Aboriginal land rights in Australia - Research Proposal Example

Introduction Australia have witnessed one of the most significant social and political event over the last twenty years, the aboriginal land rights movements. Contemporary Australia is recently been intimately linked to the accounts of the movement that have formed around the grievances of groups of Aborigines for their traditional land ownership rights, which consequently became the brainchild and emphasis for all the historic injustices that the Australian Aborigines experienced from their white Australian fellow people. Hence, pertaining to the Law Reform Commission Act (1973), which ordered the Commission to examine the pros and cons of applying either in en Toto or in part Aboriginal traditional law to Aborigines, Diane Bell has boldly expressed it as a sign that there is a drastic alteration in the legal and administrative stance to the acknowledgment of Aboriginal rights in Australia. Bell further justified her claims through pronouncing these statements; "Nowhere are these changes as striking as in the struggle of the Aboriginal people to gain recognition of land rights. This struggle has involved both moral and legal re- examinations of the relationship between a settler population and the original inhabitants. The wording of the Land Rights Act Northern Territory (1976) and the reference to customary law both assume that Aborigines have rights and a system of law, and that these have existed for many thousands of years. Such propositions would have been unthinkable two hundred years ago, when Australia was settled as a British colony. Not only has the legal profession had to rethink its judgments and governments to legislate to recognize aspects of Aboriginal Rights, but the Aborigines themselves have organized locally and nationally to bring the grievances and the injustices suffered by their people to the attention of other Australians and to people abroad."1 Nevertheless, there are alarming difficulties regarding the debate on land rights. The issue has branched out extensively to include political implications which made it extremely complicated to represent objectively and impartially. In a scholarly matter, it is rather inappropriate to provide an in-depth analysis of the causes of the land rights battle while it is still being fought. Neutrality of opinion regarding a politically charged state of affairs can be then argued as an indication of support to the conservative racist forces in Australia which combat the bestowing of land rights to the original inhabitants of Australia. Nonetheless, there is an urgent need to expose and investigate the issues revolving around the land rights movement since arguments and raison d''tre on both sides of the problem are dreadfully ambiguous. A tranquil and balanced evaluation of the diverse issues of the land rights movement can possibly generate a remedial and enlightening effect and conceivably guide those who are fervently faithful to the land rights proposal to come up with a persuasive way in presenting their case. Many Australians advocate the recognition of the Aborigine's traditional land rights which constitute the right to utilize and subsist on the land that they have previously occupied. The supporters of the land rights movement give their best hopes that a greater recognition of these customary rights, which is termed as the native title, would smooth the progress of compromise between Aborigines and white Australians. However, the land claims of the Aborigines demonstrate composite legal concerns, such as the problems that granting of native titles will cause to private welfare in the land that have existed in Australia over the past two decades. The complex issue over land rights necessitates the vitality of confronting the problem with the deep-seated legal principles regarding land rights of aboriginal people. The Land Rights Movement In the 1960s, the Aboriginal land rights movement inaugurated its emergence as a "movement", as such. The term "movement" is quite an inappropriate word to use since the land claims of a slack coalition of motives of both the indigenous people and the white partisans upon the land rights issue do not represent a logical and definite movement with a defined policy and course of action. Undoubtedly, this is partially attributable to the reality that the Australian Aborigines have failed to establish a unified "nation" in some extent. The traditional Aboriginal system has the clan as the basic unit of their life which is comprised of approximately twenty to two hundred people and which is concentrated upon a specific piece of land. These aboriginal people were able to form their own distinct language and religious system.2 Then again, there are profound differences between those Aborigines who dwell in a relatively traditional circumstance, in communication with their country, and those who reside on refugee camps and operation stations, in border camps, or in the urban areas. It is this diversity that creates obstacles in understanding an Aboriginal land rights movement, which seems it embraces all the various Aboriginal groups. Apparently, the objectives of the different groups engaged in the land rights issue differ extensively. Hence, for some Aboriginal people subsisting in a long-established condition, land rights claims imply a detailed and solid appeal to be given freehold title over their traditionally owned ancestral lands. On the contrary, Aborigines who are no longer attached to their traditional lands, demand land claims