Abstract:
Australia has an appalling history of dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (ATSI) Peoples and recognition of this motivates research that seeks to advance Indigenous rights by amending Australian laws in ways that better connect property, people and culture to place and environment. The ambition is often to open up the Australian legal space. Here international law is looked to for inspiration; categories of property, environmental, intellectual property and cultural heritage law are forensically surveyed, in the hope that these may be imaginatively repositioned to make room for the ‘Other’ under domestic law. This chapter interrogates the distinction between space and place under Australian law as a major problem that needs addressing for reform initiatives to bear fruit. We are concerned with deconstructing the idea of legal space in abstract as if it is ‘an empty vessel existing prior to the matter which fills it’, and in questioning the priority afforded to space over and above attention to the importance of recognising the specificities of particular places in law.
Bowrey, Kathy and Graham, Nicole G, The Placelessness of Property, Intellectual Property and Cultural Heritage Law in the Australian Legal Landscape: Engaging Cultural Landscapes (September 4, 2014). Forthcoming, (eds) Christoph Antons and William Logan, Intellectual Property, Cultural Property and Intangible Cultural Heritage, Routledge, ‘Key Issues in Cultural Heritage’ Series (2017).
First posted 2017-04-05 05:48:36
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