ABSTRACT
Prior to the invasion of our territories there was no consciousness of our nakedness; the awareness of nakedness came with the clothed coloniser. Colonisation brought an end to Raw Law and nakedness as one knew, lived and felt it. In an essay of 1532, De India et De Jure Belli Reflections, Francisco de Vitoria recognised that while title to land was vested in First Nations Peoples, the lands could be surrendered in a 'just war'. The effects of state protectionist and assimilationist policies instituted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries remain alive today in Nunga communities across Australia. In 1842 in Adelaide Moorehouse, the Protector of Aborigines, recommended the practice of 'locking up the Natives for 24 hours'. In 1825 Judge Barron Field of the Supreme Court of NSW commented on the old people who appeared before him as being 'Without faculties of reflection, judgement or foresight; they are incapable of civilisation'.