as a common grant of land which is unnecessarily customary or inherited land so that they can have a means of economic and social subsistence. Others may request for a land grant as reparation for being displaced from their ancestral lands, or as a representational gesture of repayment on the side of the white Australian. There are a number of Aboriginal people and advocates who request land claims because they strongly believe that their ancestral territories are intimately linked with their religious beliefs and are perceived as an indispensable foundation for the preservation of time-honored culture or the principle that without the return of their lands the entire cultural identity of Aboriginal people will be exterminated. Alternatively, some people assert that the restoration of land to the Aborigines or reparation for being dispossessed of their lands is an issue of hard justice which has nothing to do with Aboriginal religion. Hence, it is disputed that the white colonialist usurped land from the original Aboriginal dwellers of Australia through bare force and that this national robbery must be resolved by reinstating the land, or at least portions of it, to the Aborigines. Despite of conventional Aboriginal beliefs about the beginnings of their land and on its blessed character, Aborigines merit as a matter of fairness to be recompensed for being illogically driven out of those lands by white settlers, both past and present. Appeal for the restoration of land or for reparation eventually became a symbol of the Aboriginal people's determination to remedy the discrimination visited upon them since the start of white settlement in Australia. The Two Faces of the Aboriginal Land Rights Movement Land rights movement in Australia is never one-dimensional; it is illustrated by two main attitudes. First, for traditional Aborigines who maintained their association with their ancestral lands, the demand for land rights implies a claim by a particular Aboriginal group to benefit a title to their ancestral domains, and designated locations within that region, for religious objectives and also for gratifying their economic requirements through hunting wild games and gathering food. The particular territory is selected, not merely by the group's material tenancy and ancient use and enjoyment of it, other than by the group's religious beliefs and observance which prove that the ancestor spirit beings have mythically given the care and duty for that particular territory to that assembly of Aborigines. However, the traditional appeal to land rights is much more limited than this because there are established criteria used to label ownership of the land. In some Aboriginal tribes, there is a distinction between patrilineal and matrilineal descent; the former being the primary criterion of principal ownership. In some groups, both patrilineal and matrilineal descendants have rights to ownership. Yet again, some Aboriginal people differentiate strictly between "owners" and "managers" and permit simply the former complete ownership which resembles the European system. But other groups, while discriminating between 'owners' and 'managers', consent to full ownership to both.3 The common emphasis to be established is that, Aborigines in a time-honored situation have religiously-founded rights of use and responsibility to be concerned for a particular territory, and so can demand ownership of a territory. The Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act (1976) referred Aborigines in this situation as the "traditional owners".4 On the other hand, "those who no longer live in a traditional situation of the kind just described-in other words, those who have moved to other parts of the country away from their own ancestral lands, those on reserves, on mission stations, fringe dwellers, those in cities, etc.-cannot therefore claim land rights, at least in this sense."5 Nevertheless, it should be understood that an Aboriginal group's appeal to land is not restricted to the function of its locality since the most important evidence for granting land rights is the group's strong and continuous attachment to the land, and wide-ranging knowledge about the land in question. This second premise entails residing on or near to the group's traditional country, yet in some occasions Aboriginal groups have been able to demonstrate that they have preserved an active concern for their country even though they essentially dwell far away from it. One classic instance is the land claim of the majority of Kungarakany/Warai, who were actually away from the land they claim, of the Finniss River were able to successfully show that they had a profound and enduring connection in their land and had sustained habitual physical and spiritual communication with it, and therefore were found by the Land Commissioner to be 'traditional owners'.6 The valuable benefit of this perspective of land rights is that it is apparent and well-defined. On the other hand, its shortcomings is that it is extremely restricted and exclusive in the sense that it sets aside ownership to a limited sub-group of Aborigines who were able to gratify the very rigorous standards for 'traditional ownership' provided by the Act. However, "it does not provide a basis for land rights for all Aborigines wherever they may be and regardless of whether or not they are living a quasi-traditional life and able to prove their continued physical and spiritual interest in their country"7 Provided that the objectives of the land rights movement are to grant on Aboriginal