ABSTRACT
The white men who hoisted the flag on 26 January 1788 proclaimed British sovereignty over the eastern third of Australia. The rights of the original Aboriginal inhabitants were simply disregarded for they were thought too backward to have legitimate title and New Holland was deemed to have been terra nullius — no persons’s land — prior to the arrival of the Europeans. Between 1788 and 1868 some 187000 convicts were transported to Australia, 162000 men and 25000 women. The English, unlike the Aborigines, had permanent institutions — monarchy, parliament, courts, armed forces, civil offices — and formalised rules of government and law. The Australian radicals of the 1840s and 1850s were so preoccupied with political issues, so steeped in the doctrines of liberalism and constitutional democracy, that they came to look upon the state as an instrument of popular sovereignty.
