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Australians have become all too grimly familiar with the performative nonsense of ‘traditional acknowledgement’. This idiotic ritual has become even more ubiquitous and annoying than the ‘Welcome to Country’ garbage. We can’t take a simple commuter flight, sit through a team meeting or even open a bloody website, without being assaulted with this work mindworm, mostly at the hands of tilty-headed HR Karens who haven’t got quite enough chutzpah to pretend to be ‘indigenous’ so they can scam a fat fee for a ‘Welcome to Country’.
Sadly, Australians are far from the only people who have to quietly seethe through this cretinous garbage.
The same virtue-signalling mindworm has infected the entire Anglosphere under the banner of land acknowledgements. These rituals rest on the comforting fiction that native peoples were the sole and rightful stewards of every acre and that later arrivals simply stole it all in an act of original sin. The data tells a rather different story.
Pre-contact populations in Australia and New Zealand were tiny by Old World standards. The Americas north of the Rio Grande were no more densely populated.
Given the size of the precontact population of the area that became the United States, one may well question the extent of indigenous stewardship or the actual size of the footprint of the Native American economy. The British economist Angus Maddison estimated the size of precontact America at two million souls – and precontact Canada at 250,000 (see Maddison, The World Economy: Historical Statistics, 2003). Native Americans worked sophisticated hunting, gathering, and fishing economies that, in terms of productivity, equaled, or perhaps even surpassed, those found anywhere else in the world.
Farming in pre-contact North America, on the other hand, differed profoundly from farming in Africa and Eurasia. The labour involved in agriculture in the New World rested entirely on human muscle and sweat, because there was an absence there of large draft animals, e.g., horses, oxen, water buffalo, donkeys, and camels. The llama, the only meat and pack animal in the Americas apart from dogs, was confined exclusively to the high lands of South America.
To the new arrivals bringing some much-needed diversity the New World, these were not surprisingly seen as largely empty spaces. Not unoccupied, but so sparsely occupied that to their eyes it might as well have been genuinely empty. The vast stretches of what appeared to be waste land, between the pas and the villages, let alone that trod only by wandering bands of no apparent fixed abode, seemed (rightly or wrongly) to be just there for the settling.
Given this extreme demographic asymmetry, which grew worse over time, it is perhaps not surprising that European America regarded the New World as terra nullius, that is, land which belonged to no one, or at least was land not effectively utilized, a concept expounded upon in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1690).
By the time of the California gold rush, the native population had collapsed to around 228,000, an 88.6 per cent decline driven by disease, dislocation and conflict to which neither side was immune. In 1850 that represented just 0.9 per cent of the total US population. The continent was not empty, but nor was it full in any meaningful sense of intensive occupation.
The modern counter-myth – that every single acre was stolen from dense, sovereign indigenous nations exercising perfect stewardship – collapses under basic arithmetic.
The myth of free land pulled the rug over a messier reality and has been rightly debunked by modern scholarship. Unfortunately, the myth of free land has been replaced by a new, countervailing myth – the myth of maximum occupation. This latter myth airily holds that every acre of land once belonged to the continent’s original inhabitants. Since there are 1.9 billion acres in the lower 48 or contiguous American states alone, this would mean, if we use Maddison’s pre-contact figures, a ratio of one person for every 950 acres – a massive area, the equivalent of no less than 720 American football fields!
The same demographic and technological realities applied in Australia. Pre-1788 Aboriginal populations were small, mobile and hunter-gatherer. Vast tracts of the continent supported only sparse human presence. European settlement brought intensive agriculture, legal title, infrastructure and eventual population growth that transformed empty space into productive land. The idea that every square kilometre was under some form of prior sovereign stewardship that magically survived conquest, migration and abandonment is the same ahistorical nonsense peddled in North America.
History is full of peoples displacing other peoples. Even the sainted ‘indigenous peoples’ were old hands at it. Native American tribes routinely massacred and drove each other off coveted hunting grounds. The Māori raided, enslaved and even genocided whoever they could get one over. Linguistic analysis shows that successive waves of Aborigines crossed what was then the Bass Strait desert to claim their own parcel of Tasmania, driving previous groups successively further south. Anyone who thinks the process was peaceful knows nothing about human nature.
The difference is that only the West is expected to perform endless rituals of atonement while pretending its own achievements sprang from theft rather than settlement, law and labour. Land acknowledgements achieve nothing except to flatter the self-regard of HR departments and activist academics. They substitute dogma for demography and myth for measurable reality.
