"In 1981 a novel question was addressed by an Australian historian, more or less for the first time. Why had the British Crown denied - or failed to recognise - the Aboriginal people's sovereignty and rights in land? Alan Frost argued that this occurred because the British government acted in accordance with the international legal conventions of the mid-eighteenth century, or more especially a particular legal decorum called terra nullius, a Latin word meaning a land without a sovereign or a land belonging to no one."--