The Limits of the Law in Claiming Rights to Land in a Settler Colony: South Australia in the Early-to-Mid Nineteenth Century

Abstract

In recent decades a large amount of scholarship has been devoted to the task of explaining the ways in which European powers claimed possession of indigenous people's territories across the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This research has emphasised the role of the law in the dispossession of indigenous peoples. But more work is required to establish the precise roles that the law played in the claiming of land and to measure its importance relative to other factors. In this paper I consider one British colony, South Australia, in order to investigate the changes that occurred in the roles that the law performed over time in the claiming of the indigenous people's lands, and to assess the importance of these relative to the roles played by historical, moral, political, psychological and material factors. I conclude that in this instance at least the role that the law played in the claiming of possession was rather different than that suggested by numerous studies of the claiming of possession as well as much less significant.