Governing Rural Australia: Land, Space and Race

Abstract

Until the controversy surrounding the recent High Court of Australia decision in the case of Wik, many aspects of the legal and governmental regulation of the Australian interior had been a neglected aspect of governance and of socio-legal politics. That roughly 40 per cent of the Australian land mass was held under a peculiar form of statutory tenure, pastoral leasehold, involving a regime of government regulation of a most direct and interventionist kind, was hardly appreciated by the vast majority of urban dwelling, free-holding members of this "home owning democracy", including academics with a particular interest in law, government and politics. Until the High Court in Wik decided that Aboriginal native title could co-exist with pastoral leasehold interests in land, it was widely believed that virtually any Crown-dealing in land extinguished native title, with the consequence that effective Aboriginal title to actual tracts of land throughout most of the Australian mainland had been wiped out. When the Wik decision was delivered politicians, farmers' and pastoralists' organisations and newspaper leader writers went into a frenzy, gripped by the fear that suddenly its original owners were being positioned to reclaim rights to large tracts of the Australian land mass.