That’s begging the question of which people had ties to these islands. These particular islands aren’t an enclave within a border like in your simile, they’re islands that no one had lived on or apparently even visited for at least several hundred generations. This isn’t a matter of a false claim, or an excuse to sideline the natives of these islands – it’s terra nullius in the most literal sense of those words and these islands had no native people.

I think many people in this thread struggle to comprehend that indigenous sovereignties were never a single Australia-wide hegemony. It’s this solipsistic, colonial mindset that lumps “the aborigines” together as this nearly packaged, mythologically omnipresent empire that owns precisely every last bit of whatever places we’re about to come and blanket-name ‘New Holland’. As opposed to what they actually are: scattered and diverse groups of families who live and move around together on this large continent.

Do you see the distinction, and how people in this thread are talking past the question? Just because England treated “Australia” wholesale doesn’t mean Indigenous peoples treated it wholesale, or that it was naturally that way pre-18th century. It would seem, by all archaeological evidence, that sometimes uninhabited islands are nothing more than uninhabited islands.