Treaty

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.