The Law of the Land or the Law of the Land?: History, Law and Narrative in a Settler Society

Abstract

This article considers the influence of a controversial historical work on the law, politics and society of a settler nation. It argues that the impact of Henry Reynolds's 1987 The Law of the Land on legal consideration of indigenous rights to land in Australia can be attributed to the fact that it is best described as juridical history. As such, it told a lego‐historical story that provided the High Court of Australia with a new way of interpreting its own traditional narrative, which had long denied Aboriginal people their rights to land, thus enabling it to make a new determination of those rights as well as resolve a crisis of legitimacy for the law and the nation. This article also contends that this history‐making came to be accepted by many settler Australians because it provided the nation with a newly redemptive, liberal myth narrative. It assesses the cost of a story of this kind, asking whether such simple histories can have an enduring effect, especially where their authors are reluctant to signpost the historical or literary form of their texts. Finally, it suggests that histories truer to the complexities of the past might produce better political and social outcomes.

To what extent can online mapping be decolonial? A journey throughout Indigenous cartography in Canada

“…This idea of a “terra nullius” waiting for development was supported by maps of large blank spaces that portrayed North America (and other parts of the world) as an empty territory open for appropriation and exploitation. Maps became a powerful tool of territorial dispossession of Indigenous people in North America and throughout the entire colonized world (Reynolds 2003; Attwood 2004; Banner 2005; Cavanagh 2014; Borrows 2015; Bryan and Wood 2015). In a few decades, mapmaking moved from being a mode of communication to becoming a tool of dispossession.…”

Telling the End of the Settler Colonial Story

“…practices as a way to address historical grievances (see Veracini 2001). While, in the context of a discussion of Aotearoa/New Zealand's attempts to judicially 'rectify' the past, W. H. Oliver has even talked about a 'retrospective utopia', a similar inscription of 'treaty' traditions was also initiated in an Australian historiographical context by Henry Reynolds in The Law of The Land, as pointed out in a recent article by Bain Attwood (Oliver 2001;Attwood, 2004) Elsewhere, history and public debate surrounding indigenous politics decisively informed each other as well. South Africa's transition to post-apartheid also produced a rapidly and dramatically changing historiographical landscape.…”

Indigenous participation in Australian economies : Historical and anthropological perspectives

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