Feudal tenure and native title: revising an enduring fiction

This article argues that the feudal doctrine of tenure continues to endure as the foundation for Australian land law despite its obvious social and historical irrelevance. The doctrine of tenure is a derivation of feudal history. The article examines some of its historical foundations with the aim of highlighting the disparity between the fiction of this inherited form and the reality of a colonial Australian landscape. Particular attention is given to the fact that Australian feudal tenure was always a passive framework. It was disconnected with the landscape and therefore incapable of responding to the needs of colonial expansion. This resulted in a clear disparity between feudal form and the reality of a land system populated by statutory grants. The article argues that feudal tenure was never truly devised as a responsive land system but rather, adopted as a sovereignty device. In this sense, legal history was utilised with the aim of promoting imperial objectives within colonial Australia. Tenure was equated with absolute Crown ownership over all Australian territory despite the fact that this was inconsistent with the orthodox tenets of feudal tenure.
The article argues that the consequence of adopting feudal tenure and absolute Crown ownership has been the estrangement of indigenous rights, title and culture. The creation and legitimisation of a land framework with a fundamentally Eurocentric perspective completely destroyed indigenous interests during the settlement and colonial era. It created an imperial ideology where colonists silently accepted the denial of indigenous identity. The decision of the Mabo High Court to reassess this historical perspective and accept the validity of proven native title claims clearly disturbed tenurial assumptions. However, the High Courts' reification of the feudal form created a fundamental paradox: indigenous title was accepted as a proprietary right within a framework incapable of and unequipped to recognise the fundamentally different cultural perspectives of customary ownership. The article argues that native title cannot evolve within a common law framework that regards ownership as a derivation of the English Crown. It is suggested that ultimately, a pluralist property culture, where indigenous and non-indigenous title exist as equalised entities, can only be properly nurtured with the full and absolute abolition of the feudal doctrine of tenure.

Marketing aboriginal art: an intellectual property fiction?

This paper argues that legality is not enough in seeking to solve the problems caused by charlatans and carpet baggers in the Australian Aboriginal art market. It examines the role of social marketing initially posited for the health sector and seeks to apply its strategies to the Aboriginal art market. The author draws comparisons between successes in health and the need for successes in the Aboriginal art market. It suggests that social marketing has been overlooked as a way forward for the Aboriginal art market. The paper concludes by stating that conditions will not change with quick-fix legal solutions sought for complex problems. They are an intellectual property fiction.

New social orders: reconceptualising family and community in utopian fiction

A study focusing on family and community as they are represented in seven utopian/dystopian fictions written for children and young adults by Australian, American, Canadian, and British writers is illustrated. These novels depict reflections of how various notions of new social orders have impacted on children's literature and how this affects the utopian/dystopian strain, present in children's literature.

Dialectics of Diaspora Space: a Study of Contemporary, Diasporic, South Asian Fiction

In light of these continuing debates concerning immigration, national identity and belonging, re-examinations of immigrant and ethnic communities, often referred to as ‘diaspora,’ have become increasingly popular and prudent. Khachig Tololian, editor of Diaspora magazine, calls diaspora “exemplary communities of the transnational moment.”5 In an increasingly globalized world, where labor, capital, and resources are passed fluidly from continent to continent, diaspora are created by relocation or displacement of immigrant workers and their descendents.6 For these unskilled, immigrant laborers, middle class immigrants, and the children of both groups, adaptation to the culture, society, and life in a new ‘host’ country can be difficult, to say the least. So, in response to a new cultural landscape and a tenuous sense belonging, as well as to maintain a connection with a shared past, citizens of the world’s numerous diaspora replicate linguistic, cultural, and social norms, creating their own “cultural space[s]” that mirror and often replace a past relationship to their land of origin, or ‘home’.

Sense of community in science fiction random, part 1: Understanding sense of community in an international community of interest

Within the discipline of community psychology there is debate as to the dimensions underlying the construct psychological sense of community (PSOC). One of the few theoretical discussions is that of McMillan and Chavis (1986), who hypothesized four dimensions: Belonging; Fulfillment of Needs; Influence; and Shared Connections. Discussion has also emerged in the literature regarding the role of identification within PSOC. It has been suggested that differences in PSOC may be understood in terms of the degree to which members identify with their community (Fisher & Sonn, 1999). However, few studies have explored the place of identification in PSOC. In addition, while PSOC has been applied to both communities of interest and geographical communities, little research has looked in depth at PSOC within communities of interest. The current study therefore explored PSOC in science fiction fandom, a community of interest with membership from all over the world, by means of a questionnaire distributed at an international science fiction convention (N = 359). In an endeavor to clarify the underlying dimensions of PSOC, the questionnaire included several measures of PSOC, and measures of identification with the community. Results showed that science fiction fandom reported high levels of PSOC. Support emerged for McMillan and Chavis' (1986) four dimensions of PSOC, with the addition of a fifth dimension, that of Conscious Identification. These results, and implications for PSOC research, are discussed.