Rights or Resources? The Australian Mining Industry Council's Campaign against Aboriginal Land Rights and the (Dis)Illusion of Equality, 1975–1983

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term coalition comes from the Latin coalescere or ‘coalesce’, meaning “come or bring together to form one mass or whole”. Coalesce refers to the unity affirmed as something grows: co – “together”, alesce – “to grow up”. While coalition is commonly associated with formalised alliances and political strategy in the name of self-interest and common goals, this paper will draw as well on the broader etymological understanding of coalition as “growing together” in order to discuss the Australian government’s recent changes to land rights legislation, the 2007 Emergency Intervention into the Northern Territory, and its decision to use Indigenous land in the Northern Territory as a dumping ground for nuclear waste.

The origin of the events during the summer of 1990 in a little-known area of Quebec lies deep within the history of Canada. Resistance to government's handling of land claims is not new, but the extreme and violent form of the response at Oka heralded a new approach by First Nations to the resolution of Aboriginal land and treaty rights in Canada. Circles of Time documents the experiences of Aboriginal people, their history and recent negotiations in Ontario, and provides insight into the historiography of the treaty-making process, particularly in the last quarter-century. Controversial decisions such as the Temagami case and Oka are detailed, and McNab, who draws on archival sources that support oral history, provides a new perspective on land claims issues. Such compelling background information will be invaluable to anyone endeavoring to understand the origin and the current controversies surrounding Aboriginal land and treaty rights, and will clarify the reasons for resistance. Above all, this book will remind us we must never forget that this history belongs to Aboriginal people. Turtle Island is their place, and their oral history can no longer be ignored.

Aboriginals – Land Rights – Administrative Law – Inquiry by Aboriginal Land Commissioner – Party not disclosing information to inquiry – Ex parte representations to Minister by party detrimentally affected – Failure to take into account relevant considerations – Obligation of Minister to have regard to exparte representation – Constructive knowledge of Minister of matters within his departmenrs knowledge – Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 (C’th) ss 11, 50Administrative Decisions (Judicial Review) Act 1977 (C’th) s 5(2)(b).

A commitment in applied anthropological policy work to maximising cultural appropriateness or even to supporting what indigenous people say they want is not always possible. This proved to be the case in connection with formulating recommendations for land rights legislation in Australia's Northern Territory. Until 1992 the only rights in land that Aboriginal people had as the original occupiers of the continent were statutory (that is, through acts of state and federal parliaments). No treaties were signed with Aboriginal people and until that date the continent was treated as terra nullius, unowned, at the time of colonisation in 1788. From early on in the history of European colonisation, however, areas of land had been set aside for the use and benefit of Aboriginal people. These reserves were held by the government, or by one of a number of religious bodies that ministered to Aboriginal people, usually supported by government funding. Beginning with South Australia in 1966 all of the states, except Tasmania, have passed legislation that gives varying degrees of control of these reserves to land trusts governed by Aboriginal people. Each of these pieces of legislation had/have different shortcomings which included some or all of the following: the total area that had been reserved was small; the powers granted over the land were limited; the majority of the Aboriginal population did not benefit from the legislation; and none of them addressed the issue of self-determination. In 1973 a Royal Commission into Aboriginal Land Rights, with a single Commissioner, Mr. Justice Woodward, was established by the newly elected Federal Labor government, the first in 23 years. It was planned that it would deal with the continent but that it would begin by focusing on the Northern Territory which until 1978 was administered by the Federal government. At the time there were 25,300 Aboriginal people in the Territory making up 25% of the population.

An appreciation of Aboriginal land rights in New South Wales (NSW) is characterised by two dominant narratives. One is that land rights are central to achieving and advancing recognition and support for the existence and survival of Aboriginal peoples in the settled spaces of south‐eastern Australia. In this view, Aboriginal land rights realise intrinsic political power. The second dominant narrative is that the land estate restituted to Aboriginal people's Local Aboriginal Land Councils (LALCs) is to be “activated” and “leveraged” for economic prosperity of collectively defined groups and shared to support and sustain individuals and families. This perspective holds that land enables realisation of wealth and prosperity. Although these narratives are based in truth, they have served to make some important work and values held by Aboriginal people less visible in any evaluation of the benefits of land rights. It is this less visible work, the work of care that is unique to Aboriginal worlds and made possible by the resources and structures of LALCs realised through the Aboriginal Land Rights Act, 1983, that is the focus of this paper.

