Australia: A New Political Geography?

ABSTRACT

Some of the most eloquent advocates of Australian Federation in the 1890s imagined that there was nothing more natural than “a nation for a continent and a continent for a nation”, as the first prime minister, Edmund Barton, put it. The reality was more complicated, as the difficult process of achieving Federation revealed. Differences between colonies, and then states, really mattered. There was a gulf between north and south, east and west that was economic, political, physical and psychological. Above all, the settler ideal of a White Australia ignored Indigenous belonging and was made meaningful only through exclusion of Asian and Pacific peoples. This lecture explores recent transformation of the nation imagined by Barton into something that would likely have dismayed him and fellow Federation founders. The pandemic reminded Australians that soft state borders could quickly turn hard, that differences between states still mattered, and that state and territory government was embedded in everyday life in ways Australians had overlooked or underestimated. Meanwhile, Indigenous sovereignty offered a different kind of challenge to conventional understandings of settler sovereignty and national space. Australians, settler and Indigenous, have received a crash course in a new political geography inhabited by First Nations peoples, each increasingly recognised by name and Country, and each with culture, language and stories it proudly calls its own.

KEYWORDS:

• Political geography
• cartography
• sovereignty
• borders
• COVID-19
• First Nations

Friends, it is an honour to deliver the 2023 Menzies Lecture. That honour is all the greater in that I am returning to one of my academic homes, King’s College London, and I am deeply grateful to Agnieszka Sobocinska and the Menzies Australia Institute for the invitation. I acknowledge the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples of the Canberra region on whose land I work and prepared tonight’s lecture.

Tonight, I want to discuss what I am suggesting might be considered a new political geography of Australia. I should clarify, first, what I am not discussing. I am not especially interested in geopolitics here, although much of what I say will touch on the continuing legacy of empire. There is also a story to be told about the growing use of the term “Indo-Pacific” as a way of expressing Australia’s regionalism, but not by me here. Nor am I concerned with electoral geography. I will not be analysing voting patterns, although my argument does have implications for Australian electoral politics, some of which I will mention in passing.

The new political geography with which I am concerned, rather, has two broad and interrelated aspects. It is about the resurgence of the states and territories of the Federation. And it is about the rise of First Nations.

My career has occurred in Australia and Britain, in a way that reminds us of the history of settler Australia as part of an imperial enterprise. Its meanings and legacies remain integral to contemporary political contention and arguments over identity in both countries. When I came to King’s to work at what was then called the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies in 2007, I came from the University of New England, a regional institution based in a town, Armidale, that had been the de facto provincial capital of one of Australia’s most famous sheepwalks. Through its leading commodity, wool, New England—with its famous families of Whites and Wrights—was linked to London and Bradford by empire and capitalism. The mighty bush was tethered to the world by iron rails paid for by loans from the City of London, and it was linked to Britain’s docks, warehouses, auction rooms and woollen mills by oceans that the Royal Navy patrolled.

The Indigenous people of New England, the Anēwan, began to figure seriously in the histories of New England from the 1980s, in archaeology and “prehistory”—especially through the work of Isabel McBryde—from a couple of decades earlier.¹ Yet even today, there are gaps in our knowledge of frontier violence. As Tom Griffiths has pointed out, “the gaps and silences in the public record might also signify”, but just what they signify, though, will invariably be contentious, as Australia’s history wars of the early 2000s indicated.² The Indigenous historian and linguist Callum Clayton-Dixon suggests that border police, as well as settler vigilantes, likely dispensed rough justice. Lieutenant George Cobban led mounted police on an expedition in February 1838 to deal with Indigenous people who had attacked shepherds and seized livestock. At least two Aboriginal warriors were shot and killed, one of them subsequently being decapitated and his head displayed, presumably as a trophy. It is hardly surprising that when he arrived in New England, the new Commissioner of Crown Lands, George Macdonald, found among local Indigenous people “a general and pervading terror of the Mounted Police”.³

The southern and western borderlands of New England saw more famous massacres during 1838, at Waterloo Creek and Myall Creek. The latter was unique in leading to the trial and execution of white perpetrators, amid much hostility from the settler population to such punishment. Here was a region whose status as part of what the French historian Fernand Braudel called wool’s “promised land”, Australia, was soaked in the cruelty of the invaders and the blood of First Nations peoples.⁴

That history was barely known in the years—amounting to almost a fifth of the 20th century—that Robert Menzies was prime minister. W. E. H. Stanner, the anthropologist, famously had the nation’s historical writing in view when he spoke in his 1968 Boyer Lectures of “The Great Australian Silence” just a couple of years after Menzies’s retirement, and a year after the 1967 referendum had brought First Nations people more fully into formal membership of the political nation.⁵ Stanner’s lectures were published in the year I was born in the northwestern Victorian town of Nhill, about 27 miles from the place of Menzies’s birth in 1894, Jeparit. That area too had been a sheepwalk, but it would in due course become better known as a wheatland.

