Abstract:
Why devote a book to the idea of treaty-making between Indigenous
peoples and government in Australia? The answer is that a
treaty might address a big problem of principle at the same time as
helping to fix a set of very practical problems. The problem of
principle is that in Australia we have never sat at the table and
negotiated the basic terms of peaceful coexistence between the first
peoples of this continent and those who came later. That failure
has brought us trouble in the past and created a sense of injustice
that remains with many people to this day. The practical problem
is that, by almost any social indicator, Australia's first peoples typically
find themselves on the lowest run~ of our society and largely
locked out of the wealth of a very affluent country. These two
problems are linked. How a treaty might address them at the level
of both principle and practicality is the major concern of this book.
