Rose, Deborah Bird --- "Land Rights and Deep Colonising: the Erasure of Women" [1996] AboriginalLawB 69; (1996) 3(85) Aboriginal Law Bulletin 6

Land Rights and Deep Colonising: The Erasure of Women

By Deborah Bird Rose

Land claim legislation requires Indigenous people to offer up information in order to make a case for their legal rights[3]. The process of trying to achieve greater control over land remains not only contentious but also invasive.

My focus here concerns the double-bind located in the encounter between Indigenous knowledge systems which include boundaries of exclusion and silence, and the colonising demand for information. This double-bind entraps women and men differently. Colonising society has brought a set of western European gender concepts to Australia. These concepts have changed within the 200 years of colonisation, but it remains the case that male dominated professions have developed policy and practice toward Indigenous people which appear to assume that Indigenous women are without socially relevant power, and those without socially relevant knowledge and history. There appears often to be a pervasive bias, unannounced and frequently denied, that is characterised by the view that men are central actors in society and that their knowledge encompasses the social/cultural world in all of its significant aspects, while women are peripheral and acted upon, being the possessors of knowledge that encompasses only a portion of the social/cultural world. A land claim hearing has the potential to become a lose/lose situation for women: their silence can be heard as an absence of knowledge, while their words can be used to support a view that their knowledge and interests are encompassed by what appears to be a more sacred domain controlled by men, and that their knowledge and interests are available for scrutiny in ways that men's knowledge and interests are not.

Deep colonising

I use the term `deep colonising' to communicate some complex ideas about our contemporary period--a time some people want to label `post-colonial'. Here, too, I see a double-bind. While it is demonstrably the case that many formal relations between Indigenous people and the colonising national have changed in the past three decades, as have many of the institutions which regulate these relations, it is also the case that practices of colonisation are very much with us. More profoundly, many of these practices are embedded in the institutions that are meant to reverse processes of colonisation. A land claim is an excellent example. On the one hand it reverses conquest by returning land to Indigenous people.

On the other hand, the marginalisation of women, along with demands for information, perpetuates the colonising practices of conquest and appropriation. Colonising practices embedded within decolonising institutions must not be understood simply as negligible side effects of essentially benign endeavours. This embeddedness may conceal, naturalise, or marginalise continuing colonising practices. Furthermore, it can be difficult to offer a critique of the colonising features without calling into question the whole decolonising project.

Again, land rights offer an excellent example. If the double binds are not teased apart, and if the colonising practices are not separated analytically from decolonising institutions, conquest will continue. And if it continues in this form it will be wearing a mask of benign, or even radical, decolonisation which will make it far more difficult to challenge at all levels.

Deep colonising is the term use for this process--conquest embedded within institutions and practices which are aimed toward reversing the effects of colonisation.

Erasure: A key process

My analysis of colonisation has taken its starting point on the northern frontier of Australia where conquest occurred within the past one hundred years or so. Here conquest is so recent that oral histories offer rich and powerful testimony to the social processes through which conquest is achieved. The immediacy of conquest in this region also requires that it be understood not as a set of practices confined to the past, or a set of practices which are holdovers from the culture of a different era, but rather as key elements in the modernism of the twentieth century.

The structure which I particularly want to address today is articulated through practices of `erasure'. The structure itself is visible through the contrast between the theory and practice of what is usually referred to as progress, and an enabling set of practices that is not usually labelled. The unlabelled set of practices exists at the margins of progress, being always something that is about to be overcome, if it is acknowledged at all.

According to the concept of progress, that which exists on the `other' side of the frontier is an object waiting to be transformed. The land will be domesticated (through pastoralism, agriculture or urbanisation), and the people will be civilised. Both will thus be made to be productive, and through this transformation into productivity will be brought into time, into history, into culture.

This concept rests on the proposition that what already exists across the frontier is best characterised as a set of absences. There is an absence of production and an absence of civilisation. The concept of progress is from absence to presence, from nothing to something.