Despite the proximity of the towns of Nhill and Jeparit, the region from which I hail is called the Wimmera, and that from which Menzies came the Mallee. Both words, like very many place names in Australia, have Aboriginal origins. Wimmera is likely a corruption of “woomera”, meaning throwing stick.⁶ Wimmera and Mallee are familiar enough terms from Australia’s old geography. Mallee is the name of the scrub found in this region, as well as others in both the southeastern and southwestern portions of the continent; it might be derived from a “water”, mali, found in southeastern Australian Aboriginal languages.⁷ “The Wimmera has always been considered the well-bred aristocrat,” the author Adam McNicol has recently commented: “The Mallee is its feral cousin.”⁸ The Wimmera, more than the Mallee, occupies a place in the elite white Australian cultural imagination through the exquisite lyrical poetry of John Shaw Neilson and the Second World War paintings of Sidney Nolan.⁹ On occasion, observers give up on distinctions and talk of the “Wimmera-Mallee”. The region is the Country of the Wotjobaluk people, as well as of other First Nations groups. At Mount Arapiles, a haunting and beautiful site of great significance to these peoples as well as a favourite among rock climbers and abseilers, native police shot Aboriginal people who had attacked a local station in 1845. The University of Newcastle’s colonial massacre map project, which I discuss more later, estimates that six Indigenous people lost their lives on this occasion.¹⁰

Jeparit itself, the place of Menzies’s birth, means “home of small birds”. There were Wotjobaluk people still living in the area when Menzies was a boy, and Ebenezer, a Moravian mission established in 1859, was not far away. Judith Brett points out that Menzies spent his childhood in a place where the signs of previous occupation by Indigenous people would have been obvious, such as in trees from which canoes had been cut. In an interview conducted with Menzies after his retirement, he recalled local Aboriginal people as gifted footballers but was otherwise fairly dismissive of their presence.¹¹ During his prime ministership, Australia pursued a policy of assimilation and cooperated with the British government in carrying out atomic testing on Australian soil, an exercise in “nuclear colonialism” that ignored the rights of Aboriginal people and damaged their health.¹²

To understand the political geography of Australia was never entirely simple, but at the time of Menzies’s political career, it did seem to have a stability that we no longer take for granted. That stability and coherence, we can see now, was an illusion: one of the many fictions that settler Australians told themselves and others about the nature of the place they had come to regard as their home. For all the sense of difference between states, they might well have recognised themselves in the words spoken by Alfred Deakin, the country’s second prime minister, at the Australasian Federation Conference in 1890, more than a decade before their Commonwealth had been founded. “In this country,” he said, “we are separated only by imaginary lines … we are a people one in blood, race, religion, and aspirations. It is impossible for any one man born in or belonging to one colony to pass to the other and to feel that he has gone to a foreign country.”¹³

In many ways, the nation seemed to conform to this vision in the decades that followed Deakin’s statement. The process by which it did so was gradual and contingent; the mere existence of a continental nation dominated by a British people did not guarantee the formation, and then the maintenance, of any particular political geography. Alan Atkinson, in the last volume of his great trilogy, The Europeans in Australia—pointedly called Nation—argues that attachments to particular colonies remained powerful even as Federation founders such as Deakin and Edmund Barton sought to realise the vision of “a nation for a continent and a continent for a nation”, as Barton put it.

What we understand today as Australian nationalism, he indicates, emerged out of a series of conversations and connections involving smaller and larger places, from the family and household through to empire and world. Atkinson says: “When a certain critical number of the Europeans in Australia could grasp in their minds the map of Australia, then, and only then, Federation could go ahead by popular consent.”¹⁴ That process was not settled in 1901. Soon after the accomplishment of Federation, there were secessionist impulses in both Queensland and Western Australia, the two colonies that had been the slowest and most reluctant to attach themselves to the emergent Commonwealth. Australia assumed control of British Papua in the early years of the Federation, and of German New Guinea as a League of Nations Mandate after the Great War. The independence of Papua New Guinea would not come until September 1975, just a few weeks before the dismissal of the Whitlam Labor government hinted that Australia’s own constitutional status was not quite fully independent.

