Somebody's Land: Welcome to Our Country

By Adam Goodes and Ellie Laing
Illustrated by David Hardy

For thousands and thousands of years,

Aboriginal people lived in the land we call Australia.

The land was where people

built their homes,

played in the sun,

and sat together to tell stories.

When the white people came,

they called the land

Terra Nullius.

They said it was nobody's land.

But it was somebody's land.

Somebody's Land is an invitation to connect with First Nations culture, to acknowledge the hurt of the past, and to join together as one community with a precious shared history as old as time.

Adam Goodes and Ellie Laing's powerful words and David Hardy's pictures, full of life, invite children and their families to imagine themselves into Australia's past - to feel the richness of our First Nations' history, to acknowledge that our country was never terra nullius, and to understand what 'welcome to our country' really means.