 OHQ vol. 115, no. 4 REVIEWS BUYING AMERICA FROM THE INDIANS: JOHNSON V. MCINTOSH AND THE HISTORY OF NATIVE LAND RIGHTS by Blake A. Watson University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2012. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, index. 456 pages. $45.00 cloth. This volume provides a detailed description and analysis of events leading to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1823 decision in the case of Johnson v. McIntosh and the momentous impact of that ruling on Native American land rights. The case evolved from separate purchases of large tracts of tribal lands in Illinois and Indiana, from the Illinois and Piankeshaw Indians in 1773 and 1775, by land speculation syndicates comprised of prominent Pennsylvania and Maryland investors. The long-standing issue addressed in the 1823 decision was whether tribes owned the lands they occupied and had the right to convey those lands to any party,including private land speculators, or if such proprietary rights were vested exclusively in governments. Additionally , if only the latter case was applicable, the courts had to determine which governmental entity held or assumed that authority: the British Crown, the separate colonies or states, or the United States. Although there were few legal precedents that favored the Johnson plaintiff’s position — argued by the eminent jurists Robert Goodloe Harper and Daniel Webster — that tribes owned and had the right to convey the lands they occupied, many prominent Americans championed that view. Those included, but were not limited to, Roger Williams regarding his purchase of tribal lands in Rhode Island, settlers of Newark, New Jersey, eminent lawyer Patrick Henry of Virginia, and Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Wharton, and Henry Knox of Pennsylvania. In the opinion authored by Chief Justice John Marshall, the Court ruled in the Johnson decision that Native tribes had no natural right to own or convey title to lands they occupied. Rather, Marshall held that under the Doctrine of Discovery,title was conferred to the government (in this case the United States) that was successor to the nation that discovered the land. Yet, his opinion recognized that title by discovery was not absolute because tribes held a legal claim to possession of their lands, but it gave to the United States a preemptive right above all other parties to purchase tribal land. The impact of the Johnson decision has been far-reaching and enduring as precedent into the present century. Despite rhetoric in recent decades about the equalitarian existence of a “government-to-government relationship” between federally recognized tribes and the United States, the Court’s denial of proprietary title rights has severely limited tribal sovereignty and drastically diminished the political status and governmental authority that tribes, as independent nations, held prior to “discovery.” Author Blake A. Watson first became interested in the Johnson case while serving as an attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice. The decision later became the initial focus of his property classes in his current position as a law professor at the University of Dayton. His monograph presents a complex challenge to readers, because he has chosen to place consideration of the issues involved in a broader and richer context of political, economic, and social history of early America. Although the focus on so many events and personalities is at times both fascinating and confusing,Watson’s thoroughly researched work is extremely well  Reviews written.Most chapters include a summary that helps readers reestablish the overall context. Both the subject matter and the complexity of the narrative, however, appear to limit the audience and utility of Buying America to practitioners of federal Indian law, students in law or graduate school courses, and, perhaps, a very select group of lay readers. Watson devotes his concluding chapters to the enduring legacy of the Johnson decision in international law and its reinforcement of the Doctrine of Discovery. The author also makes clear that he is a critical advocate for repudiation of both the decision and the doctrine. What he does not make clear or explore are the effects and possible unintended consequences that such repudiation would have on long-standing Constitutional interpretations, such as under the Commerce Clause, and federal statutes, such as the NonIntercourse Acts,which established Congress’s plenary and preemptive...

