| Summary: | As a First Nations person belonging to the Bulluk-Willam people of the Woiwurrung nation from the Coranderrk Aboriginal Station, Wadawurrung in Geelong, and Monaro peoples in Cooma, I’m a duty-bound to educate not only the First Nations peoples, but the wider community of the 60,000 plus years history of the continent now known as Australia. The former British Empire and successive settler governments failed to recognise the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth of the colonisation of Australia, its unlawfulness and the injustices that had been created. For the benefit of the reader, I have chosen to use the term “First Nations peoples” rather than “Indigenous people and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people”. I argue that First Nations peoples had lawful transnational sovereign authority, which included being the holders of citizenship rights and having a system of jurisprudence self-governance where they had entered into legally binding treaties and land rights agreements prior to the arrival of Lieutenant James Cook on 29 April 1770 (de Costa, 2006; Diamond, 1997; Kenny, 2008; Presland, 1994; Trudgen, 2000). The Act of Settlement 1700 (UK) denounced the monarch’s lawful right to be a sovereign ruler over citizens, which means it was also applicable to their vice-regal representative. I argue that same lawful sovereign authority had been given to each person from each language belonging to the First Nations peoples residing on the continent of Australia and its surrounding islands. Even the first convicts and “free settlers” held lawful sovereign rights and not their monarch. The Law of Nations under European law (de Vattel, 1844) concluded that the First Nations peoples had lawful sovereignty, a civil society, and a political system of independent self-governance. However, the unlawful acquisition of Australia was to provide both an international trading base for the United Kingdom after the end of the American Civil War and a convict outpost (Blainey, 1966; Dallas, 1978; Frost, 2011, 2013; ...
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