ABSTRACT
If the history of the National Native Title Tribunal has a single motif, it is captured in the very incongruity of the organisations title. The discursive connotations of the name suggest a powerful decision-making body, but in actuality the Tribunal had few such powers. Conscious of the possible tensions between the two roles of dealing with future acts and mediating native title claims, early in 1995, the Tribunal divided its principal operations between claims' and 'future acts' units which ran quite distinct operations. One of the central statutory puzzles that the Tribunal had to solve was what, exactly, the resolution of native title claims was really all about. The metaphor of 'poets and slaves' is meant as an evocation of the contrast within the Tribunal between those who advocated broad visions and others who understood their role in more constrained terms, serving the interests of the organisation in implementing a particular policy conception of the statute.
