Aborigines’ legal push for independence

Australia’s Aborigines Launch a Bold Legal Push for Independence TIME, By Ian Lloyd Neubauer May 30, 2013 If a determined group of indigenous people get their way, the world’s newest country won’t be in Africa or the Balkans but on the eastern periphery of Australia’s outback. A bleak, foreboding, flood-prone savannah the size of Austria 750 km northwest of Sydney, the Murrawarri Republic was home to an Aboriginal nation that lived in the Culgoa River region of the state of New South Wales (NSW) tens of thousands of years before the arrival of British settlers. On March 31, they took the first step in ending more than 200 years of colonial rule when they sent letters to Queen Elizabeth II and the Australian government demanding evidence of either a treaty or deed of cessation. When those parties failed to respond to the Murrawarri’s 28-day deadline, they issued a Declaration of the Continuance of the State of Murrawarri Nation.

“When Captain Cook arrived here in 1770, he said he was claiming the continent in the name of the Crown. But on what legal grounds did he take our land?” asks Sharni Gibbons, daughter of Fred Gibbons, chairman of the Murrawarri People’s Council.

Australia’s Aboriginal-sovereignty movement can be traced back to 1972. That year, on Jan. 26 — celebrated nationally as Australia Day — a group of black militants planted a tent on the lawns of the Old Parliament House in Canberra. The Aboriginal Tent Embassy galvanized support for indigenous land rights and thrust its ambassador Michael Anderson into the international spotlight……..

The legality of the attorney-general’s stance was backed up by George Newhouse, a Sydney-based human-rights lawyer known for his work with indigenous Australians:…..

According to Eleanor Gilbert, a nonindigenous filmmaker producing a documentary on Aboriginal sovereignty, Newhouse and his ilk are missing the point because the Aboriginal people have never recognized the Australian constitution. “All those lawyers have to say that because they are bound by the Crown,” she says. “Instinctively they know this country was constructed illegally, but they won’t take off their blinkers because they know doing so will open Pandora’s box.”

Things may soon come to a head. This year, the Murrawarri People’s Council plans to lodge an application for the recognition of the Murrawarri Republic’s status as an independent nation with the U.N…….

it could lead to some form of indigenous autonomy that would finally lay to rest the grievances of Australia’s first nations. “Our people are mature and intelligent,” Anderson says. “We’re not picking up guns or throwing Molotov cocktails. We’ve studied our conqueror’s laws, proven how they’ve broken them and are now turning those laws against them. We will force an issue the Australian government does not want to debate.”
: http://world.time.com/2013/05/30/australias-aborigines-launch-a-bold-legal-push-for-independence/#ixzz2Uuul3T4z