Celsus and Chatwin go Walkabout

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.