people barely impartiality and reparation and also to offer an economic support on which to start a future for the majority of the Aborigines, then perceptibly this limited view of land rights will not be much of a help. To sum up the premises of the land rights movement, there are two diverging attitudes to land rights, which are based on conventional Aboriginal notions of land use and ownership, and based on quasi-European system of land possession. Along with this, any land rights movement will vary in purpose and path, according to whether one or the other mind-set is conferred prime emphasis. Who Owns Australia: The Legal Basis English law, including property law, was established in Australia when the first English settlers arrived. This applied to both the whites and the Aboriginal people. However, the diverse Aboriginal groups were not acknowledged as being self-governing states, their customary Aboriginal laws were not recognized and Aboriginal rights to ownership of their inherited lands were discarded. Thus, it is significant to examine the legal basis of English settlement in Australia because it has profoundly affected the entire succeeding history of land rights in this country. Some supporters of Aboriginal land rights usually derive their argument for these rights on the reality that the Aborigines were the earlier owners of Australia and still remain in a moral logic the real owners regardless of being unreasonably driven out of their lands by white settlers. Unfortunately, this contention has never been acknowledged by any Australian administration. The standard legal validation for the first English settlers occupying Australian lands has been the outlook that the group of Aborigines did not possess the land in any bona fide wisdom hence establishing Australia as an 'unoccupied territory' or to use the technical legal term, terra nullius.8 Accordingly, the English expansionists immediately settled Australia for the first time and had the privilege, according to international law, to impose the English system of law and to seize Australian lands in a similar method as the colonist of a remote and uninhabited land mass might do. Consequently, according to this presumption, the English law became the law of the annexed Australian territory on the 26th of January 1788, the day when Governor Phillip raised the British flag at Sydney Cove. "And a consequence of this was that the Aboriginal people became subject to English law and could not appeal, then or subsequently, to their own law to justify their claims to ownership of their lands."9 A Settled Colony The theory of the 'settled colony' or colonization of real or perceived unoccupied country may be put into contrast with the proviso of colonization by conquest or cession. These two conditions could have granted land rights for the Aboriginal people without having to undertake a severe process of legal adjudication: "If Australia had in 1788 been a country with a large number of indigenous inhabitants living in stable geographical groupings under a recognizable system of law which gave them title to own the land, in a sense akin to the English system of land tenure, and if England had then conquered Australia by force of arms and established English law and annexed the land, then one could recognize the possibility of compensation to the original inhabitants."10 And, "Or again, if the English settlers had recognized that they were dealing with people who had sovereignty over and a legal title to their land, they could have negotiated with them to cede their land by treaty. This was in effect what happened in New Zealand, where the Maori peoples ceded their land under treaty to the British colonists."11 According to the theory discussed in the previous sections, the English annexation of Australia which is neither through conquest nor cession awarded them the legal disposition not to compensate the earlier inhabitant for the lands removed from them, nor to bargain with them to abandon their territories by agreement. In this approach, the original Aboriginal dwellers did not represent an autonomous state or nation hence it was not legally feasible to initiate a contract between them and the recently arrived ambassadors of the English monarchy. This legal supposition, that Australia was settled rather than obtained through subjugation of the Aborigines or by cession by them under a truce, has been the foundation of the Australian government's ensuing commerce with the Aboriginal peoples, specifically, over the possession of land. Therefore, in a premature legal incidence, Cooper v. Stuart (1889) 14 App. Cas. 286, the Privy Council said publicly; "There is a great difference between the case of a colony acquired by conquest or cession, in which case there is an established system of law, and that of a colony which consisted of a tract of territory practically unoccupied, without settled inhabitants or settled law, at the time it was peacefully annexed to the British dominions. The colony of NSW belongs to the latter class."12 This judgment was evidently adopted from the principle pronounced by the remarkable eighteenth century English jurist Blackstone that "if an uninhabited country be discovered and planted by English subjects, all the English laws then in being which are the birthright of every English subject, are immediately there in force".13 It was also believed that this assumption was accepted from the initial period in Australia. Traditional Owners The Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act makes possible land