Colonisation: A Global Story of Displacement and Survival.

Colonisation is often taught as a chapter of expansion and exploration. For Indigenous peoples, it is remembered as a profound rupture — one that reshaped lands, laws, cultures, and lives across continents.

In Australia, British colonisation from 1788 was built on the false premise of terra nullius, the claim that the land belonged to no one. This legal fiction ignored the existence of hundreds of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations, each with their own laws, languages, and deep spiritual relationships to Country. The consequences were immediate and enduring: dispossession of land, frontier violence, introduced disease, forced removals, and the dismantling of social and cultural systems that had sustained communities for tens of thousands of years.

Colonisation in Australia was not a single event, but an ongoing process — one that extended into policies of segregation, assimilation, and the Stolen Generations. These systems sought not only to control land, but to reshape identity, often at the expense of culture, language, and family.

This pattern was not unique.

Across the Americas, Africa, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the Pacific, colonisation followed similar pathways. First Nations peoples were displaced from ancestral lands, their governance structures undermined, and their knowledge systems dismissed. Treaties were broken, resources extracted, and cultural practices restricted or criminalised. In many places, population decline through violence and disease was catastrophic.

Yet alongside this history of loss is a powerful story of survival.

Indigenous peoples around the world have resisted, adapted, and endured. Languages are being revitalised. Land rights movements continue to challenge colonial frameworks. Art, music, law, and activism have become tools of cultural renewal and political assertion.

Today, the impacts of colonisation remain visible in social inequality, health outcomes, and political marginalisation. But so too is the strength of Indigenous communities who continue to assert sovereignty, identity, and connection to Country.

Understanding colonisation is not about assigning guilt to the present. It is about recognising how the past shapes the world we live in — and why justice, truth-telling, and respect for Indigenous knowledge are essential for a more equitable future.

Colonisation may have redrawn borders, but it did not erase the first peoples of the world. Their stories, cultures, and rights endure.