Mabo: Landmark and paradox

Abstract

MaboLandmark and paradox Rhonda Evans Geoff Rodoreda and Eva Bischoff, eds. Mabo's Cultural Legacy. Melbourne: Anthem Press, 2021. 210 pp. A$125. ISBN: 9781785274294 "Mabo." The word conveys multiple meanings. It identifies a man, Eddie Koiki Mabo; it is shorthand for the High Court decision, Mabo and Others v Queensland (No 2) (1992) 175 CLR 1, that rejected the legal doctrine of terra nullius upon which Australia was colonized; and it marks a torturous turning point in relations between Australia's Indigenous peoples and its settler society. This edited volume by Geoff Rodoreda and Eva Bischoff collects papers presented at a 2017 workshop held in Stuttgart, Germany, that considered the complex cultural legacies of Mabo the man, Mabo the judicial decision, and Mabo the catalyst for change. It addresses profound questions about sovereignty as that concept applies to Indigenous land rights, Indigenous storytelling, and the authoritative definition of Indigenous identity. Because I come to the book as a lawyer and political scientist, my engagement with these subjects has been primarily from those disciplinary perspectives. I found the volume an insightful and accessible account of Mabo's cultural impact and implications. The introductory and closing chapters are especially strong. The volume's editors, Rodoreda and Bischoff, cogently yet concisely articulate the book's recurring themes. Mabo, they explain, embodies a cruel paradox. While the decision jettisons terra nullius from Australia's law books and recognizes Native Title, it simultaneously denies Indigenous sovereignty and sanctifies the dispossession of Indigenous land rights (2). Mabo's cultural significance, Rodoreda and Bischoff contend, derives from its "focus on territory, its specific intervention in historical narrative and its being spoken as law" (3). Because the authors refrain from rehearsing the content of the chapters that follow, Rodoreda and Bischoff's introduction works well as a stand-alone piece. The remainder of the volume is divided into five main sections, focusing on history, politics, film, literature, and memoir. A pair of historical chapters provide greater context for both Mabo the man and Mabo the judicial decision. Focusing on the Australian state of Victoria, Russell and Standfield recount decades-long efforts by Aboriginal activists for land and political rights, including freedom from the oppressive laws that from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1930s purported to "protect" them. Their contribution positions Mabo the man and Mabo the decision within the longer and broader struggles of Australia's Indigenous peoples. [End Page 291] Turnbull, by contrast, offers a more personal account of Eddie and Bonita Mabo's work in the Townsville community, especially with respect to providing educational opportunities for Indigenous peoples. His attention to Bonita's role corrects a general tendency to overlook her own considerable contributions. Turnbull's chapter also offers an interesting, firsthand perspective on the vibrant intellectual life of James Cook University in the 1980s, populated by the likes of Professor Henry Reynolds and Oodgeroo Noonuccal. This was the milieu in which Eddie Mabo formulated his own ideas about the world and his place in it. The legislative regime created to determine Native Title claims constitutes a key legacy of the Mabo decision. Two chapters examine the politics and practice of central elements of that regime. From anthropological and linguistic perspectives, respectively, Wergin and Ringel illustrate the important ways in which the regime's legal rules interact with Indigenous identities, shape those identities as well as the accompanying claims to land, and engender conflict among Indigenous peoples. Together, the chapters showcase the continuing centrality of the Australian state's sovereign role in defining and determining rights to land. They also illustrate the ways in which the regime empowers and privileges anthropologists and linguists in the Native Title process. A trio of chapters address issues concerning Mabo and film. Collectively, they highlight the importance of Indigenous peoples obtaining the requisite resources to tell their stories from their perspectives, or in other words, to exercise storytelling sovereignty. Chapters by Moreton and Davis and Kilroy do an excellent job of describing the development of both institutional capacity and film-production practices at Screen Australia and within the private sector that facilitate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander storytelling for both television and film. These developments, Moreton and...