Pastoral ponderings and settler politics: how a colonial judge and poet wrote terra nullius into law

Portrait of Barron Field – Richard Read (c.1820). State Library of New South Wales

Governor Richard Bourke’s written proclamation of terra nullius was made on October 10, 1835. The original document now resides in the National Archives of the United Kingdom.

The proclamation was enacted to invalidate the treaty struck between John Batman and the Wurundjeri and Woi Wurrung people, who owned the land on which Melbourne now stands. Though the term “terra nullius” does not appear anywhere in its two pages, its claim of ownership over the entire continent would become the legal justification for the dispossession and inhumane treatment of First Nations people in Australia.