The metaphor of right and left hands assists me in describing the structure I am here concerned with. The right hand of conquest is conceptualised as beneficent: it brings productivity, growth, and civilisation where these had not existed before, transforming nature into culture.

The left hand, by contrast, has an extraordinary task. Indigenous Australia was not, and is not now, a series of absences. At the time of conquest, Indigenous people were members of their own societies; their culture was articulated through their own organisation of time and history, they managed their own sources of power and their own understandings of the sacred, and they reproduced through time and space a system of ecological knowledge and land management practices with which the country was kept productive. The task of the left hand of conquest is to erase all this specific life. The left hand creates the tabula rasa which the right hand will then transform into growth and civilisation. The left hand manages the practices of destruction, without which the right hand cannot carry out its task. The direction is from presence to absence, from something to nothing. The result is devastating loss.

Finally, there is inevitably a great disjunction between the concept of progress and the practice of destruction. There are many strategies whereby the right hand can deny what the left hand is doing, and one of the main current strategies is to assert that the left hand is nothing more than an unfortunate side effect which will be rectified in the near future[2] . A related strategy is to assert that the effects of the left hand are so negligible that it is neither socially necessary nor cost-effective to rectify the situation.

In sum, this basic structure of colonisation has twined aspects: on the one hand something called progress, on the other something that is best called destruction. Progress is not possible without destruction, but destruction is not seen to be essential to progress. The disjunction between these twinned aspects is managed by practices of erasure. Progress is conceptualised as a total frame, and destruction, when acknowledged, is held to be an unfortunate side-effect which is about to be remedied.

Erasure thus covers a range of practices and intellectual strategies from massacre to denial to economic rationalism. Erasure is the process of removing or marginalising the autonomous power and presence of the living systems (human and non-human) that are being colonised.

Deep colonising is a contemporary form of conquest. In land claims the right hand of progress now establishes institutions for decolonisation within which are embedded practices which are erasing the autonomous power and presence of Indigenous women.

The power and presence of women

In the sixteen years which I have spent with Aboriginal people, learning about and experiencing both their culture and my own, I have become ever more conscious of the limitations of my culture. In the presence of sacred places, and in the presence of songs, designs, dances and objects; in the presence of the women who carry on knowledge, songs, actions and care in these ordinary times, I encounter a femaleness of such powerful and life-affirming dimensions that I am humbled by an awareness of how meagre are the words with which I can respond.

In the parts of Indigenous Australia with which I have some experience, Law is managed by women and by men. Portions of many of the major rituals are participated in by women and men both separately and together; there are rituals which are managed by women and are also carried out in the presence of men; and there are rituals, or portions of rituals which exclusive.[3] The organisation of ritual parallels the organisation of geography: there are places which are managed jointly; places to which men may go but about which they do not know the full meaning; and places where men can never go. The sacred geography of these regions contains women's space and men's space--absolutely.

Women and Men Dreamings imprint themselves on the earth, and leave behind the traces of their activities, the sites of their actions, and their specific presence. Whatever the species, the creative beings travelled the earth creating a scared and gendered landscape. The created world does not privilege women to the exclusion of men, nor does it set women in opposition to men, although it does acknowledge the competitive quality of desire. Rather, and far more profoundly, the creative beings, women and men, establish complementary and dialogical relations in gendering the land; they thus establish sites of autonomous power.[4]

Gendered land locates women spatially and cosmologically. Most of the Northern Territory and parts of Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia and New South Wales are marked by the travels of Dreaming and other extra-ordinary world-creative women. The Wawilak sisters, the Munga Munga women, the ëMermaids', the Seven Sisters, the Two Women, the Black headed python: these are some of the creative Dreamings whose actions, songs, ceremonies, and esoteric knowledge made and make this world.[5] In the stories of creation, sometimes women are chased, sometimes they are caught and raped, sometimes they are killed. Women experience love and grief--their sisters die, their children are left behind, their husbands die, their male relations fail to defend them. Like their male counterparts, they suffer betrayal and loss. And still they travel and create, name and sing, generating power and purpose.

