Sociology : Impact of Invasion and Colonisation Upon First Nations Australians

Running head: SOCIOLOGY
Sociology
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1SOCIOLOGY
Essay topic: Reflect upon the impact of invasion and colonisation upon First Nations
Australians
In the year 1770, Lieutenant James Cook, during his first voyage to the Specific, claims
possession if the Australian east coast for the British Crown (Dutta, 2018). After returning from
the voyage, Cook wrote a report that inspired the British authorities to establish a colony in the
newly claimed colony of Australia. The chief aim of this expansion was to alleviate the
overcrowding British prison, expansion of the British Empire, assert the claim of the nation to
the territory against other colonial power and finally to establish a British base in the Global
south. As known by us the impact of the colonization was highly adverse for the first nation’s
Australians. Even after 13 years of the Closing the Gap policy, the indigenous Australians are
way backwards in education, employment, mortality rates and other crucial and basic factors,
compared to the non-indigenous Australians (Fernando & Bennett, 2019). As a social worker, I
believe that instead providing them with allies we need provide them with equal opportunity for
growth in order to eradicate the adverse impact of decolonization. In the following paragraphs, I
have analysed the impact of colonization on the Aboriginal and Torres Islander individuals.
Along with this, my role as a social worker towards addressing the impact of colonisation upon
First Nations Australians has also been discussed.
One of the major impacts that took place in the 10 years following the colonization was
reduction in the Indigenous population by 90 percent (Reynolds & Hammoud-Beckett, 2017).
The three chief reasons behind this included introduction of new diseases, acquisition of the land
by the settlers and direct as well as violent conflict with the colonizers. According to researchers,
the immediate consequences of colonization were epidemic diseases that included smallpox,
measles and influenza, which spread ahead of the frontier and annihilated many Indigenous