ABSTRACT
Conflict over land and resources lies at the heart of the relationship between Indigenous peoples2 and their European colonizers. European colonization of the Australian continent brought new land laws that conflicted with the pre-existing laws, customs and relationships of Indigenous inhabitants with their land and resources. Property was and remains at the heart of this conflict. Travailing for over 200 years, the tension created between these systems at the point of colonization remains unresolved. Forbearance, protection, ignorance, hostility, violence and accommodation have all been part of the uneven landscape as the colonizers landed, expanded, mapped, marked and excluded in accordance with their property law and political institutions. In this process, two strands have been constants: first, different and incommensurate ideas about property, land and resources; and second, social and economic exclusion and deprivation of Indigenous peoples from the wealth and material benefits generated by the colonizing society. These remain at the heart of much of the political and legal discourse around the relationship between the colonizer and Indigenous peoples. Nowhere have these strands been more apparent than in controversies around the formalization of customary titles to Indigenous land, through which the communal might become the individual.