of a definite kind to be awarded to traditional owners. Nevertheless, it is relevant to probe deeper at traditional Aboriginal attitudes to the land and endeavor to distinguish the customary system which makes the Aborigines the original owners of the land. Unquestionably, it seems to be accurate, their perceptions to land use diverge fundamentally from those of Europeans. However, both the Woodward Commission account and the land rights Act markedly presume that there is some form of connection between traditional Aboriginal perceptions of the land and the outlooks of the Australian legal structure with regard to the ownership of the land granted under the auspices of the Act.14 Moreover, one of the critical issues in the land rights dispute is the method to recognize, in terms of Australian property law, a stance of land ownership which is exceptionally different from that which Australian property law was formulated to house in. For a coherent and reliable account of traditional Aboriginal attitudes to land tenure, the documentations of anthropologists will be of much help. The region belonging to a specific Aboriginal group is believed by anthropologists to have been influenced and designed by the mythic ancestor spirits of the Dreaming. It is widely held among the Aborigine peoples that the ancestor spirits meandered over the land and established specific locations of significance which their spiritual inheritors, the members of the Aboriginal group, must revere and protect through conducting regular rituals and ceremonies. The activities and deeds of the ancestor spirits are thorough in the myths of specific Aboriginal groups; these myths being, as it were, the license or designation to the land. Furthermore, the actions of the ancestor idols are also mirrored in the observances which are performed at the consecrated sites. The primary justification for one group inhabiting and using this piece of land rather than that is that its constituents accept as true that the land in question was provided to them by ancestor heroes of the Dreaming and that they have spiritual accountability for it. Consequently, each Aboriginal group is in logic bonded to a designated portion of the land and it has no power to occupy other sections of the country and declare ownership of them. Mutually, a group has no rights to generally sell or exchange or give up its territories to another group. Thus, A.P. Elkin maintains that, "from one point of view, the members who belong to the local group by birth own their subdivision of the tribal territory. But it is truer to say that the country owns them and that they cannot remain away from it indefinitely and still live".15 Moreover, Kenneth Maddock disputes that; "Aborigines regard land as a religious phenomenon' The tie between men and land is taken back to the Dreaming' The Aboriginal theory is thus that rights to the land have to do with the design of the world, not with alienable legal title. It would be as correct to speak of the land possessing men as of men possessing the land."16 The sacred sites that are part of the ancestral domains are then hearts for religious rituals and ceremonies which then cannot in effect be carried out to another place, and the pious observance of these ceremonies in return legitimated and expanded the group's rights to the territory. Hence, Maddock furthered his arguments by putting it that "a community's title to the land associated with it is built up by carrying out ceremonies and by maintaining food supplies and it is materially manifested in sacred objects".17 Aborigine peoples also belong to a small food-gathering assemblies or bands which possess the privilege to use particular lands for economic functions. Once more, the territory over which the activity of food collecting of a group or band will take place involves a quantity of local descent provinces. The food gatherers may transfer freely over their own and other sacred lands, yet they should respect the sanctified sites of other groups and not trespass. Apparently, there were two separate but interdependent features of Aboriginal ownership of the land: a religious and an economic aspect. In actuality, one cannot dissociate the religious and economic facets of land tenure since religious ownership embraces the right to settle on resource utilization and the duty to watch over the land, for instance, proper burning and harvesting procedures. Yet again, the survival of human, animal and plant is ensured through religious protection of the land, through ceremonies at the designated sacred sites. As a consequence, R.M. Berndt became well-accustomed to uphold that; "The Aborigines' ownership was both personal and social. They were linked to it, or part of it, personally, but with their patrikin they held that land collectively in trust. To put it another way, the mythic beings spiritually held that land, and in many cases were identified with that land. Their human representatives, in consequence, also held that land. Both owned that land-mythic beings and living human beings, as well as those yet to be born."18 In general, the Aboriginal culture is dynamic and in an exceptionally positive note preserves itself while muddling through with the enormous peril of white infringement. In each incidence, the Aboriginal people concerned required to sustain the conventional means of managing such situations. The Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act Mr. Justice Toohey and Mr. Justice Kearney of the Northern Territory Aboriginal Land of the 1980s have heard plenty of