He was meticulous in seeking to record the original Aboriginal place names around the colony, for which reason the majority of place names to this day retain their Aboriginal titles. The Polish scientist/explorer Count Paul Edmund Strzelecki conducted surveying work in the Australian Alps in 1839 and became the first European to ascend Australia's highest peak, Tar-Gan-Gil on the Country of the Ngarigo people, and he named it Mount Kosciuszko in honour of the Polish patriot Tadeusz Kosciuszko. Aboriginal resistance and accommodation Aboriginal reactions to the arrival of British settlers were varied, but often hostile when the presence of the colonists led to competition over resources, and to the occupation of Aboriginal lands. European diseases decimated Aboriginal populations, and the occupation of land and degradation of food resources sometimes led to starvation. By contrast with New Zealand, no valid treaty was signed with any of Aboriginal peoples in Australia. Flood, however, points out that unlike New Zealand, Australia's Indigenous population was divided into hundreds of tribes and language groups, which did not have "chiefs" with whom treaties could be negotiated. Moreover, Aboriginal Australians had no concept of alienating their traditional land in return for political or economic benefits. According to the historian Geoffrey Blainey, in Australia during the colonial period:In a thousand isolated places there were occasional shootings and spearings. Even worse, smallpox, measles, influenza and other new diseases swept from one Aboriginal camp to another... The main conqueror of Aborigines was to be disease and its ally, demoralisation.Henry Reynolds points out that government officials and ordinary settlers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries frequently used words such as "invasion" and "warfare" to describe their presence and relations with Aboriginal Australians. Reynolds argues that armed resistance by Aboriginal people to white encroachments amounted to guerrilla warfare, beginning in the eighteenth century and continuing into the early twentieth. In the early years of colonisation, David Collins, the senior legal officer in the Sydney settlement, wrote of the local Aboriginal people:While they entertain the idea of our having dispossessed them of their residences, they must always consider us as enemies; and upon this principle they [have] made a point of attacking the white people whenever opportunity and safety concurred.In 1847, Western Australian barrister E.W. Landor stated: "We have seized upon the country, and shot down the inhabitants, until the survivors have found it expedient to submit to our rule. We have acted