The Commonwealth inaugurated on 1 January 1901 embodied, as it sought to transcend, differences between the six founding colonies, which were now to be called states. As Queensland’s and Western Australia’s hesitations had suggested, there was also a massive gulf between north and south, east and west that was economic, political, physical and psychological. The Northern Territory was transferred from South Australian to Commonwealth rule in 1911, but it was arguably not until the Second World War that the north—thinly populated with whites, more thickly populated with Indigenous people, and containing multiracial communities that included Asians and Afghans—was brought more fully into the political economy and policy order taken for granted in the south and east.¹⁵ Western Australians, meanwhile, had voted to secede in 1933 but, rather strangely, were paired only with South Australians in voting to give more power to the federal government at a referendum in 1944.¹⁶ Territory was carved out of New South Wales to create a federal territory before the First World War, but Canberra became the capital only in 1927, taking over from Melbourne. The interwar years saw an upsurge of new state activity, especially in northern and southern New South Wales—a product of economic crisis and political hostility to the Labor government of the day in Sydney, but also reflecting a persistent sense of separateness that was especially pointed in the northern region of New England. Above all, the settler ideal of a White Australia founded on British sovereignty ignored Indigenous belonging, rejected First Nations sovereignties, and was made meaningful only through exclusion of Asian and Pacific peoples.

By the 1940s, much of the uncertainty in the story I have told so far seemed to have dissipated. The war itself appeared to have given a great boost to national identity. The prime minister who had followed Menzies after a 40-day interregnum, John Curtin, was peculiarly suited to the embodiment of continental nationhood, as a Victorian-born man who had moved to Western Australia and represented the seat of Fremantle. The power of the Commonwealth greatly increased under the war’s impact; it was hard to find any area of Australian life on which it did not have its mitts. The sense of threat from Japan had been a galvanising force, the nation’s survival understood as both a close call and a vindication of white rule. The postwar immigration program that extended to mass immigration from continental Europe, far from being seen as a quest for diversity, was intended to boost the size of the white population to deter any Asian power, notably a revived Japan, from a future attack.

That was the country Menzies inherited when he won the federal election of December 1949. The launching pad of his own career as a young barrister had been the Engineers' Case of 1920, which he argued before the High Court. It was a landmark in adopting a much more expansive understanding of the powers of the federal parliament than the early High Court had favoured. And in retirement he would review this case and others in delivering a series of lectures at the University of Virginia published as Central Power in the Australian Commonwealth: An Examination of the Growth of Commonwealth Power in the Australian Federation (1967).¹⁷ In the 1950s and 1960s, while the Liberal Party under Menzies remained formally committed to preservation of states’ rights, the power and scope of central government continued to increase. Later Liberal Party prime ministers have performed a similar sleight of hand to Menzies. John Howard spoke of “aspirational nationalism”, by which he seems to have meant that state and territory Labor governments—he faced eight of them by the time he lost office—should be reduced to glorified municipal status.¹⁸

The COVID-19 pandemic therefore served as a reminder of all the ways in which state and territory governments were embedded in people's daily lives in ways that Canberra was not. Their state or territory government got to decide when they would be allowed out of the house and for how long. It determined whether they would be allowed to travel across town, or out of town, to visit family. It decided who came into the state and the conditions under which they came: I pointedly adapt a phrase that Howard had used as an anti-asylum-seeker slogan at the 2001 election because it is a reminder of the nation’s larger history of border control, encompassing both “undesirable” people and contagious diseases.¹⁹ Most Australians had come to assume their internal borders, however, were soft or permeable. They now became hard, for the first time since the pandemic of 1919.²⁰ The images of people assembling at the New South Wales and Queensland border in September 2021 to celebrate Father’s Day were touching, even as they demonstrated the absurdity of some restrictions: families hugged across plastic barriers, which was probably not a good way to prevent the spread of a virus, even as officials handed out masks.²¹

With uneven levels of success, state and territory governments took on responsibility for hotel quarantine, despite that field being a formal Commonwealth government responsibility. Sub-national government decided which businesses could continue to operate, when schools opened and closed, and whether sporting events would go ahead and under what conditions. The Victorian government notoriously even closed a children’s playground.²² With their control over hospitals, state and territory governments were necessarily at the heart of pandemic management. For a time, chief health officers became among the most recognisable faces in the nation, even to the point of acquiring celebrity status. The merchandise celebrating the comely Victorian chief health officer, Professor Brett Sutton, might puzzle future second-hand dealers.

