Discrimination against Australian Indigenous groups, including the right to own traditional lands, has received increasing attention, culminating in the referenda campaigns for full citizenship rights in the 1960s, and the Mabo judgement (1992) and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generations (2008). The issue is not just one of deliberate dispossession and subjugation but also the clash of two groups of cultures (on the one hand that of the British-led colonisation; on the other, those of the various Indigenous populations grouped together under the blanket term Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders). In this paper we will discuss how, regarding specifically property rights, the two sets of cultures employed not only different conceptual systems but different rituals, both linguistic and semiotic, for establishing and recording these rights. We will examine how Aborigine peoples, once subject to a culturally alien legal system which manifested itself in ways that were both linguistically and semiotically unrecognisable for them, came, at first tentatively, to use the system as a means for securing redress and partial compensation. Legal discourse is viewed as part of a wider set of options within the social semiotic concerned (Halliday 1978, Hodge and Kress 1988) where meaning at all levels is not stable or fixed but subject to Peircean infinite semiosis. To this end, we examine various petitions (reproduced in Attwood and Markus 1999), penned either by or on behalf of Aborigines, dating from the earliest periods of colonisation up to the 1970s, including the Yirrkala Bark Petition (1963), which sought to combine elements of both Aboriginal and Anglo-Australian legalistic semiotic / linguistic codes. The perspective is that of the function of such texts and their component parts seen as moves in the discourse within the cultural context, and on direct and indirect speech acts (Searle 1969, 1975).
Petitions as social semiotic: The struggle of Australian Aboriginal peoples to participate in legal discourse relating to land rights
CHRISTIANSEN, Thomas, Wulstan
2011-01-01
Abstract
Discrimination against Australian Indigenous groups, including the right to own traditional lands, has received increasing attention, culminating in the referenda campaigns for full citizenship rights in the 1960s, and the Mabo judgement (1992) and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generations (2008). The issue is not just one of deliberate dispossession and subjugation but also the clash of two groups of cultures (on the one hand that of the British-led colonisation; on the other, those of the various Indigenous populations grouped together under the blanket term Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders). In this paper we will discuss how, regarding specifically property rights, the two sets of cultures employed not only different conceptual systems but different rituals, both linguistic and semiotic, for establishing and recording these rights. We will examine how Aborigine peoples, once subject to a culturally alien legal system which manifested itself in ways that were both linguistically and semiotically unrecognisable for them, came, at first tentatively, to use the system as a means for securing redress and partial compensation. Legal discourse is viewed as part of a wider set of options within the social semiotic concerned (Halliday 1978, Hodge and Kress 1988) where meaning at all levels is not stable or fixed but subject to Peircean infinite semiosis. To this end, we examine various petitions (reproduced in Attwood and Markus 1999), penned either by or on behalf of Aborigines, dating from the earliest periods of colonisation up to the 1970s, including the Yirrkala Bark Petition (1963), which sought to combine elements of both Aboriginal and Anglo-Australian legalistic semiotic / linguistic codes. The perspective is that of the function of such texts and their component parts seen as moves in the discourse within the cultural context, and on direct and indirect speech acts (Searle 1969, 1975).I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
