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  • Song, Land, and CeremonyInterpreting the Place of Songs as Evidence for Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Land Claims
  • Grace Koch (bio) and Alexandra Crowe (bio)

Land, song and constitution are all integral; all one. You can’t isolate one from the other. It’s all interwoven very tightly and you can’t separate them.1

Justice Peter Gray, formerly an Aboriginal land commissioner and presently a judge with the Federal Court of Australia (fca), reflects his understanding of Mandawuy’s model in a scenario showing the problems when an Anglo-Australian legal system clashes with traditional Indigenous law in regard to valid proof of land ownership:

I sometimes think that there is value in adopting a mirror world approach, turning things on their heads and seeing how they look. I have a vision in which a number of pastoral leaseholders are required to prove their title to land. The pastoral leaseholders are required to do so before a group of old Aboriginal people who are sitting around. The pastoral leaseholders produce their pieces of paper, their title documents. The old Aboriginal people say that these are no good. They ask, “Where are your songs? Where are your stories? Where are your dances? Where are your body paintings? We don’t recognise these pieces of paper.” The pastoral leaseholders object. They say, “By our legal system these are our title deeds.” The Aboriginal people respond, “Well, they are not ours.” [End Page 373]

He goes on to say:

Aboriginal culture is reflected in ceremonies. These involve painting, singing, dancing and the use of sacred objects. . . . Often ceremony, song, dance and design are the very title deeds to land. The ability to have a particular design painted on your body, or to paint it on someone else’s body, to sing a particular song, or to perform a particular dance, is proof of entitlement to particular lands.

(Gray 1999: 6)

This article explores how the connections between land and song and ceremony have been influential in the judges’ findings for claims under laws of the Commonwealth of Australia: the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 (Cth) and the Native Title Act 1993 (Cth) (alra and nta). While the authors are experienced in anthropology and musicology as relating to land claims and native title cases, the discussion does not venture into anthropological or legal theory but cites and classifies examples from judges’ reports to show how song, dance, and ceremony have figured in reports for claims under both pieces of legislation. Our data comes from reports for 67 land rights claims and 125 native title claims that were available online up to the beginning of 2010; claims and litigation mentioned in this article are listed in the appendix.2 We do not include analysis of compensation claims, although Justice Sackville made copious reference to song and ceremony in Jango v. Northern Territory of Australia. Much additional material, such as anthropological reports, special exhibits, and transcripts, is not publicly available at this stage and remains to be examined and analyzed for more detailed references as to how information on songs has been used as documentation for land claims.

Method of Analysis

Several search terms were used to ensure that references to song could be identified.3 These consisted of keywords that were chosen to reflect both implicit references, such as ceremony and corroboree, and explicit references: song, song line or songline, music, inma (western desert term for song), awelye (women’s song series from Central Australia), and manikay (northeastern Arnhem Land term for a type of song).

All but four, or 94 percent of the alra claims, referred to one or more of the terms. Analysis of the nta claims showed that the various [End Page 374] court processes governed frequency of references to the terms. Thus consent determinations, which are made after agreement has been reached by the claimants and the state or territory government and other parties, made fewer references (71 percent) than litigated claims, where the determination is made based upon a court trial (96 percent) and often refers liberally to the anthropological reports. Most of the analysis concerns Queensland, the Northern Territory, Western Australia, and South Australia...

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