LAND AHOY! Captains log: 18 January 1788 With great joy we reached Australia today, we have been at sea for far too long. We have named the landing site Botany Bay. The harbour however was not as good as Joseph Banks and James Matra (James Matra is an American who visited Botany Bay with Banks in 1770 who was in favour of starting a colony here) had described it. We found the bay to be shallow and unprotected which made anchoring the ship difficult. We also found the surrounding soil to be poor and fresh water was hard to find. In the name of the crown and England I declared this land terra nullius and now under British sovereignty.
Terra Nullius
Terra nullius is a Latin expression meaning "empty land" or “land belonging to no person”.
The term terra nullius is a legal concept used to refer to lands not associated with a specific sovereign or government that allowed European countries to take ownership of land that was unclaimed (at least by each other).
England used this law to gain possession of the Australian continent.
However, Australia was not really empty because there were native people present, the Australian Aborigines.
The English authorities of the 18th century would have understood terra nullius as an absence of a civilised society rather than ‘empty land’. For example, English law allowed for the legal settlement of "uninhabited or barbarous country". Australia was clearly not empty land, because Aboriginal groups would have been widely seen. Through European eyes, the nomadic life of the Aboriginals was evidence of a barbarous country, so they had no legal issue to stop them claiming Australia as their own.