Dominion and dishonour: a treaty between our nations, (original) (raw)

Historically, settler Australians have grappled with the problem of what to do about Aborigines. There is a persistent unwillingness to acknowledge that, in Australia, the rights of Indigenous people are inferior to those in the United States, Canada and New Zealand. The modern nation constituted at Federation in 1901 excluded Indigenous people from the state; unable to hold citizenship in their own country until 1967, Aborigines inhabited a political no-man’s land for nearly seventy years. Since Federation, public debates about the place of Aboriginal people in the nation have focussed on the problem of how to incorporate Aboriginal people within the framework of the Australian nation- state by various means: assimilation, integration, self-management, self-determi- nation, reconciliation. Throughout the years, and throughout several of the shifts in government policies on ‘Aboriginal affairs’, the call for a treaty could also be heard. The calls for a treaty go to the heart of the juridical denial, in Australian case law, of the existence of Aboriginal nations in Australia prior to the seizure of the land and consequent dispossession of Indigenous people by the British Crown. This denial has in effect accorded our nations the status of an anomaly among the settler colonial states. Unlike either Canada or New Zealand, as I show here, no treaties or agreements were concluded with Aboriginal people. The monstrous injustice of the seizure of and establishment of dominion over Aboriginal lands by the Crown, and the lack of agreements or treaties, remains a stain on Australian history and the chief obstacle to constructing an honourable place for Indigenous Australians in the modern nation-state. That place must now be found both through, and beyond, the limits of a legal discursive framework that de-humanises and de-historicises Aboriginal people ISSN 1368-8790 print/ISSN 1466-1888 online/01/010013–14 Ó 2001 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies DOI: 10.1080/1368879012004684 3