The Aboriginal land rights movement is one of the most
significant social and political events to have occurred in
Australia over the last twenty years. Any account of
contemporary Australia can hardly neglect the movement that
has gathered around the claims made by groups of
Aborigines to ownership of their ancestral lands, a movement
which has become a symbolic rallying point and focus for
all the historic grievances of the Australian Aborigines against
their white Australian compatriots.

Thus, referring to the Law Reform Commission Act ( 1973),
which directed the Commission to enquire 'whether it would
be desirable to apply either in whole or in part Aboriginal
customary law to Aborigines', Diane Bell has described it as
'one of reflection of the changing legal and governmental
attitudes to the recognition of Aboriginal rights in Australia'.
And she goes on to say:

Nowhere are these changes as striking as in the struggle of
the Aboriginal people to gain recognition of land rights. This
struggle has involved both moral and legal re-examinations
of the relationship between a settler population and the original
inhabitants. The wording of the Land Rights Act
Northern Territory ( 1976) and the reference to customary law
both assume that Aborigines have rights and a system of law,
and that these have existed for many thousands of years.
Such propositions would have been unthinkable two hundred
years ago, when Australia was settled as a British colony. Not
only has the legal profession had to rethink its judgements
and governments to legislate to recognise aspects of
Aboriginal Rights, but the Aborigines themselves have
organised locally and nationally to bring the grievances and
the injustices suffered by their people to the attention of other
Australians and to people abroad.

There are, however, formidable difficulties about discussing
land rights. It is an issue now charged with such political
passion that it is not easy to give an 'objective' and impartial
account of implications. When a battle is being fought it
may seem rather out of place to attempt to give a scholarly
analysis of the causes of the war, and it may be thought that,
at the present time, it is similarly inappropriate to attempt to
provide an objective and abstract account of the land rights
battle. To claim to be neutral and unaligned and impartial
in such a politically charged situation--it might be argued--is,
in effect, to be committed or aligned on the side of the
conservative racist forces in Australia which oppose the
granting of land rights to Aborigines. So-called 'value free'
scholarship has frequently in the past been a disguised form

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