In the twentieth century, Bravo said:
"land ownership was intertwined with the ideal of self-
determination of indigenous peoples, along with their
ability to choose the extent of their participation in
the lives of the nations that have grown up around them,
their ability to preserve their unique cultural heritage
without outside interference, and their ability to
pursue the lifestyles they deserve."
By 1921 the population of native Australians had been reduced from 300,000-one million in the 1770s to a little over
60,000 in 1921 due to a combination of white massacres and the effects of diseases of European origin. As of 1999, roughly 350,000 indigenous people of which about 30,000 were Torres Strait islanders and the remainder Aborigines accounted for approximately 1.75 percent of the Australian population. Most of them were concentrated in three areas, the State of Western Australia (2.6 percent of the population), the Northern Territory (23.2 percent) and the State of Queensland (2.3 percent).
After Captain James Cook dedicated the Australian Continent to the British Crown in 1778, all land was deemed to be the property of the Crown. The rights and interests of indigenous peoples were completely ignored. On the other hand, Pilger said that over time many white settlers acquired title to former crown lands simply by "squatting" on them. The legal fiction developed that at the time of Australia's settlement "England was found to have acquired sovereignty through the doctrine of terra nullius because it was viewed that no other owners existed." In the 1971 Gove case, Milirrpum v. Nabalco Pty. Ltd. (1971) 17 FLR 141, a Superior Court judge in the Northern Territory, (Blackburn, J.), invoked the terra nullius doctrine to reject a claim by the Yirrkala tribe which traced its possession for many centuries of the region involved and sought an injunction to stop a bauxite m...