Dear Shadow Minister,

The High Court of Australia determined that Indigenous
Peoples should be treated equally before the law with
regard to their rights over land. The Court rejected
any position in law that would discriminate against
Indigenous Peoples by denying the existence rights that
has been enjoyed freely prior to colonisation and
continued to be exercised.

In this way, it has been said that the myth of Terra
Nullius, which asserted that the land belonged to no-one,
was rejected. The idea that no rights existed in land
except those granted by the "Crown" or the sovereign
governments, was also re-assessed. It was an important
aspect of the decision to recognise that native title
predates the assertion of sovereignty by the British.

This makes native title unique in the sense when compared
with other interest in law. It is inherent to
Indigenous Peoples by virtue of their status as First
Peoples and the First owners of this land. And this was
a decision decided by the High Court.

Foxy,

You are confusing native title with Terra Nullius. TN does not assume that the land is owned by no one, it only assumes that there is no discernable government to request permission to settle.

Hi Rache,

Where to start ?

No, 'terra nullius' does NOT imply 'empty land'. Get it through your head that it means 'land over which there does not see4m to be a meaningful system of land ownership'. Land-use, yes, just as hunting and gathering peoples elsewhere, and pastoral people too, did not lay claim to 'own' any specific areas of land, but most certainly had customary rights to USE the land.

If you are suggesting that people who forage are no more entitled to ownership of the land on which they forage than animals who might roam about, then that is you problem. I think it's grossly offensive to suggest such a comparison.

Aboriginal people were counted - at least here in South Australia - from Day One, as soon as they were given rations. They were counted every month, at every ration station. And incidentally, as soon as a ration system was initiated in an area, that seemed to be the end of, or at least a hiatus in, systematic hunting and gathering - why spend all day gathering grass seed to grind down when you could just use flour ? So some areas were (temporarily in people's minds, surely) abandoned while people could camp near a ration station.

In SA, Aboriginal people in contact with ration depots were counted as a State-wide population. The men could vote as soon as all men could vote, in about 1856. The women could vote as soon as ALL South Australian women got the vote, in 1894. However, enumeration and those voting rights were not extended to the federal level after Federation, due to deals made between States, principally objections by NSW and Victoria to WA and Queensland counting estimates of 'out-of-contact' Aboriginal populations in calculating the number of parliamentary seats for each State.

[TBC]

[continued]

Rache,

As you suggest, ".... Aboriginal society had no hierarchy and no single representative who could sign a treaty on behalf of all their Nations.... ". Doesn't that suggest, in other words, that Aboriginal groups - since they didn't need to, for sixty thousand years - didn't have what could remotely be recognised as 'governments' ? Little groups of elders deciding who might have killed someone, yes, courts, maybe, but governments ?

Or what is termed in Latin, 'res nullius' - 'a political entity without a government' ? Did Aboriginal groups have governments ?

And of course, one of the primary duties of any government is to validate and safeguard the land ownership of the group.

Joe

Shadow Minister, do you not find it a little degrading that the Europeans decided which lands were ripe for invading simply because the inhabitants did not 'govern' like they did?
Not all historical facts are morally or ethically correct...

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