Daily media conferences greatly elevated the national profile of state leaders, which some were able to build into remarkable election victories. Mark McGowan’s Labor government reduced the senior partner in the Western Australian coalition, the Liberals, to two seats in the Legislative Assembly at the 2021 election, thereby making it junior partner to the rural-based Nationals—who managed the princely sum of four seats. The Labor Party won the other 53. A survey taken in mid-2020 found that 99 per cent of Western Australians approved of the government's handling of the pandemic.²³ Critically for the nation’s economy, the iron ore mines remained open and the nightmare that COVID-19 would be let loose in remote Indigenous communities in northern Australia was avoided. The Victorian government, although much maligned in the media and among federal politicians for its rigorous and lengthy lockdowns, won the 2022 election with a majority just one seat smaller than at the previous election.

The federal government was far from inactive in all of this, of course: it had power over the nation’s external borders. But having relinquished control of hotel quarantine to the states, it had effectively outsourced decisions about how many people—Australians or foreigners—could be allowed into the country at any particular time. Federal government had much greater financial clout than any state government, and it initiated expensive schemes under names such as JobKeeper and JobSeeker to keep businesses afloat and to pay people to stay home. It did not keep the country out of a recession—its first for 30 years—but things could have been worse, both in economic terms and in the number of infections and fatalities. The doubling of the unemployment benefit dragged many people out of a poverty to which they returned once the scheme was discontinued. The federal government faltered in 2021, making a mess of a national vaccination scheme and failing to ensure adequate supply of testing kits. Its punishment at the May 2022 federal election was connected with this failure, although there were also other reasons for Labor’s victory.

Did these dramatic events shift Australians’ sense of their own political geography? Judith Brett, one of the country’s most astute commentators, thinks so. She believes that state-based identities have been strengthening for some time, based on three pillars. First, the states had in any case retained distinctive political cultures after Federation; these differences had never been obliterated by the rising power of national government. Secondly, neoliberalism since the 1970s, while greatly undermining the capacity of federal government, had not had quite the same devastating effect on the states. States had retained “core responsibilities, such as health, education, policing and emergency services” and therefore “more capacity” than Canberra. Brett might be a bit sanguine about the performance of state and territory governments here, but she goes on to suggest that another effect of the neoliberal revolution was that the economic experiences of people living in different states has tended to vary quite significantly, despite constitutional provisions ensuring some equalising movement of funds between them.²⁴

Brett thought that COVID-19 consolidated rather than created the strengthening of attachment to individual states. Certainly, the states and territories had for several decades displayed much greater initiative and creativity in several areas than the federal government. They had acquired a strengthened capacity to borrow money in their own right in 1994, which has provided for quite dramatic increases in spending on infrastructure. But they have also been creative in areas such as human rights and social policy. While marriage equality stalled federally, they introduced civil partnerships for people of the same sex. State and territory parliaments have passed dying-with-dignity legislation and have removed abortion from criminal law. Some have established human rights charters: the closest one comes to a bill of rights in the Australian context. They have initiated treaty processes with Indigenous peoples, a quest that faltered in the Commonwealth in the late 1980s but which has been revived via the Uluru Statement from the Heart. While the Albanese federal Labor government prepared Australians to vote in a referendum on the First Nations Voice to Parliament, the South Australian Labor government simply went ahead and legislated its own local version.²⁵ In such ways, states have also been places for policy experimentation.²⁶

The mention here of Indigenous policy suggests another way in which Australia is now experiencing a new political geography: the rise of First Nations. To be historically and geographically literate in Australia has shifted in recent years and it is a story that, as far as I am aware, largely remains to be told.²⁷ It is entangled in the complex history of native title, which came in the wake of the Mabo decision of 1992, the Native Title Act of 1993 and the Wik decision of 1996, since that revolution prompted the emergence of legal entities across the whole nation controlled by First Nations peoples with a right to negotiate on their behalf. Their existence and activities—such as demonstrating continuing connection to Country and, where they are successful, the administration of land and waters under native title—has inevitably contributed to growing identification with First Nations among Indigenous peoples as well as their recognition among the general population. There are also instances of regional agreements between state governments and Indigenous people, such as that between the Western Australian government and the Noongar peoples of that state’s southwest. Some legal scholars have argued that it is Australia’s first treaty with First Nations people.²⁸

