Anthropology and change over the ‘land rights era’: Towards treaties?

Abstract

Australia has made no treaties with its Indigenous peoples. Despite that, over the past five decades (the ‘land rights era’ of the title), Australia has granted proportionally more land area to Indigenous interests than have other, treaty-making Anglo settler colonies (Canada, the United States, New Zealand). Despite complexities of comparison by area, an order of difference is clearly discernible. After comparing these countries, this article examines legal and political changes involved in the transformation from no ‘Indigenous estate’ in Australia to a comparatively large one, and sketches the role anthropologists have played in land and native title claims which has enlarged the Indigenous estate. Subsequent articles in this issue treat the kinds of change that anthropologists, in their commitment to close ethnographic work, have been observing at this intersection of law and anthropology. This article concludes by considering directions in which land and native title claims seem to be moving.