ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with Aboriginal peoples’ strategies and actions to forge meaningful lives for themselves in the face of the enormous pressures of colonialism. It focuses on land, and particularly those small areas in southeastern Australia which became Aboriginal reserve. While the cultural differences in European and Aboriginal perceptions of land are obvious, there may have been additional constraints on Aboriginal interest in land acquisition in the European sense. The peak of Aboriginal demand for land in New South Wales seems to have been from the 1860s to the 1890s. This is the same time span as Aboriginal attempts to gain land in Victoria and also in South Australia. The Aboriginal land rights movement in New South Wales in the late nineteenth century demonstrated the parallel development of strategies by communicating Aboriginal communities to counter the problems arising from intensification of rural capitalist land use.
