FutureTheLeftWant wrote on Jul 19^th, 2022 at 12:16pm:



That's the thing - they were not in control of the continent. They inhabited and  roamed over bits of it as territorial clans and tribes, clashing with neighbouring clans. They were fragmented and unaware of each other beyond their own territory. They were sovereign like territorial species are 'sovereign' over their turf.  They had no treaties, no 'inter-nation' law or rules or anything like that. In the legal sense they had no instruments or means to express anything approaching sovereignty.
Nationhood came late even to Europeans. The Germans and Italians, for example, became sovereign nations only in the late 19th Century. Even the Greeks were not a nation until 1830.

Frank wrote on Jul 19^th, 2022 at 12:36pm:
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Their society was different to ours, ergo invalid?

FutureTheLeftWant wrote on Jul 19^th, 2022 at 2:26pm:


A society isn't a nation... so easy this......

So, the actual objective of the Voice is that each individual clan or language group should be recognised as a First Nation and for the Commonwealth to make a treaty with each one, as if it were a separate state.

Aboriginal activists now want statehood, self-government and an independent legal system for each self-identifying Aboriginal clan that gains native title. And they want the Australian taxpayer to fund it all.

Australian judges, including the High Court’s Harry Gibbs, who said in 1979:

it is not possible to say … that the aboriginal people of Australia are organised as a “distinct political society separated from others”, or that they have been uniformly treated as a state … They have no legislative, executive or judicial organs by which sovereignty might be exercised. If such organs existed, they would have no powers, except such as the law of the Commonwealth, or of a State or Territory, might confer upon them. The contention that there is in Australia an aboriginal nation exercising sovereignty, even of a limited kind, is quite impossible in law to maintain.

Before the colonisation of Australia, Aboriginal people never had any sovereignty to surrender. “Sovereignty” is a term from international law, or what was called in the eighteenth century “the law of nations”. The two leading European authorities on international law at that time, Christian Wolff and Emmerich de Vattel, both argued that for a society to be a genuine nation it must have civil sovereignty over a territory and its people and, as a corollary, only nations could have genuine sovereignty.

Justice Burton’s 1836 judgment found the Aborigines did not have anything that amounted to what the British and other nations could regard as statehood or nationhood. He said they

had not attained at the first settlement to such a position in point of numbers and civilisation, and to such a form of government and laws, as to be entitled to be recognised as so many sovereign states governed by laws of their own.

Brian Ross wrote on Jul 19^th, 2022 at 10:21pm:


So which of the 22 clans at that wrecked place in the NT do they make a 'treaty' with?  A treaty with a distinct group must have historical basis in that group being a group in the first place..... since the Aborigines were many disparate groups, they were never a nation with which to make a treaty.

Tsk, tsk ...

The frequent claim that Australian Aboriginal culture is the oldest continuous culture on Earth, measured at 50,000 years, is a curious one. First, it is incorrect. This title belongs to the San people, who have existed for at least 150,000 years in southern Africa. Second, it is curious that this claim is used as proof of the value of traditional Aboriginal culture. Curious indeed, since the claim, which is a claim of conservatism par excellence, is frequently made by those who themselves subscribe to a view that culture should be dynamic, embracing change, in other words progressive. The question arises of how this strange alliance between white political progressivism and indigenous cultural conservativism came to exist and how it continues.

The favourable view of indigenous peoples has been an old companion of progressive politics. It arose after the discovery of the New World, with ideas such as Rousseau’s “noble savage” fascinating the intelligentsia of his day. This fascination extended to the reading public, who developed an insatiable hunger for stories of the otherworldly virtues and vices of people untainted by civilisation, as found in, for example, Melville’s Typee and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. These texts attracted readers not only by their descriptions of a people utterly unlike those in the Old World but also as means by which these authors placed their own civilisation in a new light. To this day, this hunger for the exotic continues, albeit under conditions of severe scarcity—those untainted by civilisation only exist in isolated pockets and the people once featured in those famous novels adopted modern lifestyles long ago.

The short version of the Uluru Statement still emphasizes this claim, but tries to cover up its implications by redefining the concept of sovereignty and tying its meaning to the one fact that is in the Aborigines favour, that they were the first to own the land on the Australian continent. The claim says in full:

Sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom … This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty. It has never been ceded or extinguished, and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown.

There are three things wrong with this statement. First, sovereignty has never been a spiritual notion. It is not a sacred tradition but a recent invention. It is a European term, unknown to Aboriginal culture before 1788, and not adopted by any of the 200 or so different languages that the hunter-gatherers used in the nineteenth century. It was adopted from European political and legal theory in the twentieth century by university-educated, urban Aboriginal activists.

Second, sovereignty is not just about ownership of the land, as the Uluru statement says. Aboriginal activists and their academic supporters have argued that, because the High Court’s Mabo judgment recognised Aboriginal clans had their own laws that made them owners of their land, they therefore also had sovereignty over those territories. However, this wrongly assumes that small tracts of land ownership entail sovereignty. No Australian who owns a farm in the country or a quarter acre block in the suburbs thereby becomes the “sovereign” of that piece of territory. Aboriginal people are legally no more privileged. In modern nations, sovereignty belongs only to national governments, not because they are landowners but because they have the necessary political authority and power.

Third, sovereignty is an absolute notion, it cannot “co-exist” between or among sovereign powers. One of them must prevail. There can only be one national government. If there are more than one, then there must be more than one nation on that territory. Neither of these would have genuine sovereignty until a civil war or other contest for sole political power resolved who actually ruled the realm. You can call shared power, where it exists, some kind of political arrangement, but it could not be sovereignty.

Infanticide—the deliberate murder of new-born infants and young children—was practised widely, and perhaps ubiquitously, among Australian Aborigines before the coming of Europeans and the imposition of Western values, which, unlike the values of pre-contact Aborigines, regarded the deliberate killing of babies and small children as murder. How common was infanticide among pre-contact Aborigines? According to University of Michigan professor of anthropology Aram Yengoyan: “Infanticide was the primary means of population control. In theory, infanticide could have been as high as 40% to 50% of all births, and the population could have survived. In actuality infanticide rates were lower, and probably ranged from 15% to 30% of all births … Presently, infanticide is no longer practiced on missions and government stations. However, differential care (physical and affective) extended to infants could be interpreted as infanticide.” (Aram Yengoyan, “Biological and Demographic Components in Aboriginal Australian Socio-Economic Organization”, Oceania, Vol. 43 (2), December 1972, p. 88.)