9.15 Registration
9.45 Welcome
9.50 Introduction
10.00 Opening Address
11.00 Morning Tea
11.30 Pastoral Leases
12.30 Lunch
2.00 Re-imagining the Nation: Mabo and the New Australian History
3.00 Afternoon Tea
3.30-4.30 Mabo and Re-creating the Heritage of Australia
6.00-8.00 RECEPTION hosted by the Deputy High Commissioner for Australia, Miss Rosaleen McGovern
Australia in the Age of Mabo, edited by Bain Attwood
(Allen and Unwin, 1996)
9.15 Cross-Cultural Management of Knowledge in Proof of Native Title
10.15 Lessons for Mabo from the Northern Territory Land Rights Legislation
11.15 Morning Tea
11.45 CRA Exploration and Mine Development in Australia after Mabo
12.45 Lunch
2.00 The Implications for Western Australia of the Commonwealth Native Title Act
3.00 Reflections on Aboriginal Land Rights
4.00 Afternoon tea and close of conference
Never has such an outstanding range of activists and experts on Australian Aboriginal land rights been gathered together in London. And never has their gathering been so timely. The High Court of Australia's Mabo judgment of 1992 has revolutionised Australian politics, history, culture and law. Controversy about the effectiveness, scope and impact of the Mabo judgment and Commonwealth Native Title Act (1993) continues in Australia, and the recent election of a Liberal/National Party federal government has increased uncertainty about the likely way forward. The conference will provide an opportunity to assess the political, economic, cultural and practical challenges of Aboriginal land rights, past and future.
How is Native Title being implemented in Australia today? Is it getting 'land under people's feet', to use Noel Pearson's expression? What are the most controversial issues facing the policy makers? How are business and industry working with Native Title? Are there continuing differences between state and federal governments on the issue? Will the newly elected Howard Government differ from the Keating Government in its handling of Aboriginal land rights? How has Mabo changed Australian politics, history and culture? What is its impact on the way Aborigines and settler Australians see and negotiate with one another? How do Aboriginal land rights intersect with other national debates about identity, reconciliation, heritage and the republic?
Noel Pearson is Executive Director of the Cape York Land Council and was prominent in the post-Mabo negotiations between Aboriginal people and the Australian Government. He will give the Opening Address at the conference.
Henry Reynolds is Australian Research Council Senior Fellow at James Cook University, Townsville. He is the author of the prize-winning The Other Side of the Frontier, as well as Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers and Land and The Law of the Land. He was a member of the Ministerial Reference Group on Aboriginal Education which reported recently, frequently provides informal advice on land rights claims for lawyers, researchers, and land councils, and has been a respected commentator on Aboriginal history in the media for many years. His most recent book is entitled The Fate of a Free People. He will speak about what is currently the most controversial question relating to Mabo, pastoral leases. Pastoral leases cover large areas of Australia - yet currently there is no certainty as to whether Aboriginal native title has been extinguished on this land. It is therefore an issue of great consequence. It is also of great interest because the issue is a very old one dating back to the policies created by the Colonial Office in the 1840s. Reynolds will analyse the historical origins of pastoral leases and their contemporary status.
Bain Attwood is Senior Lecturer in History at Monash University. He is the author of The Making of the Aborigines, co-editor of Power, Knowledge and the Aborigines, and co-author of A Life Together, A Life Apart: A History of Relations Between Europeans and Aborigines. He is currently writing a general study of the relationship between Aborigines, Australia and the discourse of history. His latest book is an edited collection entitled In the Age of Mabo, which will be launched at the conference. He will speak about `Re-imagining the Nation: Mabo and the New Australian History'. The 1992 Mabo ruling of the Australian High Court has had important implications not only for law and politics but also for national culture and history. Attwood argues that it represents a radically different past for the Australian nation and nationalism, and so offers new ways of imagining the present and the future. The new history has been regarded variously; conservatives have interpreted Mabo as a revolutionary threat, radicals as an exciting window of opportunity.
