction that followed with the different regional groups of Aboriginal in New South Wales. In a broad sense the form of Aboriginal response in this period of European encroachments has been outlined by Elkin (1951), and may be reduced to a two- phase process: resistance and dispossession; and ’acculturation'. For the purposes of analysis, the other side of the frontier may be divided into two phases of development: a Penal Colony; and a settler colony. These two phases for a major period of the nineteenth century were overlapping.