In many parts of Australia women's autonomous religious practice celebrates and regenerates the Dreaming, women singing the histories of places and women. In carrying on ritual, women celebrate and regenerate themselves, their country, their knowledge, their power, their community.[6]

Aboriginal women, like Aboriginal men, are subject to the Law that brings them all into being. Dreaming women, along with Dreaming men, created the world, and in so doing created sites of autonomous power for women. Women from generation to generation produce their social power, their histories, their spiritual and philosophical growth. Sites hold the potential for the power which women unfold in their lives in dialogue with men; the complementary of the dialogue is ensured by the presence of women's sites and women's Law.

The erasure of women

One will learn little of the presence of Indigenous women as subjects of their own history, Law and spirituality by consulting the eighteen year record of claims to land made under the Aboriginal Land rights (NT) Act 1976. In these years there has come into existence a public record consisting of much of the written materials prepared in advance of the hearing, the transcript of the public portions of the hearing, public references to evidence and performance offered in restricted sessions, and the final report by the Aboriginal Land Commissioner.

This written record can be understood to document a people's relationships to land at the time of the inquiry. Long after the witnesses are gone, the written record will remain. This record contains a highly biased representation of Aboriginal women as land owners. In a large majority of claims there is a marginalisation of women as managers of country, kinship and other social relations, as well as of ecological, geographical, religious and other forms of knowledge. The spiritual dimension of their lives sometimes is not even mentioned.

The written record reflects processes of consultation, investigation, preparation, presentation and representation. It clearly reflects the male dominance of the legal profession and the greater numbers of men who have been employed as senior anthropologists in the preparation of land claims. The written record thus tends to confirm the androcentric heritage of anthropology as well as to reinforce the stereotype, commonly held by many men and women of non-Aboriginal culture, that Aboriginal societies are male dominated and that women are essentially pawns in social life. In an astonishing number of claims it has been seen to be quite adequate for men to speak for women and for women to say virtually nothing on their own behalf.[7] Women's efforts to make their voices heard in contexts that mitigate against them are well documented by Bell (1984-5). One cannot suppose that women have been passive throughout the process.

This written record of land claims is a product not only of the centrality of men in the professions that prepare and present claims; it also stands as testimony to a tunnel vision approach on the part of land councils which asserts that as long as people get their land it does not matter who gives evidence. In this view, gender equity appears to be classed as an optional extra that land councils simply cannot afford. And as long as male centrality is reproduced, and gender equity defined as an optional extra, that is how claims will continue to be presented.

The tunnel vision approach depends on a view which rarely is articulated (but which most people involved in land claims have heard at one time or another) that the Act has no bearing on Aboriginal people and their Law in the further course of their lives. The idea is that people present their case, get their land, and get on with their lives. This view is false as well as self-serving. It would have us suppose that Aboriginal people do not incorporate the claim procedure into their lives, and that the claim does not radically change the conditions of the claimants' own lives, and of their descendants as well. If further suggests that Aboriginal people have realistic choices about whether or not to participate in the national and state institutions which govern many aspects of their lives.

In a successful claim, Australian law recognises the authority and integrity of the claimants' Law by granting the land. One result is that a set of Law persons has been empowered, and their empowerment feeds back into the on-going life of country and community. Men have been massively advantaged economically, culturally, psychologically, and in terms of their long range prospects for political action.

The disadvantage to women concerns not only, or even predominantly, the secret/sacred knowledge which they are unable to present. Rather, the disadvantage for many women (not all) encompasses the full dimension of their right to speak with knowledge and passion about their status as land owners. If the anthropologists work most closely with men (as most male anthropologists are encourage to do), and if the lawyers work most closely with men (and all the lawyers who have had the responsibility of carrying a land claim have, to date, been male), and if land councils see their accountability first and foremost to Aboriginal men, the results are dishearteningly predictable. There may emerge the view, apparent in many claims, that all adult men know more, and are therefore better qualified to act as witnesses, than all women; even junior men, according to practices developed under this set of assumptions, are treated as if they know more than the most senior women.