Tim Murray is Professor of Archaeology at La Trobe University, Melbourne, and is currently teaching in Paris. He is the author of Remembrance of Things Present: Appeals to Authority in the History and Philosophy of Archaeology, and numerous articles in local and international scholarly journals. He has undertaken extensive arhcaeological research in Tasmania. He will speak about `Mabo and Re-creating the Heritage of Australia'. Murray will explore the general theme of heritage and the creation and maintenance of the nation, which has been central to European nations such as France and was part of pre-Mabo conceptions of the heritage of Australia. He will contrast these conventional uses of heritage and nation with those which appear to be developing in settler societies such as Australia and the United States. In these societies the impetus towards self-determination by indigenous groups is having the effect of creating new ideas of nationhood, where the State might provide the framework for the co-existence of different `nations' within the political and geographic boundaries of Australia. Murray argues that these new ideas of nationhood are underwritten and to a large extent expressed as new conceptions of the heritage of Australia, particularly those centred around the tactics of cultural exclusion which have flowed from the ownership of heritage.
Deborah Bird Rose is Senior Research Fellow of the North Australia Research Unit, Australian National University, Darwin. She has worked on numerous Aboriginal claims to land as senior anthropologist on behalf of the claimants and as consulting anthropologist to the Aboriginal Land Commissioner, as well as assisting Aboriginal people in several contentious disputes. She is the author of the award-winning Dingo Makes Us Human and Hidden Histories, and writes widely in the fields of anthropology, history, religious studies and Australian studies. She will speak about `Cross-Cultural Management of Knowledge in Proof of Native Title'. Rose argues that when an Aboriginal land tenure system comes face to face with the European-derived legal system of the Australian nation, the possibilities for misunderstandings, injustice, and further acts of colonising appropriation are amplified; at the same time the possibilities for new forms of reconciliation, and for expanded understandings of how justice can be achieved in a plural society also increase. Rose will examine practices of presentation of indigenous evidence in Northern Territory land claims, focusing on these points of disjunction between systems.
Robert Layton is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Durham. He is author of Uluru: An Aboriginal history of Ayers Rock and Australian Rock Art, and has worked on a number of land claims under the Northern Territory legislation. He also contributed to the Australian Government's submission to UNESCO to have Uluru National Park inscribed on the World Heritage List as a cultural landscape of universal value. He will speak about `Lessons for Mabo from the Northern Territory Land Rights Legislation'. The Mabo judgment recognised the existence of native title according to the laws and customs of Australia's indigenous people. While the Northern Territory legislation of 1976 did not concede the existence of native title prior to colonisation, it nonetheless embodied a basis for claim in the persistence of traditional rights. Layton's experience of working as an anthropologist on a number of claims in the Northern Territory gives him grounds to suggest both problems that may arise and (in some cases) ways of minimising their impact.
Paul Wand is Vice President, Aboriginal Relations, at CRA Limited, Melbourne, a major Australian mining company working in areas subject to native title claims. He will speak about `CRA Exploration and Mine Development in Australia after Mabo'. He will describe CRA activities in Australia, in particular those affected by the Native Title Act, and will assess the company's future plans and activities. His work provides insights into the ways that Australian industry, in particular the mining sector, is learning to live with native title.
Stephen Wood is Chief Executive of the Policy Office, Ministry of the Premier and Cabinet, Government of Western Australia, Perth. The Mabo judgment has been intensively and distinctively debated in Western Australia, where political differences with the federal government have emerged. Stephen Wood will speak about the implications for that state of the Commonwealth Native Title Act.
Marcia Langton is Chair of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in Canberra, and also holds the Ranger Chair of Aboriginal Studies at the Northern Territory University, Darwin. She will offer a general reflection on Aboriginal land rights as a way of drawing the conference to a close.
The Conference Program includes a
RECEPTION AND BOOK LAUNCH
hosted by the Deputy High Commissioner of Australia, Miss Rosaleen McGovern at Australia House
on 18 April 1996 at 6.00-8.00 pm
The book to be launched is
In the Age of Mabo: History, Aborigines and Australia
edited by Bain Attwood and published by Allen & Unwin
Several contributors to the book will be speaking at the conference
The Conference Venue: AUSTRALIA HOUSE
Australia House in the Strand is the headquarters of the Australian High Commission in London. It is the oldest Australian diplomatic mission and also the oldest building continuously occupied by a foreign mission in London.
The Menzies Centre and the Australian High Commission work together closely in encouraging informed discussion of Australian issues in Britain. One very successful recent collaboration has been a series of `Literary Links' evenings held at Australia House where visiting or resident Australian writers have read from their work to huge and enthusiastic audiences.
The conference will be held in the Downer Room, an impressive room panelled in Australian timbers, on the first floor of Australia House.
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