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Dear Individual,

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You ask:

« Any figures/estimates what it's [Australia’s] worth was in 1788 ? »

That’s an interesting question, Individual, and despite all my efforts, I’m afraid I can’t think of an intelligent answer.

What comes to my mind are further questions :

1. What was it worth to the Aboriginal peoples who had been living there for over 60,000 years ?

2. What was it worth to the British Crown and government as a location for the establishment of a convict colony, as well as a strategic outpost for quick access to the oriental trade route ?

The replies that come to my mind to those two questions are :

1. For the Aboriginal peoples, in 1788, Australia was beyond value. It was everything they had, their life source, their whole world, the only world they knew.

2. For the British, it was worth no more than the loss of the first fleet. They could have just as easily decided to establish the colony in South Africa – which had also been seriously considered – but had chosen Australia on the firm recommendation of Joseph Banks, the botanist who had accompanied Cook on the Endeavour in 1770.

The British don’t seem to have placed a very high value at all on Australia in 1788. In their initial secret instructions to Cook for the 1770 voyage, they had specified that he should offer “the Natives, if there be any … presents of such Trifles as they may Value inviting them to Traffick …”

That’s about the best I can do Individual.

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Dear Loudmouth,

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You wrote:

« Sorry, nobody has ever claimed that Australia was uninhabited. When Justice Blackburn used the term "terra nullius", thats not what it meant: it referred to land which didn't have a recognizable system of land ownership - land use, yes, of course, but not land ownership. I would be grateful if you could find any other reference to the term "terra nullius" before the Mabo decision in 1992 »
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You don’t need to apologise, Joe. You’re quite right. I’m the one who should apologise for my sloppy language. The British did not claim that Australia was uninhabited. They claimed it was inhabited by primitive peoples who used the land without “labouring” it which, under British law, meant that it was “terra nullius” (nobody’s land).

The problem with that, of course, was that they were not in the UK and British law did not apply. They were on Aboriginal territory (Australia) and Aboriginal law applied – as was finally confirmed by the High Court of Australia in the Mabo case in 1992 when it declared that “terra nullius” should not have been applied to Australia.
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In answer to your request for references to "terra nullius" before 1992, I found this on Wikipedia :

« Court cases in 1977, 1979, and 1982 – brought by or on behalf of Aboriginal activists – challenged Australian sovereignty on the grounds that terra nullius had been improperly applied, therefore Aboriginal sovereignty should still be regarded as being intact. The courts rejected these cases, but the Australian High Court left the door open for a reassessment of whether the continent should be considered "settled" or "conquered". Later, on 1 February 2014, the traditional owners of land on Badu Island received freehold title to 10,000 hectare in an act of the Queensland Government » (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_nullius).

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Banjo,

You should ask "What was the value of Eastern Australia?"

Britain didn't claim the whole country, the West was considered French territory.

Paul,

"Lieutenant James Cook, captain of HMB Endeavour, claimed the eastern portion of the Australian continent for the British Crown in 1770, naming it New South Wales.

In his journal, he wrote: ‘so far as we know [it] doth not produce any one thing that can become an Article in trade to invite Europeans to fix a settlement upon it’."

There, that should set you right.
Many people make the same mistake and think that Cook claimed the whole of Australia.
http://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/cook-claims-australia

Banjo,

You're touching on a different matter - what in law is termed "res nullius", 'a thing or space without government'. None of all this is peculiarly British, it's standard international law. Of course, there was nothing like a single government across Australia before 1788 (in fact, not until 1901), since land was traditionally possessed and used on a clan basis, and there were perhaps 5,000 to 10,000 clans. The question therefore becomes: did clans have systems of government or administration ? If so, were there 5,000 to 10,000 systems of government across Australia ?

That's a bit unfair: many clans grouped together, often very uneasily, under the guidance of elders from the clan, especially in terms of their dialects of a sort-of-common language. There does not seem to have been any higher or over-arching system of government than that. So perhaps there might have been one or two thousand of these hypothetically possible entities. Whether they actually existed may need some better analysis than I can offer.

The clan or extended families ran their own internal affairs like families do, but there seems to have been very little to run above that level, except elders coming together to decide who had killed person A - B, C, D, or E, since it was believed that no death of able-bodied people, especially males, could have been natural.

That's about it for 'government'. Idyllic, in one sense; but somewhat limiting over sixty thousand years.

As for the term, "terra nullius" being used in the 1970s and 1980s-by whom ? The courts, or by Indigenous people themselves ? God - what am I saying ? That the term "terra nullius" was primarily, if not the invention of, then the vehicle or myth promoted by, Indigenous people themselves?

You mentioned Badu. Yes, people on the TS Islands farmed the land, cleared it, cultivated it, dug it, planted it, weeded it, built up irrigation works on it, marked its boundaries with rocks, markers often going out into the sea to mark sea-bedrights as well. In other words, they owned the land in British Law.

Dear Banjo Paterson,

Bruce Pascoe writes in his book, "Dark Emu" :

" Arguing over whether the Aboriginal economy
was a hunter-gatherer system or one of burgeoning
agriculture is not the central issue.

The crucial point is that we have never discussed
it as a nation. The belief that Aboriginal people
were "mere"hunter-gatherers has been used as a
political tool to justify dispossession.

Every Land Rights application hinges on the idea
that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people
did nothing more than collect available resources,
and therefore had no managed interaction with the
land; that is, the Indigenous population did not
own or use the land.

If we look at the evidence presented to us by the
explorers, and explain to our children that
Aboriginal people DID build houses, DID build dams,
DID sow, irrigate, and till the land, DID alter
the course of rivers, DID sew their clothes, and
DID construct a system of pan-continental government
that generated peace and prosperity, it is likely
we will admire and love our land all the more.

Admiration and love are not sufficient in themselves,
but they are the foundation of a more productive
interaction with the continent.

Behaving as if the First Peoples were mere wanderers
across the soil and knew nothing about how to grow
and care for food resources is a piece of managerial
pig-headedness..."

The author explains further in great detail. It makes for
an interesting and informative read. Pascoe puts forward a
compelling argument for a reconsideration of the
hunter-gatherer label for pre-colonial Aboriginal
Australians. The evidence insists that Aboriginal people
right across the continent were using domesticated plants,
sowing, harvesting, irrigating and storing - behaviours
inconsistent with the hunter-gatherer tag.

The book is worth a read.