Indigenous Policy and Its Historical Occlusions: The North American and Global Contexts of Australian Settlement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, I question the historical bases of Australia's peculiar investment in a territorial sovereignty that cannot tolerate Indigenous self-governance by describing legal practice in early New South Wales. I argue that from 1788, in every regard except the colony's failure to sign treaties with Indigenous Australians, New South Wales followed a pattern of Indigenous-settler legal relations established in North America centuries before. Mobilising evidence about everyday legal practice in the early colony of New South Wales, I argue that, before the 1820s, lawyers or administrators in the colony assumed that Indigenous people were independent of British law: their crimes against settlers and against other Indigenous people were governed either by laws of war, by practices of retaliation or by Indigenous customary law. After 1820, Canada, parts of the United States, New South Wales and, after the Treaty of Waitangi, New Zealand all began asserting a new type of sovereignty uniquely destructive of Indigenous rights. In this context, the colony of New South Wales is not exceptional. Rather, as Australia's response to the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples suggests, Australia was and is part of a community of Anglophone settler polities who between 1822 and 1840 began for the first time to define sovereignty over territory as a principle antithetical to Indigenous self-governance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".