Of "social ties" and "savage hordes": the denial of indigenous sovereignty in Australia

Abstract

This paper addresses issues arising from the denial by the Australian Government of a Treaty with the Indigenous peoples of Australia. In particular, it attempts to explain why such a Treaty was never signed with the Indigenous peoples during the period of British colonial rule, and why it has consistently been denied by successive post-colonial governments. The starting point of many arguments for a Treaty between the Indigenous peoples of Australia and the Australian Government is that such a document would finally consolidate recognition of Indigenous sovereignty. Such sovereignty, it is argued, consists in the fact that this continent was not a terra nullius when it was ‘discovered’ by white men, but was already occupied, and that the assertion of British sovereignty was based on the denial of a prior Indigenous sovereignty. This sort of explanation however, overlooks the crucial feature of the modern discourse of sovereignty, namely that sovereignty only inheres in those peoples who have formed themselves into a properly constituted society. The ‘sovereignty’ of the Indigenous peoples of Australia was not recognised, in other words, because it was believed that they had not so constituted themselves, and this belief has continued to shape the administration of Indigenous peoples by both colonial and post-colonial governments well into the twentieth-century. What is significant about this view is that the denial of a Treaty indicates not simply a refusal to acknowledge any Indigenous sovereignty, but an unwillingness to recognise the collective identities, customs, traditions, cultures, and indeed the survival and revival of the Indigenous peoples of this land. Show more