Furthermore, Aboriginal men may believe that only they are authorised to speak in depth in the context of the hearing. Women are unlikely to have come to understand the specifics of the Act and the nature of being a witness. They may not know what their rights as claimants might be, and how they might go about asserting them. They are unlikely to have been proofed to anything like the degree that men are proofed, and anthropologists and lawyers alike may be quite unaware of the depth of knowledge they have to offer. Senior women may not have indicated, or felt that they had the opportunity to indicate, to their legal counsel that they have information which bears crucially on the claim.

My experience of land claims has been that there is a continuum along which can be situated different women's desire to speak for their country, their desire to demonstrate their status as Law women, and their desire to ensure that they as individuals, their group as a whole, and their descendants are understood to be powerful land owners. Individual women, like individual men, position themselves differently, and there are also differences from group to group, region to region. Where women's desires are strong, they have, for well over a decade, frequently been frustrated.

Women's evidence

Men's restricted knowledge has been accepted by Land Commissioners as a dimension of Aboriginal culture which they are prepared to respect, and most land claims have included greater or lesser amounts of restricted (men only) evidence. Because of the predominance of men in the legal and anthropological positions, this has not appeared to pose a problem. Right from the first, however, women's restricted information has been objected to by opposing legal counsel.

Justice Toohey (1982) in his Report on the Daly River (Malak Malak) Land Claim discussed his decision about whether or not to receive a submission prepared by anthropologist Dianne Bell in conjunction with the women claimants. Dr Bell sought to restrict the submission such that the only man to read it would be the Aboriginal Land Commissioner. Justice Toohey stated:[8]

`Objection to the reception of this material was taken by Mr Bracher, counsel for a number of non-Aboriginal persons in the Daly River area, and by Mr Hiley, counsel for the Northern Territory Government "it should be clearly understood that if I receive the material it will not necessarily be denied to other parties. As it happens, all counsel participating are male but there are a number of female legal practitioners in Darwin and elsewhere whose services could be enlisted for the purpose of reading the report, just as there are female anthropologists who could be engaged for the same purpose. This may present some practical difficulties" But they are not insuperable.'

At one level the relationship between women's secret/sacred Law and a male Land Commissioner or Judge poses an insoluble contradiction. If women's Law is violated by the presence of men, then a male judge is unlikely to be brought into its presence. Women claimants, unlike men, are thus required to consider inherent contradiction between the land commissioner and the restrictions. Throughout the Northern Territory many women have kept their Law secret. This was the decision made by the senior women claimants in the Jasper Gorge Kidman Springs Land Claim (heard in 1988), for example. Like other women in the Victoria River valley, the women in this area have secret/sacred sites, songs, dances, designs and objects; their secret/sacred ritual is owned according to a system of ownership which is coextensive with their system of land ownership; their organisation and performance of ritual expresses and authenticates land owning relationships. These women seriously considered showing the Aboriginal Land Commissioner, and all the relevant lawyers and anthropologists involved in the claim a portion of their moist secret Law, but at the last moment they decided not to, saying: `From Dreaming right up to now no man been look that thing. We can't lose that Law'.

A strict identification of women's Law with the total exclusion of men, however, overlooks the complex gradations of secrecy that are likely to exist, and Aboriginal people's skilled and subtle management of knowledge. What matters in land claims, I contend, is not whether women reveal secrets. The important issue is whether women have opportunities fully and freely to give their evidence.

