Rites and Rights

Abstract

History, as we know, has a way of repeating itself, though often with a twist. Some seventy years ago in the course of an attempt to assess as best he could the social relations of man to land in Aboriginal Australia, B. Malinowski (1913:150-51) found reasons to distrust Sir George Grey's claim that in certain Aboriginal societies 'individual property in land was the only positive' form of land holding. Grey and G.S. Lang, Malinowski argued, were to a certain extent inspired by a humanitarian tendency, namely to show that the Australian Aborigines were not quite without ideas of property in relation to land, and that they were wronged by the white settlers, and thus deserved compensation for the loss of their hunting-grounds.