The Place of Indigenous People: Locating Crime and Criminal Justice in a Colonising World

Publisher:
Federation Press
Publication Type:
Chapter
Citation:
Locating Crime in Context and Place: Perspectives on Regional, Rural and Remote Australia, 2015, pp. 60-69
Issue Date:
2015-12-15
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This brief historical overview provides the context for locating the place of crime and crime control. At the heart of much of the interaction between coloniser and colonised in Australia, including dispossession, the introduction of English law and development of specific legal policies which regulated Indigenous lives, was the aim to create new spaces which provided for the individual ownership of land and capitalist exploitation of labour and resources. The contemporary marginalisation of Indigenous people, and their consequent socio-economic disadvantage, was forcibly constructed through a range of governmental controls (see for example, Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs 2006, p. 68). The spatial separation of Indigenous people through social, political, economic and legal mechanisms created a very particular place for Indigenous people outside of the body politic but very much within a highly regulated state sphere, and subject to an ‘originary violence’ which disavowed the existence of Indigenous law and sovereignty (Watson 2009).
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