These issue arose in the recent Palm Valley Land Claim and the Tempe Downs Land Claim. Aboriginal Land Commissioner Justice Gray has made a series of decisions which have the potential to enhance the possibilities for women to give their evidence under conditions which facilitate their authority.In Palm Valley, the women of one claimant group decided after much deliberation to request that they give some evidence to the judge with no men (other than the judge) present. The transcript, they proposed, would be available to be read by the legal advisers and anthropologists involved in the case, but it would not be circulated beyond that set of people. They stated, through their counsel, David Avery, that these matters which belong to a restricted domain controlled by women. Vance Hughston, barrister for the Northern Territory Government, objected:

`If your Honour is to hear evidence which your Honour is to give any weight to at all, then I would submit in fairness to my clients, that I, as the only experienced land claim counsel amongst my party, should be entitled to hear that evidence. This is not, your Honour, a case of some secret sacred women's matters that cannot be revealed, as I understand it, indeed it is being revealed to your Honour. It is simply a matter that these witnesses would feel more comfortable if they could select the group in front of whom they could give their evidence, and if they could select the counsel who can or cannot ask them questions. But in fairness to other participants in an inquiry of this nature unless there are very very sound religious sacred reasons why it should be done so, in my submissions these proceedings should be as open as possible so that people can have confidence in the conduct of these proceedings, that they are conducted fairly and openly. If your Honour pleases'.[9]

Mr Hughston's introduction of the issue of witnesses choosing to whom they will give evidence and by whom they will be asked questions did not arise in connection with the men's only evidence, although exactly the same principles would appear to apply.

The judge overruled the objection:

`The question then really is, is this evidence which involves matters which are secret from men in the ordinary course, in which case it seems to me that I ought to deal with it in exactly the same way as I deal with restricted men's evidence, namely that I should hear it under what I see as special dispensation, and that I should otherwise exclude men Ö I feel obligated to hear the evidence, and exclude anyone who happened to be female, be they lawyers representing people, anthropologists, my own consulting anthropologist [is] excluded from men's evidence, restricted men's evidence. I feel that I am obliged in the interests of resolving this claim to hear that evidence.'[10]

In a later context, Mr Hughston again objected, this time on slightly different grounds:

`If things cannot be revealed to men, they cannot be revealed to men, and once you do reveal them to a man Ö I cannot see any reason why that cannot be explained to them that it has to be extended to legal representatives of parties, their chosen legal representatives. And again your Honour, we do not have evidence of what [is] Aboriginal law on this matter, but it just seems an unusual way to approach the matter, to say that it is restricted to women only and then have a man actually hear it. It just does not seem to me to make any sense, and there is really no evidence which can assist us in working out how it makes any sense.'[11]

Mr Hughston's appeal to biology--if the information can be imparted to one man why not others--is an impressive example of the way in which biological sex has become a category for arguments about restrictions. In the context of land claims, and undoubtedly this will be the case in Native Title case too, demonstrations of knowledge constitute for Aboriginal people demonstrations of ownership. (Rose 199b, Bennett 1996) It must be understood throughout that privately owned knowledge is presented in a public forum because the legislation requires Aboriginal people to demonstrate that they are who they say they are.

Mr Hughston's other point was that women had not specified Aboriginal law concerning the restrictions they sought, and that therefore it was impossible for him to know if their application was legitimate in terms of the law. The Aboriginal Land Commissioner refrained from engaging in this debate and thus refrained from positioning himself as an authority on Aboriginal law. His overruling of the objection represents an important principle for the conduct of hearings:

`I have inherited a practice under which restrictions on evidence which is said to be the evidence of men only are freely granted, because, I suppose, commissioners have accepted the word of the representatives of claimants that certain items of evidence are desired to be restricted to men only for good reason, and that without inquiring into the details of Aboriginal law and the nature of the evidence in a public way, which would be necessary if such an inquiry were undertaken, commissioners have granted the restrictions. I think it would be most unfortunate if evidence from women, which is similarly restricted, were not able to be taken in these claims. Now, the most obvious difficulty about that is that the commissioner must be of one sex or the other, in a biological sense at least, and because I am a man it is easy for me to hear evidence which is restricted to men only. It is obviously not so easy for me to hear evidence which is restricted to women only. In some cases necessity must triumph, and if the women are prepared to make an exception for me to hear that evidence in the interests of the claim and the matters with which the evidence deals, then I am of the view that the first principle is that I should hear it.'[12]

The Land Commissioner makes a very important here: Land Commissioners have accepted that Aboriginal law includes restrictions, and have sought to honour the integrity of the information presented to them without seeking to assert that they exercise authority in relation to Aboriginal Law.