land claims. Consequently, the Land Commissioner's findings resulted in the revision of the Acts's concept of traditional Aboriginal proprietors. Generally, it may be assumed that the notion has been repeatedly interpreted extensively and flexibly, and that it has been acknowledged that the diverse Aboriginal groups have especially different ideas regarding the meaning of traditional ownership. ''''''''''' The Commissioner expressed a more flexible view in the Utopia Report and the Finniss River Report, asserting that the theory of a local descent group was not bonded to any one anthropological framework and that it was the opinion of descent which is evaluated as relevant by the petitioner to be imperative A group of people is qualified to be classified as descent group if they are descended from a common forebear or consider themselves to be the progenitors. ''''''''''' Furthermore, taking into account the section of the Act which obliges the Commissioner to consider "the traditional attachment by the claimants to the lands claimed",19 the Commissioner has specified the that the following may be regarded in establishing whether or not a group demonstrates traditional connection to the land claimed; "systematic travel through the area by claimants; people worrying for their country; people wanting to be buried in their country; visits to sites of significance; the use of sacred objects stored in their own country for ceremonial purposes; provision for the protection of sacred objects; people returning to their country in order to learn ceremonies and how to conduct them; the need to teach the young about the myths and rites appropriate to a given country"20 Conclusively, it can be deduced that the Commissioner has underlined that there is no plain, difficult and immediate definition of land ownership which universally applies to all groups of Aborigines, but that multiple and flexible standards have to be related and that every case has to be assessed on its own worth. Nowadays, the plethora of documentations on land claims are a quarry of information on Aboriginal method of land tenure and use, and they are a chief references for anyone laboring in a academic approach on the authorized, anthropological and social issues enmeshed in Aboriginal land rights. The Native Title: The Mabo Case The refuted dogma of terra nullius, or 'land belonging to no one', was the legal narrative that presented the rationalization for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander inhabitants for over two centuries following the placing of the British flag at Botany Bay. However, the 1992 High Court's Mabo resolution altered its entirety forever. Since 1788, the conventional privileges of indigenous people to possession of their land were acknowledged by the Supreme Court in the country for the very first time. These recently recognized though ancient rights of designation to land were, nonetheless, susceptible to abolition by state governments which held by and large, even in the 1970s and the 1980s, continued ruthlessly against to the credit of inclusive Aboriginal land rights.21 Prominently, the Commonwealth's Racial Discrimination Act 1975 granted a fundamental measure of safeguard of indigenous rights in the repercussions of the Mabo decision, as it had accomplished in the concluding decision.22 To all intents and purposes, the RDA thwarted Aboriginal people's motives in land being dealt with less sympathetically than those of non-Aboriginal populace. A growing number of Australians were starting to understand that, whilst this appropriation of Aboriginal territories began in 1788, the tradition carried on well into the 1960s and was founded on the legal narrative that aboriginal people had no privileges of ownership over the land they reside on. The core idea that the possession of a gigantic continent, inhabited by home-grown people for 50,000 years, could be gained through instituting a flag in the soil in one spot of that land is ridiculous, over and above being greatly unreasonable. In Australia, indigenous inhabitants have had to rely on the indecisive, temporary and mostly unfavorable guidelines of governments for any privileges to land. It was merely in the 1970s that some Aboriginal rights to land began to be acknowledged in the most imperfect means by state governments. Prior to that period, any territory allocated as Aboriginal reserve land survived simply at the caprices of governments and was primarily managed in accordance to the belief that the government has the power to give and take, which normally happens. Therefore, the early 1980s witnessed substantial degree of disappointment and resentment from the indigenous people because of the absence of progress made by state governments in accepting Aboriginal rights. The Torres Strait Islanders were in dissimilar standpoint from indigenous people in the sense that they had never been dispossessed of their lands. They stayed in occupation but were not acknowledged as the proprietors of their lands under Australian or Queensland law, and they had experienced coercion and discrimination through the laws of consecutive Queensland administration. Without a doubt, Eddie Mabo had been rebuffed authorization to pass through to the Murray Islands from his homeland in Townsville to be present at his father's funeral in 1972. The Australian historian Henry Reynolds informed Eddie Mabo that the Torres Strait Islands were recognized as not owned by the Islanders but as a property of the Crown.23 It was this denunciation of rights that contributed to