Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. –Soren Kierkegaard
In the mid-19th century my great-grandfather Thomas Bartlett settled in South Australia around Murray Bridge. Here he established a successful quarry along the banks of the river and supplied stone for many of Adelaide's most elegant buildings including the current railway station cum casino. He also harvested and sold large quantities of timber, all of which made him quite a wealthy man.
Of course with possession comes dispossession and I sometimes reflect on how his success also led to dispossession among the local Murray Bridge Indigenous people, namely the Ngarrindjeri.
Recently attention has been focused on the legal documents that underpinned the establishment of the Province of South Australia in 1836, and how the state's founding impacted the original inhabitants. These documents appear to prove the land was acquired illegally.
Chief among these is the Letters Patent signed by King William IV in 1836 that made white settlement conditional on the following principle:
That nothing in those Letters Patent shall affect or be construed to affect the rights of any Aboriginal Natives of the said province to the actual occupation or enjoyment, in their own persons or in the persons of their descendants, of any land therein now actually occupied or enjoyed by such Natives.
The legal implications of such a document turn the establishment of South Australia into a testing ground for Indigenous rights Australia-wide. So far the tone of this discussion has been very muted.
Sean Berg, who practises Intellectual Property Law in South Australia, has shone light on other documents that raise new possibilities for rethinking Indigenous land rights in this country.
These include Colonial Office correspondence, reports of colonisation commissioners and other documents which Berg maintains point to the same thing: 'that the transfer of land from Aboriginal groups should be a consensual act', but never was. No treaties or bargains were ever established and the new colonists paid nothing for the land they acquired.
Ngarrindjeri elder Tom Trevorrow says the legal implications of these documents is a 'burning issue' for his people. They 'have not been effective in protecting our rights to occupy and enjoy our lands and waters'. There appears to be little appetite to follow through the