Mabo1 Has Been Acclaimed As a Triumph of Remembering.2 the Case
Macquarie Law Journal (2006) Vol 6 25 HOW MABO HELPS US FORGET ALEXANDER REILLY I INTRODUCTION Mabo1 has been acclaimed as a triumph of remembering.2 The case acknowledged a shift in Australian history in the 1970s and 1980s towards a greater recognition of the violence of British colonisation and the extent of Aboriginal dispossession from land. It recognised for the first time a legal basis for Indigenous claims to land based on traditional associations with ‘country’3, and it established a central role for history in the determination of native title rights. The case has led to a new level of engagement between academics from the disciplines of Law and History, and new interdisciplinary work on the relationship between law and history.4 Before Mabo, the most direct overlap between Law and History in Australia was through the work of legal history scholars, predominantly legal academics who use legal documents from the past to understand society and its law, and to provide a particular historical context for analysing current developments in the law. Although legal history is drawn upon occasionally by the courts to add to their Senior Lecturer in Law, Macquarie University. Earlier drafts of this article benefited from the generous comments of Lawrence McNamara, Katherine Biber, Andrew Buck, the anonymous referees of the Macquarie Law Journal, and the careful editorial work of the student editor, Shireen Daft. My sincere thanks to Ann Curthoys, Ann Genovese and Larissa Behrendt for the opportunity to collaborate with them on their Australian Research Council funded project on the role of history in Indigenous Rights litigation.
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