# The construction of the white nation: colonialism in Australia  
Throughout Australia's post-invasion history, race has been the cornerstone of colonial and immigration policies, which have been implemented to shape the construction of the nation as, initially, a mirror image of Britain and, subsequently, as a 'multicultural' country controlled by a white dominant group. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, in her book White Possessive (2015, p. 7), states:  
Belonging to this new nation, therefore, was racialized and inextricably tied to the accumulation of capital and the social worth, authority, and ownership that this conferred. The Indigenous were excluded from this condition of belonging. [...] The white body was the norm and measure for identifying who could belong.  
Ghassan Hage (1998) argued that Australia holds onto a white nation fantasy, a set of assumptions about the nation and who belongs and who does not. Whiteness constructs Aboriginal people and certain migrant groups as non-Australians. Underpinning the formation of the Australian nation were the same theories of race and their concomitant ideologies that constructed European and American white men as subjects, their 'superiority' defined against the black Other (Wright, 2004). As Wright (ibid., p. 1) asserts, 'Blackness only became a racial category with the forced removal of West Africans to the Western Hemisphere'. Silvio Torres-Saillant (2009, p. 10), describing the reach of European colonialism, points out that the Christian West construed 'the peoples of Africa, Asia, America and Oceania as civilizational others with respect to the inhabitants of Europe'.  
In Australia, Aboriginal people were constructed as 'Other' by the British colonizers and labelled 'black'. Terra nullius, a Latin term that literally translates as 'land belonging to no one', was first applied to Australia with the arrival of the British in 1788. The doctrine was used to displace the traditional owners of