Overturning Aqua Nullius: Pathways to National Law Reform

Marshall, Virginia

doi:10.22459/ndla.09.2017.19

Cited by 22 publications

(29 citation statements)

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“…As we learn about this history, we discover that like terra nullius, aqua nullius is a furphy (Marshall 2017). Most of the history we were taught in Australian schools was a result of colonial power and narratives that maintained their legitimacy.…”

Section: Acknowledgment Of Countrymentioning

confidence: 99%

What’s next for Australia’s water management?

Daniell

2019

Australasian Journal of Water Resources

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Australia's water management futures are again under discussion as drought impacts and bushfires hit communities. Water and ecological system limits are being reached resulting in fish kills and dwindling water levels in storages. Awareness is also rising around the inequities in current water governance regimes for First Peoples across the Australian continent and beyond. Here we provide a brief overview and research on: the ingenuity of Indigenous waterscape and landscape knowledge and practices to care for country and community, including the development of agricultural systems and sophisticated fish and eel trapping systems that are thousands of years old; the devastating impacts of colonisation on First Peoples, their country and ability to maintain some cultural practices; and the ongoing contestation over water governance, right from Federation, including the eight waves of water reforms in the Murray-Darling Basin. Current challenges and needs for reform are also presented including: hydrological scientific uncertainties, such as around return flows and their adjustment due to irrigation infrastructure efficiency increases, and new design methodologies, such as for flood estimation inputs to hydraulic models; adjusting current governance regimes of sustainable diversion limits and water markets to provide alternative value to Australia, beyond economic value drivers, that better respond to the benefit of all basin communities in the face of ongoing extreme climate variability and climate change; and determining positive ways forward for truly valuing and allowing First Peoples' knowledge, practices, culture and law to provide a basis for developing the next waves of Australia's water management reform journey.

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Section: Acknowledgment Of Countrymentioning

confidence: 99%

What’s next for Australia’s water management?

Daniell

2019

Australasian Journal of Water Resources

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“…The ocean has long been construed as an empty vessel - aqua-nullius - an inert medium to be traversed and controlled en route to the colonial present (Deloughrey, 2007, 2010, Marshall, 2017). Ocean spaces are often imagined as inert realms to be colonized by capital and exit elites (Craib, 2022), juridically defined to facilitate natural resource exploitation (Ranganathan, 2019), or - like Comoros, St Kitts, and Antigua - readily transformable into realms where citizenship can simply be purchased by the highest bidder (Abrahamian 2015).…”

Section: Urban Oceansmentioning

confidence: 99%

Urban oceans: Social differentiation in the city and the sea

Rodenbiker

2022

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

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This paper argues that the urban and the ocean are co-constituted through relations that are unevenly classed, gendered, and racialized. This argument is empirically anchored in high-value fish maw markets in Hong Kong, New York City, and the oceanic spaces and lives therein. The global inter-urban trade in Totoaba, an endangered fish endemic to the Gulf of California, serves as a primary example of piscine capital circulation, while supporting examples engage a much longer durée of urban ocean relations. Agrarian technologies appropriated through colonial trans-oceanic trade, for instance, are shown to be precursors of Euro-American industrial urbanization, while whale bodies were crucial to urban politics of difference and producing urban spaces in 19th century U.S. cities. Contemporary fisheries on the high seas exemplify how ocean spaces remain frontiers of unfree labor and natural resource extraction that contribute to capital accumulation in global cities. Through these examples, the article details how the ocean is urbanized, how the urban is constituted through the ocean, as well as some of the differentiated social formations and socio-natural effects of urban oceanic relationships. Urban oceanic processes of exploitation, extraction, circulation, and consumption predispose marginalized people and ocean wildlife to premature deaths. Urban oceanic relations could be otherwise constituted. Towards reconstituting these relations, the paper advances a hybrid analytical framework that ungrounds the urban from terrestrial conceptual moorings through engaging interdisciplinary ocean geographies.

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“…While at first glance it may seem that LP for natural sites/systems is compatible with the cosmologies, epistemologies and ontologies of Indigenous peoples, it may also be seen as yet another colonial imposition that erases the traditional relationships, conceptions, experiences and law of these sites (Marshall, 2017). According the Reef rights as a ‘natural object’ involves the foundational move of seeing nature as separate from humans, before then allowing ‘it’ some human-like rights and appointing some humans to speak as its legal proxy, thus supplanting Indigenous groups’ own diverse ‘conceptions of responsibility, agency and value’ (Whyte, 2017b: 89).…”

Section: Merits and Problems Of The Lp Approach In The Case Of The Gbrmentioning

confidence: 99%

The campaign for legal personhood for the Great Barrier Reef: Finding political and pedagogical value in a spectacular failure of care

Barcan

2019

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

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This paper examines the campaign for legal personhood for the Great Barrier Reef launched by the Environmental Defenders Office of North Queensland in 2014. Although this campaign has been unofficially shelved, the paper argues that it still provides a useful chance to think through the practicality and politics of some of the current experiments in environmental law, especially contemporary attempts to expand legal definitions of personhood. The EDO campaign is held up to critical scrutiny by considering its practical efficacy, environmental merits, conceptual foundations and ethico-political import, especially in relation to Indigenous justice. It argues that such experiments are to be welcomed, whether as immediate opportunities, thought experiments or pressure points, and that public and scholarly discussion of the legal personhood mechanism needs to be alert to the dangers of unknowingly and ironically replicating dominant power relations while seeking to overthrow them, but also of shutting down alternatives at precisely the moment we need them most.

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Overturning Aqua Nullius: Pathways to National Law Reform

Cited by 22 publications

References 0 publications

What’s next for Australia’s water management?

What’s next for Australia’s water management?

Urban oceans: Social differentiation in the city and the sea

The campaign for legal personhood for the Great Barrier Reef: Finding political and pedagogical value in a spectacular failure of care

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