The Concepts of Property and of Land Rights in the Legal Discourse of Australia relating to Indigenous Groups

Issues of property and land rights as applied to indigenous groups in Australia (Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders) have received increasing attention in recent years, especially since the landmark Mabo judgement (1992), by which the declaration of terra nullius, dating from the beginnings of British colonisation, was successfully challenged but not replaced by any clear single legal concept . The concept of property is the subject of much philosophical reflection (e.g. Cicero, Hobbes, Locke, Proudhon). Land rights in particular have been a point of political contention in most societies and the problem of property is even starker in countries like Australia where settlers arrived and constructed a new society and country in disregard of the existing inhabitants, their social structures and systems of law. As the Mabo judgement showed, where there is political will, legal systems derived from English law and which avail themselves of the concept of Common Law, can be made to accommodate the land rights of indigenous peoples, but inevitably only in terms of English legal concepts such as possession and title - the two key elements of property: Wendell Holmes Jr (1881). These may not be fully or even partially applicable to the indigenous groups’ concept of possession, if indeed they have such a thing. This is an issue which touches upon frame semantics (Fillmore 1976), cross-cultural communication (Pauwels 1992), and ultimately translation of genre (Gotti et al 2003, Bhatia 1997). In this paper we will examine this issue by looking at the lexis and syntactic structure of legal discourse found in a corpus of the Indigenous Law Bulletin (until 1997 called the Aboriginal Law Bulletin) from 1981-2007 from the perspective of cognitive grammar (Langacker 1987/1991).