ABSTRACT
This chapter is an overview, first of the long genesis of native title, followed by an account of the Mabo case and then a precis of the legislative system in operation. The processes of native title are infamously labyrinthine and so a digest of their design is inevitably something of a catalogue of winding passages. The Native Title Act 1993 (NTA) created a system under which Indigenous people could lodge claims for the recognition of native title over land or waters in Australia with a newly established body—the National Native Title Tribunal. The NTA was difficult legislation to understand (once described as like attempting to read porridge); not only intrinsically complex, but open-ended. One way of interrogating the meaning of the widespread embrace of cross-cultural communication is to understand its implications for the wider distribution and exercise of power within the native title system.
