Celsus and Chatwin go Walkabout
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Paola Carbone
Abstract
A reading of Bruce Chatwin’s well-known (fictional) travel book The Songlines is the starting point for an analysis of the development of legal rules on Aborigines’ rights to land. Two different, but deeply interrelated, lines of reasoning will be followed: the first one will ponder on the ancient Western principle of Terra Australis as terra incognita: disregarding the Aboriginal knowledge and perception of the territory as a complex net of songs (narrations), the British re-mapped, that is re-invented, the Australian geography in order to rule the continent according to their cultural paradigms. The second one will debate the three legal representations of Australia as terra nullius, as land without property and, after the Mabo (n. 2) decision in 1992, as land of fairness and justice. Celsus’s maxim “ius est ars boni et aequi” will help to understand both the living symbiotic relationship Aboriginal peoples have with the land, and the reason why, prior to the British settlement, Australia had been possibly described as a “land without property”, but also how Aborigines were forced to cope with the Western notion of property through the implementation of the Land Rights Act of 1976, and even through the same enforcement of the native title doctrine and the Native Title Act. The claim to a legitimate power and the actual practice of an expert power are points at issue.
Note
This paper is a result of the joint work of the authors. However, paragraphs 1 and 2 were written by Paola Carbone; paragraphs 3, 4 and 5 by Giuseppe Rossi.
©2015 by De Gruyter
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Focus
- Focus: Shakespeare and the Law
- Weak Kings and Perverted Symbolism. How Shakespeare Treats the Doctrine of the King’s Two Bodies
- Free Will and Folly in As You Like It
- Romeo and Juliet: The Importance of a Name
- Unreliable Sources for Law: Dying Declarations in Shakespeare’s King John, Othello & King Lear
- Disruptions and Negotiations of Identity in Act 1 of Shakespeare’s Othello
- Research
- Illegal Search and Seizure, Due Process, and the Rights of the Accused: The Voices of Power in the Rhetoric of Los Angeles Police Chief William H. Parker
- The Judge’s Voice: Literary and Legal Emblemata
- Power and the Trial: The Tension Between Voices and Silence
- Voice, Authority and the Law in Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang
- Silence, Power and Suicide in Michael Cunningham’s The Hours
- Celsus and Chatwin go Walkabout
- Representing the Unrepresentable: Making Law Anyway?
- Book Reviews
- Gary Watt: Dress, Law and Naked Truth. A Cultural Study of Fashion and Form
- José Calvo González: Direito curvo
