The Definition and Discovery of Facts in Native Title: The Historian's Contribution

The Torres Strait regional sea claim, culminating in the High Court decision of Akiba v Commonwealth, signalled a new respect for the holistic relationships and dominion that underlay First Peoples’ custodianship of land and waters. The ‘Akiba correction’ centred upon a distinction between ‘underlying rights’ and specific exercises of them – and produced in that case a surviving right to take resources for any purpose (subject to current regulation). The correction emerged from extinguishment disputes, but the significance of this edge towards ‘ownership’ was soon evident in ‘content’ cases on the mainland. Yet there are new challenges coming in the wake of Akiba. What of the many native title determinations that have been settled or adjudicated on pre-Akiba thinking? And what does this renaissance in native title law offer to the communities that will fail (or have failed) the rigorous threshold tests of continuity – also crafted with the older mindset?

Download Full-text

Statistics for Community Governance: The Yawuru Indigenous Population Survey, Western Australia

International Indigenous Policy Journal ◽

10.18584/iipj.2014.5.2.2 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 5 (2) ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

John Taylor ◽

Bruce Doran ◽

Maria Parriman ◽

Eunice Yu

Keyword(s):

Local Community ◽

Indigenous Rights ◽

Household Survey ◽

Community Planning ◽

Community Governance ◽

Native Title ◽

Support Mechanism ◽

Secure Information ◽

Background Events

This article presents a case study of an exercise in Aboriginal community governance in Australia. It sets out the background events that led the Yawuru Native Title Holders Aboriginal Corporation in the town of Broome on Australia’s northwest coast to secure information for its own needs as an act of self-determination and essential governance, and it presents some of the key findings from that exercise. As the Indigenous rights agenda shifts from the pursuit of restitution to the management and implementation of benefits, those with proprietary rights are finding it increasingly necessary to build internal capacity for post-native title governance and community planning, including in the area of information retrieval and application. As an incorporated land-holding group, the Yawuru people of Broome are amongst the first in Australia to move in this area of information gathering, certainly in terms of the degree of local control, participation, and conceptual thinking around the logistics and rationale for such an exercise. An innovative addition has been the incorporation of survey output data into a Geographic Information System to provide for spatial analysis and a decision support mechanism for local community planning. In launching and administering the "Knowing our Community" household survey in Broome, the Yawuru have set a precedent in the acquisition and application of demographic information for internal planning and community development in the post-native title determination era.

Download Full-text

Spinifex People as Cold War Moderns

Contemporaneity Historical Presence in Visual Culture ◽

10.5195/contemp.2015.144 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 4 ◽

pp. 71-94

Author(s):

Greg Castillo

Keyword(s):

Cold War ◽

Western Australia ◽

Land Tenure ◽

Large Scale ◽

Nuclear Testing ◽

Atomic Age ◽

Native Title ◽

Global Modernity ◽

The 1950S ◽

The Government

Aboriginal Australian contemporary artists create works that express indigenous traditions as well as the unprecedented conditions of global modernity. This is especially true for the founders of the Spinifex Arts Project, a collective established in 1997 to create so-called “government paintings”: the large-scale canvases produced as documents of land tenure used in negotiations with the government of Western Australia to reclaim expropriated desert homelands. British and Australian nuclear testing in the 1950s displaced the Anangu juta pila nguru, now known to us as the Spinifex people, from their nomadic lifeworld. Exodus and the subsequent struggle to regain lost homelands through paintings created as corroborating evidence for native title claims make Spinifex canvases not simply expressions of Tjukurpa, or “Dreamings,” but also artifacts of the atomic age and its impact on a culture seemingly far from the front lines of cold war conflict.

Download Full-text

Yulara and Future Expert Reports in Native Title Cases

Anthropological Forum ◽

10.1080/00664670601168575 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 17 (1) ◽

pp. 71-92 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

Basil Sansom

Keyword(s):

Native Title

Download Full-text