ABSTRACT
Indigenous peoples inhabit modernity not as an archaic remnant but as a fold, a complication of its singular but fractured and internally disparate time. This complication is repeated spatially. In Australia, as in Canada and New Zealand, the destiny of non-urban Aborigines is closely tied to the struggle over possible forms of belonging to land, which represents at once the chance of economic autonomy and, on a quite different plane, the atemporal locus of Law and personhood. Legal ownership is in one sense peripheral to the more ancient rights in country given by that other Law which the Law does not recognize (or rather, since Mabo vs Queensland (1992), now both does and does not recognize); in another sense the politics of land rights has been at the very centre of the disputation of nationhood in the three settler colonies.
