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The Aborigines of Australia
The native people of Australia, known as Aborigines, have lived there for 40,000 years. When the British began settlement in Australia in the late 1700s, there were approximately 300,000 Aborigines living there. Yet the British declared the Australian continent to be "terra nullius" – empty land.
The British considered the native Aborigines to represent "the very lowest scale of barbarism." In 1902, a member of the Commonwealth Parliament of Australia stated, "There is no scientific evidence that the Aborigine is a human being at all." In fact, it took until 1971 for the government to even include the Aborigines in their national census.
The Microbial Conquest/Germ Warfare
The expeditions of Cabeza de Vaca, and of the other conquistadors who followed, started another kind of conquest in North America – a microbial conquest. It is estimated that there were between 8 and 12 million people who lived in pre-Columbian America north of Mexico. 80-90% of the native people died because of diseases introduced by the Europeans.
Environmental Conquest
Cabeza de Vaca was the first European to report seeing herds of American bison – originally about 25,000,000 strong. The Conquest of the Americas was an environmental conquest, or holocaust, for the buffalo, which resulted in their near extermination. In one 3-year period, from 1872-74, white hunters killed 4,375,000 buffalo.
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