Fractal politics and diplomacy: religion, governance, and conflict management in classical Aboriginal Australia

Abstract

Through a discussion of the overall patterning of religion and law, and using examples from Central Australia and Southeast Queensland, this response to the inaugural Coral Bell School lecture on Indigenous Diplomacy by Mary Graham and Morgan Brigg shows how Aboriginal people developed a system of embedded, detailed, and comprehensive fractal politics and diplomacy. The descriptor ‘fractal’ is used as it is particularly apt for explaining the long-lasting pre-colonial stable order that prevailed on the Australian continent. The broad categories in the classical Aboriginal fractal system are religion and the Law, geography and land tenure, kinship, and the class or skin system. The response explains how these elements lock together, and how this in turn supports diplomatic and harmonious relations among groups or nations. The fractal diplomatic systems of Aboriginal Australia thus generated multi-faceted identities and ways of forming polities at different scales to address particular socio-political needs and challenges dependent on broad contextual factors and the current circumstances. This anthropologically informed explication of the diplomatic system complements the more abstract model of Indigenous political relations described in the Graham and Brigg lecture.