ABSTRACT
A critical review of standard Australian property law textbooks reveals a widespread convention in the selection and presentation of topics and key cases in property law education. While legal history is often used in introductory chapters to explain and/or legitimate the status quo, there is insufficient acknowledgement that colonisation in Australia continues. The conventional approach to teaching real property limits the capacity of today’s law graduates to develop the field and ensure its continuing viability in the 21st century. Successful legal regimes that govern the distribution and access to land have recognised the distinctiveness and importance of land through developing regulatory models that are necessarily adapted to local geophysical conditions. The model of dephysicalised property relations, by design, is potentially applicable to any valuable right so that it can facilitate the exchange of capital in whatever form it might take now and into the future.
