//How do you know it's not an engineer?//

It doesn't have a slide rule.

Hi mhaze,

Across most of Australia, and perhaps a major portion of the total Aboriginal population, societies were patriarchal: the land was the possession of the men; such societies were virilocal, women came to live in the men's country, as sort of non-citizens for life; their role was to produce the next generation of men as 'owners' and of girls to trade.

In the early documentation here in SA, once the ration system was set up in early 1837, pretty much the entire Indigenous population of the region settled at the Native Location. Roughly every year in the early days, at least one Aboriginal bloke would beat his wife to death. But the courts went pretty light on them, observing that it was, after all, part of their culture. Seriously.

Paul,

'Terra nullius' has never meant 'uninhabited country': no explorer was that stupid as not to see people all over the place. Cook writes about never being out of sight of the smoke from campfires.

The term refers to the concept of country over which there is no system of land ownership, proprietorship, or possession. Occupation yes, and once the British got their act together in the 1840s, they recognised the right of Aboriginal people to 'occupy or enjoy' and use their lands as they always had done, and that was written into all pastoral lease documents:

" .... reserving to aboriginal inhabitants of the said State and their descendants during the continuance of this lease full and free right of egress and regress into upon and over the said lands and every part thereof and in and to the springs and surface waters therein and to make and erect and to take and use for food, birds and animals ferae naturae in such manner as they would have been entitled to if this lease had not been made."

[TBC]

Mr Opinion, I thought that was clear, but here it is again.

"A treaty recognising Aboriginal sovereignty of the land and at the same time seeding governance of that land to the Commonwealth is a necessity." You may have a different opinion.

mhaze English will be fine, the Maori signed a treaty in English, some did sign a Maori version but it was a little different to the English version, so we don't want confusion, do we. If the British monarch is to old and feeble to attend the signing, then she can send Charlie.

Hasbeen, "Just ignore it" well, that has been the attitude of the gubba for 228 years.

Is Mise; The big chief in Washington was giving out welfare in the form of corn and blankets to Native Americans at the same time as he was making treaties with them to steal their land. "Under our laws" what laws are those? So again we have a precedent to cover your concerns.

[continued]

Clearly, British law did not recognise that Indigenous people farmed, or cultivated, or planted anything on, the land, and therefore had a concept of land tenure above foraging on it - which the British eventually recognised formally, and Australian law still does, at least in SA.

In those days as well, the British did not recognise that Aboriginal groups had systems of government - the country was therefore 'res nullius' - without government.

Given the tens of thousands of clans, land-using groups, 'nations', across pre-1788 Australia, in which one could say that traditional 'ownership' resided, and given that most Aboriginal people now really couldn't name their clan or clans or the land that it/they foraged on traditionally, there might be some problems with either recognising 'nations', or getting signatures on a treaty, or recognising sovereignty, whatever it might mean, in 2016.

Joe

The English had a treaty with the American Indians which did not allow European settlement west of the Allegheny Mountains. When the United States became independent from England the new country no longer recognised the treatment so citizens of the new nation poured into Indian territory. In general the American Indians supported England during the Revolutionary War because they knew what would probably happen if the USA became independent.

The US later made many treaties with the Indians but broke them all. Where there is a disparity of power the more powerful party to a treaty can easily break it as there is no compulsion to keep to its provisions. Such treaties are meaningless as I suspect would be a treaty between the Australian government and the Australian Aborigines.

The American Revolution was also bad for blacks as England abolished slavery in 1833, but it took a horrendous Civil War to do it in the United States.

Hi David,

I would hope we would be a little more enlightened these days and not simply enter a treaty to then muscle the indigenous out of it.

Hi Joe,

If you do not recognise British authority as valid in the first place then this; " once the British got their act together in the 1840s, they recognised the right of Aboriginal people to 'occupy or enjoy' and use their lands as they always had done, and that was written into all pastoral lease documents:", is invalid and the pastoral lease documents are not worth a cracker. Very magnanimous of the British to do that.

You could apply the same logic to Germany's occupation of France during WWII. The French should not have resisted, and simply obeyed German law. Like the British, Germany was the governing power.