Here is a story of cultural resurgence that is shaping how Indigenous people understand their own identity and how public discourse is conducted. The term “Aborigine” is now mainly out, although there are Indigenous people who continue to use it as a distinctive identifier.²⁹ “Aboriginal” and “Indigenous” are also increasingly treated as lacking precision and are too generalised to be fully acceptable. The website of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies explains: “Many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people do not like to be referred to as ‘Indigenous’ because it is considered too generic and can be applied to all indigenous peoples of the world. There is a growing preference for First Nations Australians as a more encompassing term, because while it also is generic, it acknowledges the diversity of Australia’s First Peoples.”³⁰

“Noongar”—signifying the First Nations of southwest Western Australia—is still in use for it refers to a group of peoples with strong cultural affinities and mutually intelligible languages. Nonetheless, there is a trend towards greater precision here, too, in the use by Noongar people of more specific language and place names such as Whadjuk Noongar, in the Perth area. Koori is used by many First Nations people in Victoria and parts of New South Wales, and Murri for people in parts of northern New South Wales and Queensland. Palawa is in use among some Aboriginal Tasmanians and Meriam among Torres Strait Islanders. All of these terms, which reflect First Nations cultural resurgence of the later decades of the 20th century, express forms of identity that are more local, regional or state-based than national or pan-Aboriginal. And they are changing as both politics and knowledge evolve.

When a First Nations person in Australia refers to “my mob”, they do not normally mean Indigenous people, or Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, although “mob”—without a definite article—can sometimes be used in a general sense for Aboriginal people as a whole. But a reference to mob more commonly means a particular “community”, “family” and—increasingly—a “people” or their “nation”. They are of the Wiradjuri, Gamilaraay, Ngarrindjeri, Pitjantjatjara and Arrernte nations, among many others. In Canberra, we normally acknowledge the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples at the commencement of public events, although the latter gained official government recognition and an apology only in April 2023 after launching court proceedings.³¹ Basic competence in the new political geography can require more than a knowledge of which nation is which. In Victoria, the Kulin are considered an alliance of five nations in southwestern Victoria, including Melbourne. In much of Melbourne, now also referred to as Naarm by many people, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, you would normally acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. In Sydney, the Gadigal people of the Eora nation are acknowledged.

As this discussion suggests, rituals such as the Welcome to Country, the Acknowledgement of Country and smoking ceremonies such as those with which the federal parliament has opened since 2008 have been important in educating the public in this deep-time political geography. The reclamation of language is another aspect of the story and one of the critical ways in which First Nations people are themselves contributors to a wider transformative process. My colleague Laura Rademaker, in her study of the relationship between missionaries and Anindilyakwa-speaking peoples on Groote Eylandt, draws attention to the role of the English language as an instrument of settler power, and examines how Indigenous people used their multilingualism to resist, redirect or elide domination.³² The publication of dictionaries of First Nations languages has contributed to a wider cultural resurgence. In Canberra, Ngunnawal people have been painstakingly building up the word count of a language that had almost been obliterated: such an exercise in community-based vernacular language recovery typically relies on a combination of colonial-era records and the memories of older people. They run workshops to teach basic words and phrases. The high school closest to our home in Canberra offers students a unit in Indigenous languages and culture.³³ A few settler Australians now deliver their acknowledgement of Traditional Owners in the relevant First Nations language—in my own city, notably the federal Member for Fenner and government minister Andrew Leigh. Andrew explained to me that language must be taught by an Elder; it is a part of the protocol that one does not then teach it to others. Andrew was inspired by the way that Māori words and customs have been so successfully integrated into the New Zealand mainstream. The ACT Legislative Assembly also opens its daily sittings with a Ngunnawal language acknowledgement.

The new political geography, like the old, also rests on maps. I have already mentioned—as well as drawn on—a project led by the eminent and pioneering historian of Aboriginal Australia Professor Lyndall Ryan of the University of Newcastle. Normally called the Massacre Map, its official title is Colonial Frontier Massacres in Australia, 1788–1930. It has sought to build up a picture of the massacres of First Nations peoples, as well as the deaths of settlers in frontier violence, based on a range of sources, and it is necessarily an accumulation of evidence of local happenings. But the choice to plot the massacres on a map necessarily gives the project a national aspect, an emphasis reinforced by the decision to partner with the Guardian in making the research accessible to a wider audience via the title The Killing Times.³⁴ In that sense, it perhaps has some affinities with the popularising aims of the New York Times’ 1619 Project, but the Massacre Map differs in being a scholarly project based in a university, conducted by academic researchers, and funded by the Australian Research Council. It sits well with the truth-telling call of the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