Introduction There is substantial evidence that although there are a variety of responses to the disruption of indigenous economic systems, the imposition of a dominant form of economic and cultural behavior frequently is opposed (Ellana et al. 1988). Rather, the most usual response to such an imposition is to be found in the integration of market-based and subsistence-based behaviors and a consequent adaptation of associated social and institutional systems. It is important to note that subsistence-based economic systems generally have experienced the most difficulty integrating and becoming involved in the production side of goods and services within a market-oriented economy. On the other hand, individual members of such a subsistence-based economy have demonstrated a desire to become active consumers of the wider range of goods and services made available by market-based economic systems. Involvement in organizations concerned with the production of goods and services is likely to be of most interest to indigenous Australians, where the underlying methods of production have remained similar between production for subsistence and production for market exchange or cash (Ellana et al. 1988). For example, indigenous peoples within remote communities have been closely associated historically with pastoral enterprises. This paper presents the results of an investigation into opportunities and constraints to a small pastoral enterprise and cattle holding facility by the Warai, an indigenous clan in Northern Australia attempting to start up an economic enterprise on land granted to them, as traditional owners under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976. Background to Establishment of the Warai Pastoral Enterprise The Finniss River Land Trust Area granted to the indigenous traditional owners, the Maranunngu, Kungarakany, and the Warai under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976, and its relative geographical location can be seen in Figure 1. The Finniss River Land Trust Area has been divided into areas one, two, three, four, and five. Areas one and two have been granted to the Maranunggu. Areas three, four, and five have been granted to the Warai and Kungarakany clans. The Warai pastoral enterprise is located on approximately 20 square kilometers in area five, 100 kilometers south of Darwin. This research presents the results of information collected using a structured questionnaire based on the recommendations of Dodd (1993) and Stafford-Smith et al. (1994). The information collected enables a critical evaluation of the economic research and assessment processes followed in establishing the first Warai economic enterprise. As a result of information collected in this study, a number of proposals may be advanced in relation to future directions for improving the commercial potential of indigenous business enterprises. The Warai pastoral enterprise is owned by the Warai association, which is in turn managed by the traditional owners of the land. The Warai clan is estimated to consist of approximately 70 people aged 18 years and over and a further 50 aged less than 18 years of age (Dixon 1998). While the main priority for the Warai was to establish on their own country, the second and fairly immediate priority was to establish an economic base. The Warai initially thought that they would raise cattle on areas of land granted to them within the Finniss River Land Trust area. Figure 2 shows the numbers of live cattle exports from Darwin by destination over the period from 1993-98. The diagram shows a rapid growth in live-cattle numbers exported through Darwin before the onset of the Asian financial crisis in late 1997. Indonesia had been the most important export destination since 1996, when 59 percent of live-cattle exports shipped through the Port of Darwin were destined for that country. The Asian crisis resulted in a sharp decrease to nine percent in 1998. …

One of the most durable consequences of the development of plantation farming in the tropics was the establishment of varied systems of native land rights which allowed administering authorities, whether colonial or otherwise, to demarcate, alienate and sell land to investors. Without the codification of land rights, land could not have been bought, sold and leased as a commodity and security of tenure for the overseas investor would have been uncertain. The development of such land rights in British North Borneo, now known as Sabah, between 1880 and 1930 is the subject of this paper. It is argued that the elaboration of a Land Code which classified land with native title, state land, and land leased to investors was closely linked with the development of plantation farming for tobacco and rubber. The paper seeks to examine the economic, legal and social context within which native land rights were formulated. IN MANY PARTS of late nineteenth-century South East Asia, the growing demand for commodities such as tobacco, timber, plantation rubber, oil and tin, was a major stimulus to greater foreign, especially European investment, in the production process. As many of the economies of the region experienced the effects of an expanding resource frontier, they became increasingly peripheralized within the global commodity market (Wallerstein, 1989) with the emergence of enclave sectors producing largely unprocessed products for export. The expansion of plantation systems of farming represents one example of such peripheralization. Whilst the structure and development of plantation farming shows considerable variation by both place and product, its effects on indigenous societies and their farming systems were often remarkably similar in the Tropics. The relationship between indigenous and plantation farming systems is of both historical and contemporary interest,

Discussing approaches to the aboriginal land rights in contemporary Russia, I shall focus on the arguments that have been presented in favor of three major policy options. These options are often labelled as "pro-aboriginal," "anti-aboriginal" and a "compromise" position. Ethnologists who have been deeply involved in the attempts to define legally aboriginal land rights ever since 1991 have themselves been split into the same three interest groups. Thus the controversies over aboriginal land rights and of the so called "traditional economy" (i.e., hunting, fishing, food gathering and reindeer herding in the taiga and tundra) provide excellent illustrations of developments in applied ethnology in post-Soviet Russia.

In Australia, land rights legislation provides statutory schemes for the transfer of land to Indigenous peoples. The first significant land rights legislation was passed by the Australian Commonwealth government in 1976. This was the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act (ALRA) 1976 (Cth). In 2006, the Australian Commonwealth government passed significant amendments to the ALRA. One of the key amendments introduced the leasing of Aboriginal ‘township lands’ held under that Act. It is these leasing amendments which are a focus of this article. A primary motivation behind the amendments was to decrease poverty in Indigenous communities and to allow for economic development on Aboriginal lands. This article critiques the township leasing scheme under the amended Act. It questions whether the new leasing arrangements are the most appropriate forms of leasing to achieve economic development on Aboriginal lands and to benefit the Aboriginal communities who hold these lands. In 2008, leasing amendments were passed to Queensland's statutory land scheme in the Aboriginal Land Act 1991 (Qld) and these amendments are subject to review in this article. Furthermore, the article examines alternative forms of leasing used for economic development on Indigenous reserve lands in Canada and whether there are lessons that Australia could learn from these tenures and their modes of leasing.

