Old Dead Trees and Young Trees Green: The Cambridge Legal History of Australia

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1 Peter Cane, Lisa Ford and Mark McMillan, eds, The Cambridge Legal History of Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).2 Markus D. Dubber and Christopher Tomlins, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Legal History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Heikki Pihlajamäki, Markus D. Dubber and Mark Godfery, eds, The Oxford Handbook of European Legal History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).3 See Keith Pickens, ‘The Writing of New Zealand History: A Kuhnian Perspective’, Historical Studies 17, no. 68 (1977): 384. Keith Sinclair, A History of New Zealand (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959) is essentially Turnerian (stressing the frontier and the local creation of culture and identity); W.H. Oliver, The Story of New Zealand (London: Faber and Faber, 1960) is essentially Hartzian.4 Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton & Company, 1988). Nevertheless the frontier thesis remains alive and well, and numerous distinguished books by prominent American and Canadian historians have been published recently which continue to utilise the concept of the frontier.5 David Lieberman, ‘English Legal Culture in the Late Eighteenth Century: Institutions and Values’, in The Cambridge Legal History of Australia, 40–60.6 See, for example, Ion Idriess, Our Living Stone Age (Melbourne: Angus and Robertson, 1963).7 B. Spencer and F.J. Gillen, The Arunta: A Study of Stone Age People (London: Macmillan, 1927), vii. This book correlates with the evolutionist phase in the history of cultural anthropology, which has long been supplanted by the functionalist school of Malinowski and others as well as by the style of anthropology pioneered by Franz Boas in the USA. See generally G.W. Stocking, After Tylor: British Social Anthropology 1888–1951 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995).8 See Mike Smith, The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 212–67. The modern emphasis is to understand Aboriginal rock art as a product of complex cultural traditions unique to Australia and to discard synchronic and diachronic comparisons.9 Ibid.10 Coel Kirby, ‘Australia and the World’, in The Cambridge Legal History of Australia, 281–302.11 Ibid., 282.12 See e.g. John Hirst, Freedom on the Fatal Shore: Australia’s First Colony (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2008). This book is a consolidation of the same author’s Convict Society and Its Enemies (1983) and The Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy (1988).13 Bruce Kercher, ‘Colonial Settlement to Colony’, in The Cambridge Legal History of Australia, 87–107.14 Ibid., 88.15 See Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the British Imagination (Cambridge: Polity, 2002).16 Amanda Nettelbeck, ‘Protection Regimes’, in The Cambridge Legal History of Australia, 482–501.17 Ibid., 499.18 See John H. Langbein, The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).19 See Richard Hill, The Colonial Frontier Tamed: New Zealand Policing 1867–1886 (Wellington: Historical Branch, Department of Internal Affairs and GP Books, 1989).20 Mark Finnane, ‘Indigenous Peoples and Settler Criminal Law’, in The Cambridge Legal History of Australia, 629–50, 629.21 Ibid., 650.22 Diane Kirkby, ‘Labour Law’, in The Cambridge Legal History of Australia, 671–92.23 Ibid., 688–9.24 Bruce H. Mann, ‘The Transformation of Law and Economy in Early America’, in The Cambridge History of Law in America, vol. I, Early America (1850–1815), eds Michael Grossberg and Christopher Tomlins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 365–99, 377.25 On the American phase of British transportation, see A. Roger Ekirch, Bound for America: Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718–1775 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). On the various forms of free and unfree migration to, and of labour in, colonial British North America, see Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labour and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Tomlins argues, in an extended discussion, that the boundaries between ‘free’ and ‘unfree’ labour in colonial British North America were highly permeable; I can see no reason why the same could not be said of colonial Australia, which received not only convicts but also enslaved Pacific islanders, sent there by means of what is euphemistically referred to as the Pacific ‘labour trade’. I may have missed it, but I couldn’t find anything about the latter in The Cambridge Legal History of Australia; on New Caledonia as France’s penal colony, see Louis-José Barbançon, L’Archipel des Forçats (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Septentrion, Paris, 2003), 15.26 Shino Konishi, ‘Reckoning with the Past’, in The Cambridge Legal History of Australia, 740–64.27 Nicole Watson, ‘Indigenous Legal Traditions and Australian Legal Education’, in The Cambridge Legal History of Australia, 721–39.28 See further, Ron Harris, ‘Is It Time for a Non Euro-American Legal History?’, The American Journal of Legal History 56, no. 1 (2016): 60.29 Kathy Bowrey, ‘Place and Race in Australian Copyright Law: May Gibbs’s and Albert Namatjira's Copyright’, in The Cambridge Legal History of Australia, 693–718.30 Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co, 1961; originally published 1922).