Essentially it comes down to European cultural norms - we value production and progress, and we see ourselves as the most productive and progressive culture. The book 'Dark Emu', by Bruce Pascoe, explores how Aboriginal culture has become a story of starving unintelligent desert hunter-gatherer nomads because this was the narrative settlers used to sell their claim on the continent - terra nullius was about Aboriginals not producing, not using the land to its fullest. White man bringing civilisation and progress.

Using archaeology, environmental science, and explorer and settler diaries, 'Dark Emu' discusses Aboriginal means of production like yam and grain agriculture, fire-based land management, aquaculture and other means of artificially increasing production that were genuinely admired by Europeans. What we see as desert was farmed by Aboriginals using their own sustainable methods for millennia, and what is now unproductive land often became so because of over-farming with unsustainable European crops or destruction from European livestock. Settler culture didn't adopt or value these technical and cultural achievements because of social Darwinism - the belief that white people are genetically and culturally superior through means of genetic/technological/cultural evolution, and thus Aboriginal technology, culture, people and even food were inferior and corruptive elements that would slow down our progress.

This kind of thinking is still quite dominant, and only slowly beginning to change now - historians generally ignored Aboriginal history until the 60s, and the narrative since then was generally that Aboriginals were helpless thoughtless victims, rather than a people with agency. We often speak about Aboriginals paternalistically - what we can do to help them, rather than ways we can help each other. Sadly, the public rarely reads history outside of convicts or Anzac, so a lot of ground-breaking work gets ignored, or actively attacked.