ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. Anthony Martin Fernando lived on the fringes of the colonised and settled lands of his ancestors in the vicinity of Sydney, New South Wales, in the 1860s. Arabunna elder Kevin Buzzacott gave evidence before Justice Crispin in the genocide case, Nulyarimma, in which the tension between the state and First Nations legal and political systems was highlighted. As an effective instrument UNDRIP is impotent, unable to be used in moving anywhere or shifting the matrix of colonial power. Our First Nation's legal systems are embedded in our relationships to the natural world and that which I have described as Raw Law: a natural system of obligations and benefits, flowing from an Aboriginal ontology. The West is obsessed by dreams of wealth and fuelled by a colonial history, which justified and constructed international law out of the dispossession and genocide of Indigenous Peoples.
