ABSTRACT
In this Chapter, I examine The Complete Adventures of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie (May Gibbs) and Welcome to Country: A Traditional Aboriginal Ceremony (Aunty Joy Murphy) to show how law, lawlessness, lawfulness and the meeting of laws is depicted in Australian children’s literature. I argue that children’s literature can be a helpful archive of material to help us understand the operation of law, including the ways in which different legal systems interact. In Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, the ‘Banksia men’ suggests a lawlessness of Indigenous Australia, but in reading Aunty Joy Murphy’s Welcome to Country, we see Indigenous laws and lawful relations between Indigenous communities and visitors. I argue that reading these books as international lawyers compels us to consider the racist ways in which international law has denied Indigenous laws, and the ways in which we can create meeting places between European/settler colonial and Indigenous international laws.
