ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the spectrum of public property type, from corporeal to incorporeal. It expands on the preliminary definition by identifying three indicators of public property in land: the diversity of its type; the conundrum of its ownership; and its right of inclusion. In Australia, conservation agreements, or positive covenants protecting environmental, cultural, heritage or natural resource values, are analogous incorporeal public rights, the benefit vesting in the relevant land conservation agency. Customary public property evidences faint but 'surprising connections' between 'informal usages and understandings' about public property, and their binding effect amongst 'those who practice and share them'. Joseph Sax frames ownership from a values perspective, in the process identifying a fault line common to the cultural divide between property as a private commodity, and property's social or communitarian meanings. Direct ownership by the state or a state agency is a paradigm framed within private property's individualistic values and rhetoric of exclusion.
