ABSTRACT
In Australia, positively valued contrasts of indigeneity with nonindigeneity—of “indigenous people” with the nonindigenous or “settler” population—have posited the consubstantiality of Aboriginal being and culture with the “land,” in contrast with the externality to it of nonindigenous being. Modes of designating Australian people(s) or “populations” have, in short, been unsettled and contentious. The decision, handed down in 1971 by the Northern Territory Supreme Court, found that there was no doctrine of communal native title in Australian law, rendering superfluous more detailed analysis of certain aspects of the claimants’ case. Emphases in the Australianist ethnological and anthropological literature on socioterritoriality can be shown to have changed a great deal over time. In a number of well-documented instances, Aborigines in earlier colonized parts of Australia demanded land as a matter of right joined to their aim to pursue agrarian livelihood from early colonial settlement. Characteristic of Australia is the extent to which Aboriginal issues touch a raw nerve: they are “unfinished business.”