the absolute determination of Eddie Mabo to transform Australian Law. His decisive victory would not merely protect the acknowledgement of native title rights in the Torres Strait but for indigenous people on the mainland as well. The original five Torres Strait Islander plaintiff commenced proceedings in the High Court of Australia in 1982 in which they avowed traditional rights of ownership over designated areas of land on the Murray Islands and parts of the sea; the claims over the latter were eventually inhibited. They advocated the idea that traditional rights should be accepted under Australian law. They aimed to prevail over one of the impediments created by the Gove land rights case through affirming that the rights claimed were not originally common but individual private property concessions over specific garden pieces of land, comparable to the rights appealed by the non-Aboriginal Australians.24 Torres Strait Islander community, where inhabitants had garden plots and permanent residence, was arranged in a different way from Aboriginal groupings where people subsist in a nomadic lifestyle, hunting and gathering in their traditional country. The Commonwealth's RDA was to contribute a significant role in the defense of indigenous rights, both prior to and following the Mabo decision. The Whitlam administration in 1975 submitted the RDA to activate Australia's responsibilities which requires national governments to operate within their limits to confer effect to the codes of the convention. The implications of the RDA was to forbid exploit by governments or any other party that would handle any people less positively than others on the sole root of their race. Its confirmation was endorsed in the High Court decision of Koonwarta vs. Bjelke-Petersen,25 in which the court demolished the prejudiced land relocation strategies of the Queensland government. "The existence of the legislation became crucial when the Bjelke-Petersen government passed the Queensland Coastal Islands Declaratory Act 1985, which sought to obliterate any native title rights Torres Strait Islanders may have had when the islands were declared a part of Queensland in 1879. The effect of this law, if upheld, would have defeated the Mabo claim and meant that no native title rights could be recognized by the court, having been effectively expropriated out of existence, without compensation, by the Queensland National Party government."26 The legitimacy of the legislation was confronted, which became known as Mabo No. 1, in which the High Court in 1988, through a meager majority of four to three, disproved the legislation as being in violation of the Commonwealth's RDA. Then, the Mabo case was carried on in the Supreme Court of Queensland, which witnessed exhaustive accounts on behalf of each of the plaintiffs regarding their specific interests in territories. Finally, it was not Eddie Mabo but the other two enduring plaintiffs, David Passi and James Rice, who were successful in proving their claims of title to the land, yet the verdict still impartially and accurately bears the name of Eddie Mabo.27 Conclusively, the case went before the High Court in Mabo No. 2, the resolution popularly referred to as the Mabo decision.28 The pronouncement is one of the most remarkable decisions the High Court of Australia will yet set free and promoted the development of compromise. In the statement of Justice Brennan; "The common law of this country would perpetuate injustice if it were to continue to embrace the enlarged notice of terra nullius and to persist in characterizing the indigenous inhabitants of the Australian colonies as people too low in the scale of social organization to be acknowledged as possessing rights and interests in land."29 An awe-inspiring majority of Aboriginal people did not gain any rights of ownership of land originating from the resolution of the High Court in the Mabo case. They had been dispossessed of their land completely as a consequence of schemes of consecutive governments which fell short to recognize their native title to land. Consequently, they did not continue to take the pleasure out of the essential amount of attachment to the land obliged to gratify the Mabo standards. Land Rights: The Current Situation The development of the recognition of land rights can be analyzed per period since the establishment of the land rights movement. In 1966, no Australian Aborigines had land privileges as indigenous people; in 1983, Aborigines had been granted ownership to more than 500,000 square kilometers of land, which are largely parched and infertile lands; in 1981, the South Australian Pitjantjatjara Land Rights Act turn out to be a law, conceding title to an expansive region of land to the Pitjantjatjara community. This is an exceptionally important piece of legislation and was greatly mediated by the Pitjantjatjara inhabitants themselves.30 However, in Queensland, there appears to be very minimal hope of land rights in the stringent sense; "The Queensland government explicitly rejects any notion of Aboriginal land rights in the State, maintaining that Aborigines should have no entitlement to land which is not available to non-Aborigines. What is considered to be the Aboriginal peoples' special situation is covered, they argue, by the fact that reserves are temporarily set aside on which communities exist which provide training for Aborigines before they (inevitably) move into the general community."31 In 1978, the conflict between the Aurunkun and Mornington Island peoples and the Queensland Government