Syllabus 14 template
1
Student names
ABOR1110 Talking Circle 15 marks
criteria HD 35 & above DN XXXXXXXXXXCR PP NN
In your submission: In your submission: In your submission: In your submission: In your submission:
criterion 1
presenter skills
Weighting: 25%
5 marks
The presentation is highly
visually appealing and easily
accessible for participants
The presenter speaks very
clearly and has an
outstanding manner to
engage participants
The presentation is very
visually appealing and
accessible for participants
Minor improvements would
enefit the presentation.
The presenter speaks
clearly and has a very
pleasing manner to engage
participants
The presentation is visually
appealing and accessible for
participants. Some
improvements would benefit
the presentation.
The presenters speaking
needs revision They have a
pleasing manner to engage
participants
The presentation is visually
acceptable and accessible
for participants. Substantial
improvements would benefit
the presentation.
The presenters speaking
needs significant revision.
They engage participants
adequately
The presentation is not
visually acceptable or
accessible for participants.
Substantial improvements
are needed in the
presentation
The presenters speaking
needs major revision. They
did not engage participants
adequately
criterion 2
structure and content
Weighting 75%
10 marks
The Presentation is
outstanding in its structure.
The Talking Circle shows an
excellent depth of
knowledge of the topic.
The Presentation is
advanced in its structure.
The Talking Circle shows a
good depth of knowledge of
the topic.
The Presentation is very
competent in its structure.
The Talking Circle shows an
adequate depth of
knowledge of the topic.
The Presentation is
satisfactory in its structure.
The Talking Circle shows an
adequate depth of
knowledge of the topic.
The Presentation is not
satisfactory in its structure.
The Talking Circle shows
superficial knowledge of the
topic.
Comments XXXXXXXXXXGrade /15
2
Irene Watson
Sovereign Spaces, Caring for Country, and the
Homeless Position of Aboriginal Peoples
The real land and law business has not been done.
What I would like to point out to you is that in terms
of our land and our law it needs to be understood, as
my mother said, that we are custodians of this land.
And when people say, “oh we lost this land or we lost
that land,” we didn’t lose it anywhere. The land is still
here and we still have the responsibility of being custo-
dians of that land. The problem is that we haven’t been
given the power in the non-Aboriginal legal system to
fulfill that custodial right. Until our Elders in Council
decide on these matters through their customary laws
and until that consent, which Captain Cook was sup-
posed to get, is properly given, then we still live under
ad laws.
—Dennis Walker, Aboriginal Tent Embassy, Canbe
a,
April 9, 1995
In this essay I reflect on Aboriginal worldviews
and practices and the challenges posed to their
survival by what Dennis Walker names bad laws.
While different Aboriginal peoples belong to dif-
ferent places, or ruwi, and Aboriginal worldviews
are diverse,1 here I consider the possibility of
decolonizing a space outside an Australian mono-
culture that could become a home to Aboriginal
worldviews.
South Atlantic Quarterly 108:1, Winter 2009
doi XXXXXXXXXX/ XXXXXXXXXX © 2008 Duke University Press
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28 Irene Watson
Aboriginal worldviews struggle under an Australian colonialism that his-
torically denied an Aboriginal presence and went on to build the Australian
state’s foundation.2 Although that foundation is based on the myth of te
a
nullius,3 Aboriginal peoples were and still are present, ca
ying laws and
cultures that governed every space of Australia. In the landmark native title
case Mabo v. The State of Queensland,4 six of the seven judges held that the
doctrine of te
a nullius as applied to Australia was a fiction and should hold
no continuing place in the common law of Australia. However, the histori-
cal negation of an Aboriginal presence based on te
a nullius continues, in
spite of Mabo, while the illusion of an Aboriginal space being held by the
“settled native” is allowed by the state.5 Australian law seems to have incor-
porated and accommodated the settled native as “British subject” from the
time of the invasion of Australia,6 but in reality Aboriginal peoples were
treated as enemies and objects of British law. This, nevertheless, provoked
questions about the efficacy of native title law: can it provide a real home for
the sovereign Aboriginal subject? Who is the native subject, and what is its
status, outside native title recognition? The untitled native? The “unsettled
native,” left to unsettle the settled spaces of empire? The intention here
is not to construct a stereotype by naming the unsettled native, but it is
an attempt to communicate the ongoing Aboriginal resistance to con-
form and fit into mainstream Australian culture, while unsettled natives
occupy diminishing spaces on the fringes of empire. Those fringe spaces
provide only a temporary home for Aboriginality, because the presence of
the unsettled native is itself challenging the fiction of lawful foundation.
