"Such an encounter is very difficult to imagine nowadays because I think we now posses a somewhat universal culture of communication and even though gestures and languages differ from community to community, we now have means to translate them. The situation between two cultural groups, who didn't know that the other existed beforehand, will be very different from any encounter that could happen nowadays.
I suppose that a significant problem arose from the fact that the settlers and explorers who came to Australia, regarded their own culture as superior to that of the Aboriginal people, since they possessed "civilized" inventions like further developed weaponry, technical equipment and lived in seriously superior brick houses. These people were absolutely convinced that their “civilized state” gave them the right to invade the land of the Aborigines. Coming from a European background, they would have carried with them “Christian” values and probably missionary tendencies that often lead to debasing of other religious beliefs.
Moreover, that fact that the Aboriginal culture involves traveling across the land would probably be difficult to comprehend for European settlers. This certainly accounted at least partly for the subsequent treatment of the Aboriginal peoples, since people tend to be suspicious of anything they don’t know or understand. Encountering this strange culture should have lead to an interest in and consequently understanding of it in the settlers. It did not, however, instead it lead to the oppression of the original inhabitants of a country which was subsequently populated by immigrants from a different continent who felt it was their right to take land for themselves, authorized by a government that felt it had any kind of right to distribute this land amongst freshly released prisoners and ambitious settlers.
What must these settlers have thought when they came to Australia? That these uncivilized people couldn’t defend the country from a bunch of white men with guns? That it was absolutely justified to uproot entire tribes just to farm cattle on the land? That having naval power lead to the right to just conquer an entire continent just because the inhabitants, the true Australians, were not able or willing, to fight the Europeans till death? Even If the settlers were desperately searching for a better life, this justifies to no extent the crimes committed in the pursuit of this goal. "
