The case for new thinking on Aboriginal land rights, and for a Treaty

Adelaide land crime shows why we need a treaty Eureka Street, JOHN BARTLETT JANUARY 17, 2012 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 potentially incendiary issues have been aired in a book edited by Berg,Coming to Terms: Aboriginal Title in South Australia….. No matter how extensive or generous any government program to tackle Indigenous inequality, it will mean little unless Indigenous people are first treated as a sovereign nation with independent rights. http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=29317