"History books, school curricula and legal texts all treat terra nullius as the defining doctrine in the foundation of Australia and the dispossession of the Aborigines. The High Court's Mabo decision was supposed to have overturned it. Michael Connor reveals terra nullius to be a mythical notion. It was never a phrase used in Australia in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. It was only injected into Australian political and legal debate in the 1970s. Since then it has meant whatever its users want it to mean. The foundation of Australia was based on entirely different concepts and terminology"--Publisher's website.