Our Constitution
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George Fletcher Moore
Colonist and government official.
His perceptions of Aboriginal people were recorded in his diary. |
"This people have been taken under the protection of the British nation, and claimed as its subjects - their country has been taken possession of - their existence has been overlooked - their rights unregarded - their claims have been unattended to - their lands have been sold by the British Government without reference to their existence." George Fletcher Moore, 1841.
Aboriginal people have lived for more than fifty thousand years in what we now call Western Australia.
The arrival of the British at the Swan River in 1829 fractured traditional Aboriginal communities and altered their way of living.
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Swan Coastal Plain, 1827
Frederick Garling's painting of the Swan River plain two years before white settlement depicts Aboriginal people as decorative subjects in a romantic landscape. This was a common Eurocentric representation of Aboriginal people which did not recognise their close relationship with the land or their complex society. |