• DOI:10.1080/03007760008591767
• Corpus ID: 190738751

Singing about nations within nations: Geopolitics and identity in Australian indigenous rock music

@article{Dunbarhall2000SingingAN,
  title={Singing about nations within nations: Geopolitics and identity in Australian indigenous rock music},
  author={Peter Dunbar-hall and Christopher R Gibson},
  journal={Popular Music and Society},
  year={2000},
  volume={24},
  pages={45 - 73}
}

• P. Dunbar-hall, Christopher R Gibson
• Published 1 June 2000
• Political Science
• Popular Music and Society

Indigenous Geopolitics in Australia Over the last 25 years, as the United Nations and other global institutions have begun to recognize the rights of colonized peoples, indigenous narratives of nationhood have emerged from within many first world nation-states, including those of Australia, Canada, and the United States, but also many non-Western countries such as the Philippines, Brazil, and throughout Africa. In Australia, indigenous claims for forms of self-determination revolve around struggles to maintain distinct cultural identities, often voiced through the use of the terms peoplehood and increasingly, nationhood, in strategies to own and govern traditional lands within the wider national political system (Yu, Dodson). The historic Mabo decision, handed down by the High Court of Australia in June 1992 in favor of the claims of the Meriam people of Murray Island (Mer), acknowledged the prior occupation of Australia by indigenous peoples, and offered a compelling challenge to the ideological cornerstones of Australian nationalism. Overturning the false principle of terra nullius (Latin for "empty land") which underwrote the invasion and expansion of European economies across the continent, the Mabo decision shaped a new geopolitical environment in Australia through the entrenchment of native title rights in the nation's body of common law. Before native title became enshrined in the legal sphere of Australian politics, indigenous self-determination policies had been constructed with particular meanings for governments, bureaucracies, and policy-makers. Since the early 1970s, as indigenous rights movements escalated in the Australian national polity, successive Australian governments have adopted self-determination as an official policy in Aboriginal Affairs. Over that period, limited mechanisms for land rights and systems of representative bureaucracy for indigenous communities have been instituted as attempts to reconcile the jurisdictional differences between the colonial state and Australia's "first nations" (Gibson, "Cartographies"). Through these institutional (rather than common law) structures, governments promoted the empowerment of indigenous