demonstrates the state of affairs of confrontation in that condition over the land rights issue. Likewise, in Western Australia, the erstwhile state government repudiated to reassign the title and authority of land to Aboriginal peoples. Aborigines may be granted occupancy of lands owned by the Crown through the Western Australian Lands Trust yet absolute power of the land is saved by the State Minister for Aboriginal Affairs. In the 1980, the Noonkanbah disaster, which was an incident wherein Aboriginal groups complaint against recommended drilling of oil at Noonkanbah in north-western Australia, in which the drilling company was backed up by the state government and police security, demonstrates the persistent condition in Western Australia until 1982. The land rights movement has practical effects over the lives and dispositions of the Aboriginal people. The granting of land rights to the Aborigines created a regional economic, political and social structure, like the Northern Territory, and consequently produced major structural reforms. The existence of the land rights movement resulted in profound changes in previous policies. Moreover, unintentionally, land rights provided an improved adult education program which any education department failed to accomplish. Merely by establishing rights which forced whites into conciliation with Aboriginal peoples on equal terms, which present Aborigines with ranks of funding that permit them to practice self-defined objectives and which build structure in connection to land that are competent of independent deed, is any successful and non-assimilatory declaration of the predicaments Aborigines and whites create for each other probable to be achieved. Pointless to say, land rights is not a universal remedy but there are extremely scarce alternatives open to government in quest of establishing a consequential communication between Aborigines and Australian social order in the outback. As opposed to this argument, the assertion that the granting of land rights in the Northern Territory has placed Aborigines into regional, economic, political and social structure is questionable. Perhaps, since a number of traditional Aborigines currently own land in an entirely different manner from other Australians, a comprehensive deposit of new structures has been founded together with, but not included with, white Australian economic, political and social structures. Yet again, it may be questioned whether the bestowing of land rights has forced whites into agreement with Aborigines on equal terms. However, the outcomes of the mining negotiations that have occurred testify to the fact that the Aborigines are dreadfully far from being on equal terms with whites. Apparently, the aboriginal land rights in Australia aroused advocacy and opposition. Nevertheless, the most important thing to do is to revisit the past and delve deeper into the analysis of the legal systems that evolved from the time of the inception of the Aboriginal people until the period of conquest and cession; understanding the history of these two opposing parties, in terms of ownership of land, can be very valuable in the long-run since establishing a peaceful and stable agreement depend greatly on the willingness and the cleanliness of the mind-set of the two sides of this controversial issue. Works Cited Anderson, Christopher. "Queensland." Peterson, N. Aboriginal Land Rights: A Handbook. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1983. 5. Barwick, D., Mace, M. and Stannage, T. "Handbook for Aboriginal and Islander History." Aboriginal History (1979). Bennett, J.M. and Castles, A. "A Source Book of Australian Legal History." The Creation of Colonies and the Treatment of Aboriginal People. Sydney: The Law Book Company, 1978. Berndt, R.M. "A Long View: Some Personal Comments on Land Rights." Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies Newsletter (1981): 5. Brennan, F. One Land, One Nation. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1995. Brennan, Frank. The Wik Debate: Its Impact on Aborigines, Pastoralists and Miners. Sydney, NSW: University of New South Wales Press, 1998. Castles, A. "An Australian Legal History." The Law Book Company. Sydney, 1982. Chapter 2. Charlesworth, Max. The Aboriginal Land Rights Movement. Richmond, Vic.: Hodja Educational Resources, 1984. Goodall, H. Invasion to Embassy, Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770-1972. St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1996. Hardy, F. The Unlucky Australians. Melbourne: Nelson, 1968. "Mabo V. Queensland (No 1)." Commonwealth Law Reports (1988): 186. "Mabo V. Queensland (No 2)." Commonwealth Law Reports (1992): 1. Maddock, K. The Australian Aborigines: A Portrait of their Society. Melbourne: Penguin Books, 1982. Nettheim, G. "Victims of the Law: Black Queenslanders Today." Evaluation (1981): chapter 13. Peterson, N. "Aboriginal Land Rights: A Handbook." Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (1981): Canberra. -. "Aborigines, Land and Land Rights." Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (1983). Reynolds, H. "Aborigines and Settlers: The Australian Experience, 1788-1939." The Morality of Settlement. Melbourne: Cassell, 1972. chapter 6. Rowley, C.D. A Matter of Justice. Canberra: ANU Press, 1978. -. "The Destruction of the Aboriginal Society." ANU Press (1970). Stanner, W.E.H. The Australian Aborigines: A Portrait of their Society. Canberra: ANU Press, 1979. Toohey, J. Finniss River Land Claim. Aboriginal Land Commissioner. Canberra: AGPS, 1981. Read More