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Dear rhross,

.

This is in response to your post of Saturday, 22 June 2019 4:21:42 PM

You wrote :

1. « Ah, the land ownership. Well, when earlier waves of people who came to be called Aborigines wandered in and slaughtered those they found, was that recognising legitimate ownership? Nope. You apply double standards. »

Yes, in their primitive culture, I think it probably was a sign of recognition of « legitimate ownership ». Otherwise, they would have simply « wandered in » without feeling the need to « slaughter » them, if that is, indeed, what they did in order to take their land.

No, I don't think I'm applying « double standards ». According to most historical accounts, the British colonisers did much the same whenever they met with any resistence from the local Aboriginal peoples whose traditional land they wished to take.

2. « And the idea that invasion and colonisation by those with pale skin is wrong and the same acts done by those with a bit more colour is right, is utterly racist »

Yes, I agree if your expression "the same acts" includes "by the same or similar methods".

.

Hi Banjo,

Welcome back, how was the beach ?

Yes, of course, from the earliest days,

* Aboriginal people, unbeknownst to them, were declared to be British subjects;

* the rights of Aboriginal people to use the land as they always had done, were recognised;

* . the NSW governor (including Victoria and Queensland) granted huge land grants across NSW, and recognised the fait accomplis of many squatters to illegal seizure of land. But from 1849-1859, the British (I think under Earl Grey ?) ordered that the above rights of Aboriginal people had to be formally recognised and incorporated into pastoral leases.

* pastoral leases were issued for the specific purpose of pasturing animals and not for cultivating the soil (except for a house-block of an acre). Pastoralists paid an up-front fee for any existing improvements, yards, fences, etc., and an annual fee per animal. Pastoral leases were/are renewable - in different colonies/States, from 30 to 42 years, and in Queensland and (I think) WA, perpetual leases were also granted, with similar conditions.

* when the federal government in Canberra took over responsibility for the Northern territory from South Australia in 1911, at first they issued pastoral leases which did not include the clause protecting Aboriginal rights to use the land; from 1924, they included that clause in all pastoral leases. The 'unprotected' leases (there were five or six) all expired before 1960. The Aborigines' Friends' Association here in SA wrote in 1934 to the Minister in charge asking about this omission, but was told that the clause had been inserted from 1924. The correspondence is on my web-site: www.firstsources.info , on the AFA Page, under 'A.F.A. Reports', item (c). Those use-rights are still written into law in SA.

Of course, while co-existing uses could work, it was probably made very difficult for Aboriginal people to do so. As well, ration systems drew (or inveigled) people away from their lands for decades.

Cheers,

Joe

Hi Joe,

I find your knowledge on this very interesting.

//the rights of Aboriginal people to use the land as they always had done, were recognised;//

How did that relate to sovereignty/ownership? Then there is //Of course, while co-existing uses could work, it was probably made very difficult for Aboriginal people to do so.//

This is interesting;

"John Macarthur convinced the British Government he could establish a fine wool industry in New South Wales. In October 1804 Lord Camden directed Governor King to grant John Macarthur 5,000 acres of land 'situated near Mount Taurus' in the Cowpastures, with the promise of a further 5,000 acres if the wool venture succeeded. Macarthur returned to Sydney in 1805 with orders for a grant of part of the best pasture land in the colony."

Were Aboriginal interests considered by the British Government when making such a grant? Me thinks not.

Hi paul,

This is the very issue: no, the rights to use land doesn't imply ownership, and has very little to do with sovereignty: land use and/or ownership are land tenure issues; sovereignty is a governance issue. Why do people keep confusing the two ?

The rights to use land, to harvest what the land produces, have been recognised in British common law forever. A family may have rights going back centuries to pick the peaches on a certain tree on the lord's land, as permanent payment for something an ancestor did for the lord. A person may have rights to fish in a certain stream going through a landowner's property.

Obviously, we all have rights to harvest, say, oysters or periwinkles or mussels from the sea-shore, or to fish for redfin or cod or perch in our rivers. These are 'commons' rights. Even in Australia, many towns may have areas of commons land where someone can parture the odd cow or sheep or goat or, in Bruce Pascoe's case, the odd cassowary.

But that doesn't amount to ownership. Whether traditional land-use by Aboriginal groups amounted to ownership is up to someone else, an experienced land lawyer, to work out, it's not for me to say. Books on land law don't mention land-use as a recognition of land ownership.

If you can, Paul, get hold of Hugh Kawharu's two books, one on Maori Land tenure, the other on the Treaty of Waitangi: I'm a bit thick, but there didn't seem to me to be much overlap between the two fields of study - land tenure and sovereignty.

Did Aboriginal groups here have sovereignty, presumably over clan lands ? What would such 'sovereignty' mean ? How would it manifest itself ? Again, that's up to someone much more knowledgeable than me.

Cheers,

Joe

Hi again Paul,

On 'sovereignty': in your list of straw-men, kicking off this thread, your No. 1 was:

That there is only one, and there ever was, only one Aboriginal culture. Not true.

No indeed. There would have been cultural differences between clans within the same 'tribe', let alone between 'tribes'. So yes, there may have been some thousands of different cultural assemblages or societies. And given that they were usually fiercely independent of each other, except when it came to exchanging women, one could say that those thousands of groups exercised the powers of mutually exclusive sovereignties.

So if 'sovereignty' actually existed, and was maintained by the elders of thousands of entities, what does that mean for present-day groups ? Would it be possible - assuming that sovereignty did exist in traditional times - for groups to sort out their clan boundaries, etc., and come together as a single over-arching Indigenous sovereign entity ? Or is this a pipe-dream ?

And what would that even mean if it could be done ? What relationship might such a composite sovereignty have with the sovereignty of the Australian system, with the government and bureaucratic structures currently exerting sole sovereignty ?

Some of these threads are wonderful, they really make me think about some issues in a new light.

Cheers,

Joe

Aboriginal sovereignty would be the Achilles Heel of Australia's future and should be dismissed out of hand.

Of course, we could take the argument over rights to its logical conclusion and start demanding that the British and other modern-day Governments give back the lands that they stole over the centuries; I could become a multimillionaire!!