The nature of the State and the tendencies of accumulation and legitimation are crucial to understanding the official response to the Aboriginal Land Rights demand. Land Rights has been made negotiable and the struggle for Land Rights now runs through the material relations of the State. A political struggle exists around the discourse which contains arguments for and against Land Rights. This is represented principally between the Federal Government ranged against Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory and takes the form of a struggle over the content of what is to be signified as racist. This discourse breaks down and exposes the the class nature of the State when it is confronted with a threat to the reproduction of major accumulation conditions. This creates legitimacy problems. The Noonkanbah dispute in Western Australia in 1980 and the present moves to de-gazette Queensland's Aboriginal Reserves are two examples of this.

I shall begin with a riddle, in fact three riddles:1What sort of interest in land is held as an estate in fee simple but is inalienable?2What sort of interest in land is held by a registered proprietor who has no power to make decisions relating to it, except with the consent of another, and who must act at the direction of that other?3What sort of interest in land does not carry with it ownership of minerals but can preclude mining thereon?The answer to each of these questions is — Aboriginal land under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 (Cth) (“the Land Rights Act”).The purpose of this paper is not to trace the course of judicial history in this country, from the robust assertion of the Privy Council that the colony of New South Wales “consisted of a tract of territory practically unoccupied, without settled inhabitants or settled law, at the time when it was peacefully annexed to the British dominions” to the judgment of Blackburn J in Milirrpum v Nabalco Ply Ltd.

In this thesis I consider the influence of the Gove land rights case on Australian culture and political discourse between 1968 and 1972. For much of the twentieth century Australian governments did not recognise indigenous polities or rights. But in the early 1970s this changed. In this thesis I argue that the Gove land rights case played a critical role in this development and seek to explain why and how this occurred. Most importantly, I suggest that the ideas articulated by lawyers and anthropologists throughout this case not only constructed a certain notion of Aboriginal difference but that this eventually changed the way that the federal Liberal-Country Party government, led by Prime Minister William McMahon, thought about its Aboriginal policy, and that this prompted it to formulate an Aboriginal land rights policy. In doing so I draw into question the account of historians who have argued that this government's support for an assimilation policy led it to reject the notion of land rights for Aboriginal groups. I suggest that these historians have failed to grasp the impact of the Gove land rights case and have overlooked the novelty of the conservative federal government's response to this. I also assess the influence that a redemptive legal narrative about 'native title' had upon the Australian press, the public and political leaders after the highly publicised defeat of the Yolngu people's case in the Northern Territory Supreme Court. I argue that this made it difficult for the McMahon government to articulate the reservations it had about a land rights scheme and to propose an alternative approach to Aboriginal policy. Finally, I suggest that the redemptive native title narrative and the related ideas about the nature of Aborigines that were initially articulated by the lawyers for the Yolngu plaintiffs in the Gove case still constrain settler Australian conversations about Aborigines and Aboriginal policy.

The term ‘Blue Carbon’ (BC) recognises the ability of mangroves, saltmarshes, and seagrasses to capture and store carbon in their soils and biomass. Given their anoxic sediment, BC ecosystems can sequester up to as much as four times more carbon per hectare, and store it 30–50 times faster, than terrestrial forests. Australia has some of the world’s largest BC storage capacity, with 5–11% of global BC soil stocks and 2–7% of annual BC sequestration, based on available global estimate. Evidence indicates that mangrove and saltmarsh degradation from cyclone damage, feral damage and disease, is occurring throughout the Northern Territory (NT). This is a growing issue with feral animal populations degrading Indigenous lands and areas of conservation significance. This cumulative pressure on BC habitat means that northern Australia is uniquely positioned to expand BC methods to also account for protection and restoration of degraded coastal habitats including freshwater wetlands that have been damaged by non-native feral animals. Researchers from Charles Darwin University (CDU), University of Queensland (UQ), and the Northern Australian Indigenous Land and Sea Management Alliance Ltd (NAILSMA) recently worked to explore the opportunity and potential for economically viable BC methods in the NT. The study had a particular focus on Aboriginal Land gazetted under the Aboriginal Land Rights (NT) Act (1976) (Cth). We present the research outcomes and identify the pathway to focused research on BC stores and tailored methods for generating Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs) and potentially biodiversity credits, in the NT.

States as International persons — Composite and dependent States and territories — Mandated and trust territories — Rights and duties of the administering authority — Rights conferred on persons by a mandate — Whether enforceable In the municipal courts — Acquisition of control of the mandated territory — Whether an act of State — Territory of New Guinea — Mandate to Commonwealth of Australia — Whether any legal or equitable duties imposed on the administering authority as a matter of law — Power of the administering authority to Introduce a system of land title by registration — Whether any duty on the administering authority to protect native land rights — Whether native land rights inalienable — The law of Papua and New Guinea