University of New South Wales calls Europeans' arrival an 'invasion'; re-ignites debate about Australian history

The University of New South Wales has been accused of trying to re-write Australian history, with The Daily Telegraph on Wednesday reporting that UNSW had published a document that called the Europeans’ arrival to the country an “invasion.”

Forming part of the teachers’ “diversity toolkit,” the guide is meant to clarify “appropriate language use for the history, society, naming, culture and classifications of Indigenous Australian and Torres Strait Islander people,” according to the university’s web site.

Under the guidelines, the University of New South Wales cited “less appropriate” and “appropriate” terms to describe Australia’s history. According to the material, it is less appropriate and even offensive to say that Captain Cook discovered Australia, since Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were in the country long before he arrived. The guide said that it is more appropriate to use the terms “invasion,” “colonisation” and “occupation.

“Australia was not settled peacefully, it was invaded, occupied and colonised,” the guide said. “Describing the arrival of the Europeans as a "settlement" attempts to view Australian history from the shores of England rather than the shores of Australia.”

The guide was quickly panned by some local media and some Australian individuals. On Wednesday, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph said on its front page that the guide “rewrites the history books to state Cook ‘invaded’ Australia.”

Sydney talk radio host Kyle Sandilands denounced the University of New South Wales’ material. “It divides society,” Sandilands said, according to news.com.au. “All the flogs at uni reckon we invaded the joint … I’m not interested in who was here first and who did what, get over it, it’s 200 years ago.”

Conservative commentator Alan Jones was also quoted by news.com.au as saying, “This rubbish toolkit devised by the University of New South Wales represents anti-intellectualism and political correctness at its worst.”

For their part, the University of New South Wales said that the guide was not designed to be “politically correct,” but rather made for the benefit of teachers. “To suggest that it would stifle open debate at a university in any way is plainly wrong,” the university spokesperson told news.com.au.

Over on Twitter, the university seemed to get the nod of some users. Australian author Justine Larbalestier wrote, “ If you find the fact of the English invasion of Australia controversial then you simply don't know the history of your own country.”

Australia’s Aboriginal people were said to have moved from South East Asia at least 50,000 years ago, according to the official Australian tourism web site. It describes that during the European “discovery and settlement,” there are already up to one million Aboriginal people inhabiting the continent. The web site also states that in 1770, Captain James Cook “chartered the east coast and claimed it for Britain.”

The University of Queensland, for its part, does not teach that Captain Cook “invaded” or “settled” Australia. “Captain Cook was a navigator and explorer, and he neither invaded nor settled Australia,” Associate Professor Jon Willis, director and manager of UQ’s academic programs, said in a statement. “However, we also teach that the English idea that Captain Cook ‘discovered’ Australia is inaccurate, even from the point of view of Europeans,” he added.