Two Laws

This exhibition looks at ongoing debates about Indigenous knowledge, law and property in Australia.

It invites thought about an autonomous future for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures.

When Britain established legal control over Australia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, hundreds of Indigenous nations were subordinated to the crown.

The colonisers did not recognise Indigenous legal systems. They usually believed Aboriginal people’s beliefs, religion and culture to be inferior to their own belief systems. Indigenous Australians have resisted this domination over them from the beginning. People persisted with their own laws. Indigenous rights, in recent decades, have been recognised worldwide. Formal recognition of Indigenous customary law is now being called for.