terra nullius Social Policy

This chapter is drawn from Aboriginal scholar Lyndon Murphy’s influential thesis ‘Who’s Afraid of the Dark?’, published in 2000. This widely circulated thesis made one of the earliest sustained arguments about the role of colonial thinking in apparently neutral or participatory Australian policy making and has influenced a generation of critical policy scholars. It is published in a condensed and more widely accessible format here for the first time. Murphy’s chapter describes how, despite increased Aboriginal ‘participation’ in state systems, contemporary policy remains ‘terra nullius social policy’. He argues that it remains nullifying because Australian administrative institutions continue to operate on the assumption of one Australia, without recognition of continuing Aboriginal sovereignty and ontology, and therefore perpetuate a colonial relationship based on settler rule over an ‘empty land’. He also suggests that some ‘radical’ or resistant Aboriginal positions in fact reproduce the same construction of the Aboriginal ‘other’ imposed by settlers since the origin of colonial occupation. He calls for a fundamental change in discourse, in which the state recognises Aboriginal people as subjects based on their own authority rather than objects of settler control. This suggests that it is necessary to move beyond utilitarian administrative processes, and a preoccupation with the state, towards a genuine subject-to-subject relationship.