School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemColonizing concepts of Aboriginal rights in land in Port Phillip and South Australia in the 1830s( 2002)At a time when Anglo-Australian law purports to recognize Indigenous systems of land ownership through the doctrine of 'native title', it is pertinent to examine previous discourses of 'recognition' and their impact within the process of colonization. As Patrick Wolfe points out, the uncompensated Indigenous owner presents a discomforting obstacle to non-Indigenous claims over land and national belonging in Australia. Dealing with the 'problem' of the uncompensated Indigenous owner was therefore an important element of the colonization process in colonies of settlement such as South Australia and Port Phillip. While Some resolution of the outstanding 'rights of the Aborigines' was necessary for the completion of colonization, to enable the colonizers to 'settle', it also threatened to undo or prevent colonization, demanding a return of the resources appropriated during colonization. Through the techniques observed in this thesis, colonizers constantly balanced these two actions. Deborah Bird Rose describes these twin operations as the left and right hands of conquest: …the right hand of conquest is conceptualised as beneficent: it brings productivity, growth and civilisation where these had not existed before, transforming nature into culture.. . Indigenous Australia was not, and is not now, a series of absences ... The task of the left hand of conquest is to erase all this specit1c life. The left hand creates the tabula rasa which the right hand will then transform into growth and civilisation ... Finally, there is inevitably a great disjunction between the concept of progress, and the practice of destruction. There are many strategies whereby the right hand can deny what the left hand is doing. This thesis observes three discourses through which colonizers managed this dual task of ‘protectin’ Aboriginal rights and peoples while also appropriating Aboriginal lands - discourses of legal rights, econOl11ic concepts of ‘property’ and humanitarian obligation. The very delineation of these three discourses operated as an exercise of power by which colonizers c1aiIned to 'manage' Aboriginal rights in land while excluding Indigenous voices. The lines of distinction between these discourses - between 'ancient occupation' and 'proprietary right to the Soil, between 'a plain and sacred right' and 'some portion of their own land, - were the points at which colonizers strategically denied Indigenous systems of law as sovereign entities and Indigenous people as land-owning subjects.