Abstract
Abstract The right of Australian Indigenous groups to own traditional lands has been a contentious issue in the recent history of Australia. Indeed, Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders did not consider themselves as full citizens in the country they had inhabited for millennia until the late 1960s, and then only after a long campaign and a national referendum (1967) in favour of changes to the Australian Constitution to remove restrictions on the services available to Indigenous Australians. The concept of terra nullius, misapplied to Australia, was strong in the popular imagination among the descendants of settlers or recent migrants and was not definitively put to rest until the Mabo decision (1992), which also established a firm precedent for the recognition of native title. This path to equality was fraught and made lengthy by the fact that the worldviews of the Indigenous Australians (i.e. Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders) and the European (mainly British and Irish) settlers were so different, at least at a superficial level, this being the level at which prejudice is typically manifested. One area where this fact is particularly evident is in the area of the conceptualisation of property and especially the notion of land “ownership” and “use”. In this paper, we will focus on these terms, examining the linguistic evidence of some of the Australian languages spoken traditionally by Indigenous Australians as one means (the only one in many cases) of gaining an insight into their worldview, comparing it with that underlying the English language. We will show that the conceptualisations manifested in the two languages are contrasting but not irreconcilable, and indeed the ability of both groups of speakers (or their descendants in the case of many endangered Australian languages) to reach agreement and come to develop an understanding of the other’s perspective is reason for celebration for all Australians.
Highlights
Background to the status of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in Australian LawThe status of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders1 in Australia presents a special case among ex-British settler colonies because elsewhere (e.g. New Zealand, Canada, South Africa before apartheid) the Indigenous2 peoples were typically granted more rights and greater legal recognition, even though, paradoxically, the area of lands reserved by various Australian state governments for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders was typically much larger than Indigenous peoples were given in other countries.3The harsher treatment which was meted out to Indigenous Australians can be traced to many different factors that combined to amplify tendencies found in other colonies in the nineteenth century, which is the period in which first intensive contact between Europeans and Indigenous Australians first occurred
Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders did not consider themselves as full citizens in the country they had inhabited for millennia until the late 1960s, and only after a long campaign and a national referendum (1967) in favour of changes to the Australian Constitution to remove restrictions on the services available to Indigenous Australians
The general pattern seen in the petitions examined in Christiansen (2011) is illustrative of the wider progression of relations between Indigenous and Westernised Australians, and in their growing understanding of and appreciation for each other
Summary
Background to the status of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in Australian Law. The first colonies in Australia, in particular New South Wales (still the biggest and richest state in the Commonwealth of Australia, and which originally comprised virtually the entire eastern half of Australia) were set up as penal colonies and contained very high concentrations of Europeans (mainly British and Irish) in specific areas This meant that contact with traditional fully functioning Aboriginal societies was rare. It was common practice for imperial and colonial authorities to set rules for the treatment of Indigenous peoples and, in accordance with established international practices, for the expansion of settlements by Europeans. Adopting this stance towards Indigenous peoples and refusing to treat them as completely human were convenient in that these allowed one to all but ignore them when it came to land rights, which is a topic we shall turn to
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