Strangers in Sea Country: The Early History of the Northern Territory’s Legislation Recognising Aboriginal Peoples’ Relationships to the Sea

Abstract

This article uses a reconciling sovereignties frame to analyse the initial debates in the 1970s about recognising Aboriginal peoples’ relationships to sea country in the Northern Territory (‘NT’) which culminated in declaring ‘sea closures’ in the 1980s. Sea closures were unique to the NT and were the first substantive legal mechanism in Australia that recognised a form of Indigenous rights over the sea. Sea closures are still the law ‘on the books’ in the NT, but they can be seen as a legal and policy failure given that only two were ever declared. However, the history of sea closures reveals assertions of sovereignty made by both Aboriginal peoples and the settler state in legal, sociological and empirical ways. The reconciling sovereignties methodology seeks to analyse interactions between assertions of sovereignty, across time, to identify what was fundamentally at stake during this important part of Australian legal history.