Terra nullius. Land belonging to no one.

They were told the land belonged to no one. From the moment they arrived, they knew that was a lie.

Picture the scene. January 1788. Eleven ships of the First Fleet sail into a harbour on the other side of the world. On board — convicts, marines, officers, a whole colony's worth of strangers about to step onto a land they've been told is empty.

Terra nullius. Land belonging to no one.

Except it wasn't. Not even close.

It's estimated that over 750,000 Aboriginal people were living on this continent in 1788 — more than 400+ distinct nations, each with its own language, law, culture and deep connection to Country, going back over 60,000 years. The oldest continuing civilisation on Earth. And it was declared, on paper, to be nobody's.

Here's the thing though. The men who actually arrived could see with their own eyes that the paperwork was wrong.

Even Cook, eighteen years earlier in 1770, had recorded the people watching his ship from the shore. When he tried to land at Botany Bay, two Dharawal men stood their ground on the beach — making it absolutely clear the British were not welcome. They threw stones. They raised spears. Cook ordered muskets fired. As Cook himself wrote in his journal that day, all they seemed to want was for the strangers to be gone.

And when the First Fleet arrived in 1788, the officers were genuinely taken aback by how many people were already here. Captain John Hunter, sailing with the fleet, wrote in his journal that he was surprised to find the local people "very Numerous" — directly contradicting what the earlier Endeavour voyage had claimed. He described them not as the "stupid" people he'd been led to expect, but as a lively, inquisitive race.

The very people sent to settle an "empty" land were writing home about the crowds of people who were, in fact, already living on it.

The land was never empty. The British knew it. They wrote it down in their own journals. And they proceeded anyway — because terra nullius was never really about what was true. It was about what was convenient.

It would take until the Mabo decision of 1992 — more than two hundred years later — for Australia's highest court to finally reject that fiction and recognise what the First Fleet officers had seen with their own eyes on day one.

The people lining those shores in 1788 weren't a footnote to someone else's story of discovery. They were the Traditional Owners of a continent, watching an invasion begin.