There is, however, a far more influential map that belongs to the story I tell today. It is the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AITSIS) Map of Indigenous Australia. Created by anthropologist David Horton for the 1996 publication The Encyclopedia of Aboriginal Australia, it has become widely used across a range of domains. It was by no means the first effort to create a map of this kind—Norman Tindale’s from 1974 is the best-known earlier example—but it has become the most influential. As Tony Bennett has pointed out, the map brings together a number of different kinds of knowledge, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous: in particular, it mediates anthropological and Indigenous knowledge and frames it within what Bennett calls a “nationalist cartography”. That is, what we have here is a map of Australia, based on the political community that formally came into being on 1 January 1901 as the Commonwealth of Australia. But in place of the colonies that became states in that new entity, we have Aboriginal collectivities of various kinds. Different “language, social or nation groups”—in many respects, an untidy collation of different kinds of entity—are subjected to the disciplines of European map-making.³⁵ Importantly, these are not those “corridors or pathways of knowledge” that criss-cross the continent, which the term coined in the 1980s by the English writer Bruce Chatwin, “Songlines”, seeks to capture.³⁶ These are not Dreaming tracks, or at least not explicitly or deliberately so. The Indigenous knowledge embedded in the AITSIS map might usefully be considered a translation. As a recognisable map of Australia, however, one that invites us to think nationally, it sits as a direct descendant of the settler cartographic imagination explored by Atkinson and others for the Federation era. In this adaptation, we are invited to glimpse something of the diversity of Indigenous Australia, even as that variety is rendered in a way that makes it legible to a national audience composed of mainly non-Indigenous people. But not only the non-Indigenous: the maps produced by both Tindale and Horton have been widely used by First Nations peoples in making native title applications.

That paradox—of a diversity among First Nations people that is also made “national”—is present in the politics of Indigenous constitutional recognition. The regional dialogues that were held in the lead-up to the adoption of the Uluru Statement from the Heart registered something of this diversity. Here was how a synthesis of those dialogues, “Our Story”, began, which was included in the final report of the National Referendum: “Our First Nations are extraordinarily diverse cultures, living in an astounding array of environments, multi-lingual across many hundreds of languages and dialects. The continent was occupied by our people and the footprints of our ancestors traversed the entire landscape. Our songlines covered vast distances, uniting peoples in shared stories and religion. The entire land and seascape is named, and the cultural memory of our old people is written there.”³⁷

This extraordinary diversity, however, somehow ultimately has to be represented in a particular institution, a Voice to Parliament, that would necessarily be national even while backed by regional organisation. Stan Grant, a leading journalist and Wiradjuri man, explored the paradox in a recent article. Many of his own people, he reported, were telling him they did not understand the Voice. “These people live close to the earth and the Voice conversation — like all things of politics — feels distant,” he wrote. The impression Grant leaves here is that the abstractions of formal politics are in tension with a Wiradjuri identity embedded in intimate knowledge of, and connection with, Country. “Wiradjuri people are rebuilding our nation,” he explained. “We are reviving our language and practising our ceremonies.” One old uncle had told Grant that “he doesn't want Indigenous people from outside our nation speak for us”. The nation here is Wiradjuri.³⁸ And in the sometimes bitter debate over the Voice to Parliament, we have seen an Arrernte Traditional Owner in Alice Springs, Graeme Smith, criticise the conservative senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price for presuming to speak on behalf of Aboriginal people in that town. “She’s not Arrernte,” he explained, “she’s not from Alice Springs. She’s from Yuendumu. She’s a Walpiri woman getting on TV discrediting the Arrernte country of Alice Springs. We do not like that.”³⁹

The terrain here seems to me a quite different one from the famous referendum of 1967, when more than nine in every ten Australians voted to change their constitution. We are now in an environment where arguments over sovereignty cannot be so easily avoided. What are the respective claims of First Nations sovereignty against those asserted through British rule? “We have coexisted as First Nations on this land for at least 60,000 years,” declares “Our Story” in the Referendum Council report. “Our sovereignty pre-existed the Australian state and has survived it … The unfinished business of Australia’s nationhood includes recognising the ancient jurisdictions of First Nations law.”⁴⁰ “Will the Voice lead to treaty? What about our sovereignty?” asks Stan Grant, in his efforts to channel the confusions of fellow Wiradjuri.⁴¹

