ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how differing understandings of what constitutes knowledge help explain the apparent failure to reach a common ground of agreement between members of the judiciary, anthropologists and Aboriginal claimants in Australian courts in the Hindmarsh Island Bridge case and the Yorta Yorta Native Title claim. It explores a narratological approach to framing the problem of the multiplicity of knowledges. The chapter considers the ways in which knowledge is structured by spatial and temporal narratives and how these spatio/temporal narratives differ between knowledge traditions. It examines the ways in which the spatiality and mobility of knowledge are revealed in the conception of Australia as terra nullius and in the conception of Aborigines as 'wanderers'. The chapter also considers the ways narratives of spatiality and temporality produce misunderstandings, conflicts, collisions, and occasional coalescences in examples of the forensic encounter of differing knowledge traditions.
