Thesis Supervisor: Dr. Ghalya Saadawi

Thesis: Land in One’s Image: Techniques of dispossession in the development of the settler colony of Australia

July 2025

Abstract

How is process of settler colonisation determined by the land it occupies? This thesis attempts to answers this question through a close cross-reading of recent literature on the subject of settler colonisation and by focusing on the particular example of Australia. It analyses four techniques of dispossession that develop chronologically throughout its history, as informed by the broader ten-dencies of European settler colonisation more generally. These techniques illustrate the shifting dy-namics of law, logic and land in the ongoing process of invasion and occupation begun in the late eighteenth century.

This thesis proposes that land management and population management are one and the same with-in the internal logic of the settler colonial nation state and that from the interaction of these interests its fundamental nature is ascertained. What are presented as reforms are, rather, strategic adaptions that continue the processes of invasion and dispossession. Finally, this thesis argues that only through the abstraction and commodification of the land can the settler colonial regime both assert and confirm its sovereignty and achieve its ultimate goal of eliminating the Indigenous population and rendering the land in its own image.

Author: Sam Mountford