These are expressions of Australia’s new political geography, but they are also products of tensions inherent in the settler-colonial project since its inception. What we are seeing here is not the kind of break-up of Australia of which conservatives have warned for decades in the pages of right-wing magazines such as Quadrant. Rather, we are seeing a resurgence of the claims of a legal pluralism that historians have found in the very foundation of British Australia in 1788. Legal historians have shown that sovereignty in early Australia did not function like a blanket, covering all people and territory from the moment the invaders planted the flag. Rather, sovereignty came in a more gradual, contingent, negotiated and partial manner, as people and land were brought within its scope through the operation of the law.⁴² The dominant settler narrative, however, is “of a singular national law under singular sovereignty”, a position asserted in the Mabo decision of 1992, even as it recognised native title rights under the common law.⁴³

The lived reality in Australia today is of the survival and even resurgence of First Nations law and sovereignty. “The Law was violated by the coming of the British to Australia. This truth needs to be told,” declares “Our Story”.⁴⁴ The years immediately ahead will reveal what kind of nation emerges out of these contending stories about Australia’s deep history and political geography.

Acknowledgements

This lecture was delivered at King's College London on 20 April 2023. The author thanks Malcolm Allbrook, Joshua Black and Emily Gallagher for their advice.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Isabel McBryde, Aboriginal Prehistory in New England: An Archaeological Survey of Northeastern New South Wales (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1974).

2 Tom Griffiths, “The Frontier Fallen,” Eureka Street, March 2003, https://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article/the-frontier-fallen.

3 Callum Clayton-Dixon, Surviving New England: A History of Aboriginal Resistance & Resilience through the First Forty Years of the Colonial Apocalypse (Armidale, NSW: Anaiwan Language Revival Program, 2019), 23–24.

4 Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible (London: Fontana Press, 1981), 326.

5 W. E. H. Stanner, After the Dreaming; Black and White Australians--An Anthropologist’s View (Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1969).

6 Bruce Moore, ed., The Australian National Dictionary: Australian Words and their Origins: M–Z, Second Edition (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2016), 922.

7 “Mallee (Habit),” Wikipedia, accessed 17 August 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mallee_%28habit%29; Richard Broome et al., Mallee Country: Land, People, History (Clayton, VIC: Monash University Publishing, 2019).

8 Adam McNicol et al., The Wimmera: A Journey through Western Victoria (Ballarat East: Ten Bag Press, 2021), 10.

9 Frank Bongiorno, “The Wimmera,” The Top Paddock, 30 June 2021, https://www.kcl.ac.uk/the-wimmera.

10 Colonial Frontier Massacres in Australia, 1788–1930, University of Newcastle, accessed 2 April 2023, https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/detail.php?r=548.

11 Troy Bramston, Robert Menzies: The Art of Politics (Melbourne: Scribe Publications, 2019), 18; McNicol et al., The Wimmera, 22; Robert Kenny, The Lamb Enters the Dreaming: Nathanael Pepper & the Ruptured World (Carlton North, VIC: Scribe Publications, 2007); Judith Brett, Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People (Chippendale, NSW: Pan Macmillan Publishers, 1992), 166–67.

12 Jessica Urwin, “The British Empire’s Dr Strangelove? Ernest Titterton and the Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia,” History Australia 18, no. 4 (October 2021): 714–36.

13 Robert S. Brain, Official Record of the Proceedings and Debates of the Australasia Federation Conference, 1890, Held in The Parliament House, Melbourne (Melbourne: Government Printer, 1890), 77.

14 Alan Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia, Volume Three: Nation (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2014), viii.

15 Tim Rowse, Indigenous and Other Australians since 1901 (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2017), 200–12 and Tim Rowse, “Indigenous Heterogeneity,” Australian Historical Studies 45, no. 3 (September 2014): 303–7.

16 Stuart Macintyre, Australia’s Boldest Experiment: War and Reconstruction in the 1940s (Sydney: NewSouth, 2015), 269.

17 Sir Robert Menzies, Central Power in the Australian Commonwealth: An Examination of the Growth of Commonwealth Power in the Australian Federation (London: Cassell, 1967).

18 The political history I have narrated in the foregoing paragraphs relies on Frank Bongiorno, Dreamers and Schemers: A Political History of Australia (Collingwood, VIC: La Trobe University Press in conjunction with Black Inc., 2022), chap. 4–9.

19 Alison Bashford, “At the Border: Contagion, Immigration, Nation,” Australian Historical Studies 33, no. 120 (October 2002): 344–58.

20 Mark Finnane, “Governing in a Pandemic: Law and Government in Australia, 1919,” Australian Historical Studies 53, no. 2 (April 2022): 266–83.