Aboriginal resistance, which has no “legitimate” space for countering the
power of the state, is given articulation only in illegitimate spaces such as
y the prisons, the mental institutions, and the parklands of the state.
Accommodating and Incorporating the Native
By the 1930s, the Australian state and commonwealth governments were
ecoming aware that the social Darwinist expectations of the extinction
of the natives were not being realized, and so they determined a path of
assimilation for “their natives.”7 Ultimately, the aim was the same: assimi-
lation was just as much a final solution as starvation and disease. However,
an underlying irony existed. While in law Aboriginal peoples were consid-
ered “British subjects” of a settled colony, colonial policies contained and
separated Aboriginal peoples under the powers of the Aborigines acts from
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Sovereign Spaces, Caring for Country 29
mainstream Australian life. Prior to 1967, jurisdiction over the “Aboriginal
ace” was excluded from the Australian Commonwealth head of power.8 The
states and the Northern Te
itory held jurisdiction over Aboriginal affairs
until the 1967 amendments. From the earliest colonial period of Austra-
lian history, the Aboriginal presence was met with a violence intended to
emove peoples from their traditional lands. It was a time refe
ed to by
High Court of Australia justices Sir William Deane and Mary Gaudron in
Mabo (No. 2) as “a national legacy of unutterable shame.”9 “Protectionist”
policies and the Aborigines acts of the states and te
itory sanctioned the
control of all aspects of Aboriginal life: the removal and dispossession of
Aboriginal peoples from their lands, the further removal from Aboriginal
eserve lands, the care and custody of Aboriginal children, discipline on the
eserves, imprisonment, prohibition of the use of traditional languages,
and prohibition of cultural and law practices.10
Nungas11 became institutionalized wards of the state, living under the
direction of the Aboriginal protector.12 Our ancestors were known as
“protected persons” rather than as Aboriginal peoples belonging to ruwi.
In Australian law we were deemed “British subjects,” but in practice we
were made invisible, doomed to annihilation and absorption. The colonies
established reserves, and the roundup and placement of nungas into these
institutions served to provide enclaves of cheap labor for the local agri-
cultural industries. All movement of Aboriginal peoples onto and off of
eserves was controlled, as our ruwi was increasingly invaded by pastoral-
ists and farmers. At a time when slavery was no longer practiced within
the boundaries of “law,” the Aborigines acts provided a labor force at the
cost of subsistence rations, which replaced food sources formerly available
to hunter-gatherer peoples. Nungas were placed on Aboriginal reserves
without consideration being given to clan identity or language group;
they were often removed from ruwi and relocated to other regions hun-
dreds of kilometers away from traditional homelands. Under the Aborigi-
nes acts, the separation of fair-skinned nungas from dark-skinned, divid-
ing “half-castes” from “pure-blood” or “full-blood” natives, became policy.
This policy intended to assimilate “half-castes” into white society, aiming
at keeping groups separate, preferably unmixed and ranked hierarchically
according to color; that is, those Aboriginal people who looked more white
than others were assessed as being more easily assimilated into white Aus-
tralia. “Half-caste” children were separated from their parents. Policies of
child removal have since been refe
ed to as acts of “genocide,”13 and the
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�0 Irene Watson
Australian government respectively apologized, saying “so
y” on Fe
uary
12, 2008.
While Australian law and policy variously pursued the extinction, segre-
gation, protection, and assimilation of the settled native, the unsettled native
continued to inhabit fringe spaces that the state would not recognize. This
continues. The unsettled native is constantly occupying and reoccupying
these sites. Aboriginal traditional homelands are one example; another is
the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canbe
a, occupied by Aboriginal peoples
since the 1970s as a space in which the dispossession of land rights and sov-
ereignty are spoken back to the state. Similar Aboriginal sites of resistance
have arisen across Australia at different times. Camp Sovereignty came into
existence during the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games, creating
a space to speak on Aboriginal sovereignty and to demonstrate the long
history of subjugation.14 The state denies the voices of the unsettled native
ecause these voices put a lie to ideas of “white supremacy” and the illusion
of the free, informed, and consenting native’s participation in the colonial
project. This illusion has Aboriginal people positioned as participants of
a process that would have our native histories and connections to home
erased.
In Mabo (No. 2), the High