The Tempe Downs Land Claim was heard in November 1994. Again, the claimant women sought restricted sessions during which they could give evidence to the judge. Again, Mr Hughston, acting on behalf of the Northern Territory Government, objected. Much the same ground was gone over, and Justice Gray made the percipient point:

`I appreciate that it is short prior notice, and that it is not easy to find representation by experienced female counsel in relation to land claims. But I suppose it might equally be said that if we go on hearing only restricted men's evidence forever, then that is all we will ever do. And it would seem to me to be both unfair to the claimants, and a dereliction of my statutory duty if I were to refuse to hear evidence.'[13]

The Tempe Downs Land Claim was a watershed. For the first time extensive evidence was given by women in restricted session with a restricted transcript. For the first time also, a land council (in this case the Central Land Council) made a helicopter available for women's site visits and site evidence. In a world where money talks, this was the first time that money began saying something about gender equity.

In the Tempe Claim a whole group of women was given an opportunity to speak and to show their evidence on their terms. I was deeply impressed with the authority and strength which the claimant women communicated once they were in control of the context. Those of us who have worked with Aboriginal women and known their strength and authority, only to see that authority over-ridden in the course of male dominated land claim processes, will appreciate the momentous possibilities inherent in the reconfiguration of women in land claims.

Violence and the periphery

Australia is a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 27 of which `provides that groups must not be denied the right to enjoy their own culture' (Dodson 1995: 13). The core issue is whether Indigenous societies will be able to continue to function as societies within contemporary Australian polity of which they are a part.

The deep colonising embedded within land rights raises the question of cultural survival in acute form. The erasure of the power and presence of women in the context of a public hearing about the spiritual, cultural and social bases of land ownership is a form of violence; it obscures and tends to nullify the living presence of Indigenous women in their social, moral and spiritual complexity. It is a violence that is not acknowledged as such--as it is displaced--androcentric views of society assume that women already are marginal to social/spiritual life. Given that assumption, their marginalisation in land claims can be thought to mirror, rather than violently to assert, social reality. As is the case for Indigenous women in North America, erasure contributes to invisibility in political and spiritual matters. (Bell 1993: 295)

Many of my colleagues see land claims as an essentially beneficent process with a few minor problems. I see the beneficent process, and I also see embedded erasure. In this context which brings legal, anthropological and judicial expertise together with Indigenous expertise in a decolonising process intended to empower Indigenous people, the erasure of women's power constitutes the left hand of colonisation. It creates absence where there was once presence. And like related colonising practices, it is to be expected that absence in this intensely serious and strongly legitimated setting establishes a benchmark of absence that is likely to increase rather than decrease.

I would be pleased to rest my case here, saying that a process that presses women to the periphery and erases their presence is clearly a process that is in urgent need of remedy. Time after time, however, women who make this case are hit with gestures of denial, dismissal, trivialisation, condescension, and , in extreme cases, charges of provoking dissatisfaction where previously only satisfaction had reigned.

Given this resistance to basic tenets of equity, I will take a moment to track some of the implications of marginalisation. I stated at the outset that colonising demand for information construct a double-bind that entraps women and men differently. I have focussed my analysis on women, but it ought to be borne in mind that men are also entrapped. Their knowledge is being transferred at a rapid rate into contexts over which they have little control, and at the same time they become implicated in gender relations that set them in opposition to their own mothers, sisters, aunties and daughters.[14]

Briefly, when the power of women is erased in land claim practice and from the record, what sticks on the surface is confirmation of a powerful stereotype: that Indigenous women are the social pawns of Indigenous men. This imagery returns us to familiar colonising gender constructs in which the domination of men over women is taken as an index of their savagery (discussed in Rose 1992). In the late twentieth century, imagery of the subjugated woman signals a wrong to be overcome. At the extreme, the logic of this imagery of gender relations is that the coloniser appears as a saviour who will rescue Indigenous women from the ills or evils of their won society. The further logic of such imagery is that what is often referred to as traditional Aboriginal society is out of sympathy with the twentieth century, and is destined to give way to more enlightened practices, both as a result of the contact between settlers and Indigenous people, and as a result of the political choices of enlightened men and women of both settler and Indigenous origins. Insidiously but relentlessly the left hand clears the way for the perception of Indigenous gender relations as a tradition awaiting transformation. Progress, in this logic, will overtake Aboriginal societies, resulting in the transformation of Indigenous tradition to produce gender equity according to western standards.

