Interesting post Barb. As for the rest of you, to say that it simply doesn't matter is flaunting ignorance. Of course, there are many more important aspects of aboriginal dispossession than getting to the bottom of the legal truth of the matter. But legal questions were and are an important part of the reality of dispossession and remain important to arriving at some form of justice. One of the elements most lacking from the problem of land rights in this country is intelligent discussion and these posts just confirm that sorry fact.

Dr Andrew Fitzmaurice deserves credit for being one of the few academics willing to confront their credibility crisis. Unfortunately he is also willing to resort to the sort of methodology that caused the crisis in the first place. His accusation that Connor fabricates when he discusses territorium nullius as a forerunner of terra nullius is preposterous. There is no parallel between Connor’s discussion and Reynolds’ “word substitution” of terra nullius for res nullius - the former is an open account of what happened; the latter is a hidden fabrication of what didn’t happen. The British colonists did not proclaim a doctrine of terra nullius. We were conned. For 20 years.

Connor's thesis didn't gain any particular advantage from his discussion of territorium nullius, it wasn’t needed to “support a particular interpretation of Aboriginal dispossession”. Connor’s case would have lost none of its force if he had omitted reference to territorium nullius. But if he had done that, Fitzmaurice would have had a real charge of “tailoring the evidence to fit the argument”, rather than a trumped-up one. Fitzmaurice’s charge, in effect, criticizes Connor for being too thorough.

Fitzmaurice’s claim that “territorium nullius describes an absence of sovereignty whereas terra nullius describes an absence of property” is nonsense. Over the last few decades terra nullius has been used to describe “an absence of sovereignty” and an “absence of property” and an absence of inhabitants and various combinations and permutations of these definitions that are switched around all the time, so as to perform magical feats of argumentation.

If “any account of the justification of dispossession is not going to look dramatically different” without terra nullius, then no one need fear a re-examination of colonization without that “idiotic” doctrine that never existed. So I trust Fitzmaurice will be working on his colleagues to bring it on.

http://www.macleaypress.com/Washout.htm?id=SKU004

I am each way on this one. I do agree with the first few points BD makes. However I do find it strange how such a religious man believes that all men have in them an inherent capacity for genocide which they would exercise if given the chance...

Winschuttle and his cohorts (our prime minister being one) have played this card, attacking Reynolds in particular for years. Any rational viewing of their attacks can discern two common themes: One, they are politically motivated; and two, they lack scholastic credibility when one views their claims in any logical fashion. It is an exchange not disimilar to the Deshowitz/Finklestein (and many others mind you) exchange regarding the Jewish lobby in the US and the Palestinian Israeli conflict.

That said, I agree the article has merit, but it does seem a tad nit-picky to be appearing in mainstream media. Seems funny that the Australian will publish anything portraying Indigenous Australians in a negative light, and stuff like this, but nothing ever that notes achievements that have been made.