What many of the Aboriginals did not understand, was that the White men believed that the land was terra nullius and they were here to claim it.
The first European explorers were the front men in what could be called Australia's first warfare-like conflict. The explorers were sent in to survey the land, to see what was there, and to see what they wanted to claim. Prior to World War One, Australia had not yet had the opportunity to glorify its country's war heroes. Instead, the explorers were seen as a type of intelligence corp., giving up their lives to the service of discovery. The obstacles that the Australian wilderness presented, in reality, probably wouldn't have been so romanticized had the European explorers position in society been so important. They were the leaders of their groups, the pioneers of the time. They worked to gather information, and to utilize it. Once they came across land, whether inhabited by natives or not, it was the explorers who decided how they were to going to take the land that seemed just to good to waste.
The aim of many of the white explorers was to discover new land and resources for white settlers to cultivate and prosper. A combination of eagerness and ignorance led many of these men into a bush land, which they had no idea how to deal with or survive. Reynolds states that "the explorers were engaged in warfare against the hostility of the wilderness .a battle fought and won over great natural difficulties and obstacles". Their problem lay in the fact that, more often than not, they failed to adapt to the new conditions that the Australian land presented them with. Many of the explorers were not accustomed to the harsh scrub, and dry flat lands that they came across. They approached the land with traditional European ideologies, which probably seemed quite logical, but proved to be totally unsuitable to their new country of Australia. Many of these men facing the war of the wilderness, therefore enlisted the help of the Aboriginals to help them to achieve a successful mission.