"The papers in this collection reflect on the various social effects of native title. In particular, the authors consider the ways in which the implementation of the Native Title Act 1993 (Cwlth), and the native title process for which this Act legislates, allow for the recognition and translation of Aboriginal law and custom, and facilitate particular kinds of coexistence between Aboriginal title holders and other Australians. In so doing, the authors seek to extend the debate on native title beyond questions of practice and towards an improved understanding of the effects of native title on the social lives of Indigenous Australians and on Australian society more generally"--Publisher's description.

Cover image taken at Mangkuna (Corkbark) on Karajarri country in the Kimberley, Western Australia - November 2014. Photography by Edward Tran. © Copyright Kimberley Land Council.This edited collection brings together some of Australia's foremost experts in native title to provide a realistic assessment of the achievements, frustrations and possibilities of native title, two decades since the enactment of the Native Title Act 1993 (Cth), and after the most significant High Court decision on native title in more than ten years, Akiba v Commonwealth, which confirmed the existence of commercial native title fishing rights. The Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors come from a variety of disciplines and perspectives and include academics and practitioners from the fields of law, economics, anthropology, politics, history and community development. Uniting the book is a concern that native title make a real impact on the economic and social circumstances of Australia's Indigenous communities.The book consists of two parts.Part One is entitled Legal Dynamics in the Development of Native Title. It examines the way in which Australian law has defined and often constrained the scope of this newly-recognised property right. There is a particular focus on legal issues with a direct bearing on the economic potential of native title, such as alienability and the right to trade resources and the challenges posed for anti-discrimination law.Part Two is entitled Native Title as a Vehicle for Indigenous Empowerment. Authors provide an overview of the contribution made so far by native title and the prospects for future empowerment. Detailed mapping and analysis provides readers with a geographic orientation and a sense of realism about the economic potential of the native title estate, in comparison with achievements under a parallel statutory land rights regime. This part also explains some of the challenges Indigenous groups face in areas such as governance, land reform and internal politicking, as they operate in the shadow of the law, seeking to utilise native title for greater empowerment._______________________________________________________ Click here to view and listen to the Indigenous Empowerment panel discussion which includes video and audio webcasts, photos and a review essay.

Aboriginal title represents one of the most remarkable and controversial legal developments in the common law world of the late-twentieth century. Overnight it changed the legal position of indigenous peoples. The common law doctrine gave sudden substance to the tribes' claims to justiciable property rights over their traditional lands, catapulting these up the national agenda and jolting them out of a previous culture of governmental inattention. In a series of breakthrough cases national courts adopted the argument developed first in western Canada, and then New Zealand and Australia by a handful of influential scholars. By the beginning of the millennium the doctrine had spread to Malaysia, Belize, southern Africa and had a profound impact upon the rapid development of international law of indigenous peoples' rights. This book is a history of this doctrine and the explosion of intellectual activity arising from this inrush of legalism into the tribes' relations with the Anglo settler state. The author is one of the key scholars involved from the doctrine's appearance in the early 1980s as an exhortation to the courts, and a figure who has both witnessed and contributed to its acceptance and subsequent pattern of development. He looks critically at the early conceptualisation of the doctrine, its doctrinal elaboration in Canada and Australia - the busiest jurisdictions - through a proprietary paradigm located primarily (and constrictively) inside adjudicative processes. He also considers the issues of inter-disciplinary thought and practice arising from national legal systems' recognition of aboriginal land rights, including the emergent and associated themes of self-determination that surfaced more overtly during the 1990s and after. The doctrine made modern legal history, and it is still making it.

Based on author's thesis (doctoral - University of Sydney, Department of Anthropology, 2013) issued under title: Forces of destruction, acts of creation: aboriginality, identity and native title, on the far west coast of South Australia.

Native title involves an interface between the Australian legal system and Indigenous legal, cultural and political systems. The assertion and management of native title rights involves collective action by sometimes large and disparate groups of Indigenous people. Contentious politics makes such collective action difficult and the courts will often be asked to decide whether group decisions have been validly made. In the last two decades a vast and complex body of law and practice has developed to address this challenge. Authorisation law is a set of principles about how the views and intentions of native title claimants or holders are translated into legally effective decisions. This book sets out the legal rules and their application in various situations: native title claims, native title agreement-making, decision-making by native title corporations, and compensation applications. It also addresses key practical, ethical and political dimensions of native title decision-making. This book will be useful for native title practitioners including lawyers, judges and native title holders. It will also be relevant to academic research into the ethical, political and anthropological dimensions of Indigenous governance.

The Rights and Wrongs of Land Restitution: ‘Restoring What Was Ours’ offers a critical, comparative ethnographic, examination of land restitution programs. Drawing on memories and histories of past dispossession, governments, NGOs, informal movements and individual claimants worldwide have attempted to restore and reclaim rights in land. Land restitution programs link the past and the present, and may allow former landholders to reclaim lands which provided the basis of earlier identities and livelihoods. Addressing the practical and theoretical questions that arise, this book offers a critical rethinking of the links between land restitution and property, social transition, injustice, citizenship, the state and the market.

Beginning with the nineteenth-century expeditions, Northern Australia has been both a fascination and concern to the administrators of settler governance in Australia. With Southeast Asia and Melanesia as neighbors, the region's expansive and relatively undeveloped tropical savanna lands are alternately framed as a market opportunity, an ecological prize, a threat to national sovereignty, and a social welfare problem. Over the last several decades, while developers have eagerly promoted the mineral and agricultural potential of its monsoonal catchments, conservationists speak of these same sites as rare biodiverse habitats, and settler governments focus on the “social dysfunction” of its Indigenous communities. Meanwhile, across the north, Indigenous people have sought to wrest greater equity in the management of their lives and the use of their country. In Wild Articulations, Timothy Neale examines environmentalism, indigeneity, and development in Northern Australia through the controversy surrounding the Wild Rivers Act 2005 (Qld) in Cape York Peninsula, an event that drew together a diverse cast of actors—traditional owners, prime ministers, politicians, environmentalists, mining companies, the late Steve Irwin, crocodiles, and river systems—to contest the future of the north. With a population of fewer than 18,000 people spread over a landmass of over 50,000 square miles, Cape York Peninsula remains a “frontier” in many senses. Long constructed as a wild space—whether as terra nullius, a zone of legal exception, or a biodiverse wilderness region in need of conservation—Australia’s north has seen two fundamental political changes over the past two decades. The first is the legal recognition of Indigenous land rights, reaching over a majority of its area. The second is that the region has been the center of national debates regarding the market integration and social normalization of Indigenous people, attracting the attention of federal and state governments and becoming a site for intensive neoliberal reforms. Drawing connections with other settler colonial nations such as Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand, Wild Articulations examines how indigenous lands continue to be imagined and governed as “wild.”