Growing law in Goolarabooloo Country

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 D. Massey, ‘Imagining the Field’, in M. Pryke, Gillian Rose and Sarah Whatmore (eds), Using Social Theory: Thinking Through Research, London: Sage Publications, 2003.

2 Latour’s concept of ‘circulating reference’ (B. Latour, Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Cambridge, M.A., London: Harvard University Press, 1999) engages with this dilemma.

3 The Bugarrigarra, which has also been called the Dreaming, is the cosmology of the Goolarabooloo region and what Muecke refers to as ‘the foundation of the law and culture of the Goolarabooloo people’ (S. Muecke and P. Roe, The Children's Country: Creation of a Goolarabooloo Future in North-West Australia, London, New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2021, p 5).

4 The 1998 and 2007 Amendments to the Native Title Act (1993) were particularly controversial because of the restrictions placed on potential claimants.

5 For example, the designation of certain landmarks, places, or species as ‘sacred’ builds on the concept of a nonhuman rights and can be utilised to sustainably manage seasonal resources. (V. Burns, ‘Traditional Water Management as an Adaptive Subsistence Practice: A Case Study from Coastal Timor-Leste’, in A. Ahearn and R. Kumar Dhir (eds), Indigenous Peoples and Climate Change: Emerging Research on Traditional Knowledge and Livelihoods, Geneva, Switzerland: International Labour Organization, 2019, pp 21–33).

6 See C. Stone, Should Trees Have Standing?: And Other Essays on Law, Morals, and the Environment, Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Oceana Publications, 1996.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vanessa Burns

Vanessa Burns is an environmental geographer at the Department of Geography, University of Sheffield. Her areas of specialization include decolonizing environmental governance, Indigenous adaptation justice, and geographies of climate change. She has published work in a number of leading academic journals, including Political Geography, Environment and Planning E, and Land Use Policy.