Some five times more land in the Northern Territory has been granted to Aboriginal owners than Fraser's legislative drafters intended, while large tracts around the town areas has been rendered, by legislative fiat, unclaimable. The Native Title Act is so hedged about by legal difficulty that successful claims have scarcely begun. The disadvantage common to all past models is that everyone, except the successful claimant is left unsatisfied. The principle 'that is yours, this is mine', an axiom of European land settlement for many centuries, in the end fails to address the legal and religious complexities of modern Australian principles of land settlement. Nor does that principle satisfy shared emotional complexities.
Aboriginal people have other connections to land than traditional association.
They cleared the bush, farmed the land, built huts, fenced boundaries, bore children, nursed the sick and buried their dead on the treasured reserves, from almost all of which they were evicted, in the past ninety years, by one means or another. Thousands of cups of tea and damper consumed on the same iron bedsteads before the same billies combined in memory with the events of the life cycle on these sites of action and resistance. Land in our own century has for Aboriginal people grown ever richer in secular and social meaning. And so it has for non-Aborigines, not least for those in the eye of the storm, the Queensland pastoralists. In my own recent book Returning to Nothing I coincidentally noted these very same mechanisms of deep belonging which have developed so strongly amongst non-indigenous Australians.