21 “Covid: Separated Australian Families Swap Hugs at Border on Father's Day,” BBC News, 6 September 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-58458978.

22 Donna Lu, “Is It Necessary to Close Children’s Playgrounds during Covid Outbreaks in Australia?,” Guardian, 20 August 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/aug/20/its-risky-is-it-necessary-to-close-childrens-playgrounds-during-covid-outbreaks-in-australia.

23 Andrew Markus, Mapping Social Cohesion 2020 (Caulfield East, VIC: Scanlon Foundation, Monash University, 2020), 52, https://scanloninstitute.org.au/report2020.

24 Judith Brett, “COVID Exposed our Fractured National Identity, but State-Based Loyalties Were Rising Long Before,” The Conversation, 20 October 2021, https://theconversation.com/covid-exposed-our-fractured-national-identity-but-state-based-loyalties-were-rising-long-before-170017.

25 Rory McClaren and Stacey Pestrin, “SA Becomes First Australian Jurisdiction to Create First Nations Voice to Parliament as Historic Bill Passes,” ABC News, 26 March 2023, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-26/sa-first-jurisdiction-to-establish-voice-to-parliament/102146780.

26 Geoff Gallop, “The Federation,” in Dear Mr Rudd, ed. Robert Manne (Melbourne: Black Inc. Agenda, 2008), 50.

27 But the transformation is registered in W. S. Arthur, F. Morphy, and P. L. Dodson, eds., Macquarie Atlas of Indigenous Australia, Second Edition (Sydney: Macquarie, 2019).

28 Dominic O’Sullivan, “Treaties and Re-setting the Colonial Relationship: Lessons for Australia from the Treaty of Waitangi,” Ethnicities 21, no. 6 (202): 1070–92; Harry Hobbs and George Williams, “The Noongar Settlement: Australia’s First Treaty,” Sydney Law Review 40, no. 1 (2018): 1–38.

29 Adam Carey, “School Library Discards Outdated and Offensive Books on Colonisation,” Age, 18 February 2023, https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/school-library-discards-outdated-and-offensive-books-on-colonisation-20230216-p5cky4.html; Louise Swinn, “Getting in the Good Books at Northcote High School Library,” AEU News, 5 December 2022, https://news.aeuvic.asn.au/in-depth/getting-in-the-good-books-at-northcote-high-school-library/.

30 “Australia’s First Peoples,” Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, accessed 2 April 2023, https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/australias-first-peoples.

31 Genevieve Jacobs, “Ngambri People Challenge Government Recognition of Traditional Owners in ACT Supreme Court,” Riotact, 2 August 2022, https://the-riotact.com/ngambri-people-challenge-government-recognition-of-traditional-owners-in-act-supreme-court/580564.

32 Laura Rademaker, Found in Translation: Many Meanings on a North Australian Mission (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2018).

33 Emma Thompson, “Ngunnawal People Are Revitalising their Traditional Language, One Canberra Workshop at a Time,” ABC News, 11 April 2022, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-04-11/ngunnawal-people-determined-to-revitalise-aboriginal-language/100980558.

34 “The Killing Times,” Guardian, accessed 2 April 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/ng-interactive/2019/mar/04/massacre-map-australia-the-killing-times-frontier-wars.

35 Tony Bennett, “Museum Transactions: Negotiating Knowledges, Governing Cultures,” Humanities Australia 9 (2018): 20.

36 Margo Neale and Lynne Kelly, Songlines: The Power and Promise (Port Melbourne: Thames & Hudson, 2020), 52; Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987).

37 Final Report of the Referendum Council (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2017), 16, https://ulurustatemdev.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Referendum_Council_Final_Report_2017.pdf.

38 Stan Grant, “Many of my Own People Tell Me They Don’t Understand the Voice,” ABC News, 19 February 2023, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-02-19/stan-grant-voice-to-parliament-wiradjuri-land-aboriginal-history/101992012.

39 Julia Bergin, “Forget Dutton, Alice Springs Locals Say Jacinta Nampijinpa Price Is the Real Problem,” Crikey, 14 April 2023, https://www.crikey.com.au/2023/04/14/jacinta-price-peter-dutton-alice-springs-locals/.

40 Final Report of the Referendum Council, 16.

41 Grant, “Many of my Own People”.

42 Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788–1836 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).

43 Shaunnagh Dorsett, “Plural Legal Orders: Concept and Practice,” in The Cambridge Legal History of Australia, ed. Peter Cane, Lisa Ford, and Mark McMillan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 34.

44 Final Report of the Referendum Council, 17.