In sum, the erasure of women as social beings in their own right produces this colonising imagery: the necessity of their salvation from the oppressive gender relations which, through erasure of women's own autonomous power and presence, can now be represented as integral to Indigenous society must be changed in order to co-exist in the contemporary world.

This brief summary of the colonising imagery of gender relations (positing Aboriginal women to be in need of the humanitarian civilisation of the western world) leads me to conclude with a simple and direct argument: if cultural survival can only be achieved at the cost of silencing and disempowering a segment of the population, in what sense is it possible to speak of `culture' and `survival'? The case for women's survival as historical and moral actors who control and command their own resources (land, knowledge, spirituality), like the case for whole groups, is political (Maybury-Lewis 1977). There is no natural law dictating that women be silenced and disempowered, but there have been and will continue to be many decisions about how land rights will be managed.

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[3] There is a vast amount of literature concerning strategies for justifying destruction for the sake of progress and justifying progress as a teleological end in its own right. One strategy to which I will return below is that of tunnel vision. The view down the tunnel is that the end justifies the means. It has been a central view on Australian frontiers for at least a century (for example , see Rose 1991: 262) and continues to inform land rights and other debates in this decolonising period.

[2] Women's ritual life is described and analysed in detail in three main studies spanning five decades of women's endeavours to redress the androcentric views of Indigenous gender relations: Bell(1993), Berndt (1950) and Kaberry (1981), while Hamilton (1981) provides an excellent article on questions on male domination. Gross (1980) provides an excellent analysis of a number of symbolic dimensions of Dreaming women and ritual practice. Critiques of these views by women include Hamilton (1986) and Merlan (1989). Brock (1989) presents a number of essays which indicate a range of approaches and issues, while Gale (1983) offers opportunities for Indigenous women to speak directly to readers. Langton (1985) provides a very fine critique of androcentric bias.

[3] Watson's recent (1996) study of the Seven Sisters Dreaming provides an analysis of many of these issues. I have borrowed the concept of dialogical relationship between men and women from her work (ibid: 112).

[4] Watson's recent (1996) study of the Seven Sisters Dreaming provides an analysis of many of these issues. I have borrowed the concept of dialogical relationship between men and women fromher work (pg112).

[5] See, for example, Bell (1994) on the Munga Munga women, Rose (1994a) on the Black Headed Python, and Watson (1996) on the Seven Sisters.

[6] Portions of this and the following section appeared in an earlier publication (Rose 1995).

[7] There may be historical or cultural reasons why it is appropriate for men to carry the burden of evidence, but this is a matter to be investigated rather than assumed.

[8] My understanding of these two claims was formed in my capacity as Consulting Anthropologist for the Aboriginal Land Commissioner.

[9] Palm Valley Land Claim Transcript, March 1994, p246.

[10] Palm Valley Land Claim Transcript, March 1994, p 248. I have reproduced the transcript as it stands, although it is clear that there is a word or two missing.

[11] Palm Valley Land Claim Transcript, March 1994, p338.

[12] Palm Valley Land Claim Transcript, March 1994, pp339-40.

[13] Tempe Downs Land Claim Transcript, November 1994, p211.

[14] The issue of knowledge and how it is managed in land claims requires separate discussion (see for example Rose 1994b. Michaels (1985) and Keen (1994) offer two insightful accounts, one primarily theoretical, the other more ethnographically based. Bell (1993) provides an insightful analysis of the articulation of women's and men's knowledge domains.