The Invention of Tradition

The article explores the issues of how law and space intersect in the area known as 'The South'. It examines the intersection between 'Northern' traditions of law and space and indigenous Australians experience of this 'history'. These intersections are germane to the question of how living in the South should now be understood in terms of the shape and pattern of legal relations. Ultimately, the question of indigenous and local traditions that form patterns of the lived experience of local peoples is mediated through law, but is not entirely subsumed by Northern law. Spatial and temporal existence is culturally embedded, and Aboriginal experience of time, for example, does not adhere to Northern parameters. Accordingly, the interleaving of law, tradition and 'existence' is played out in various ways in the colonial and postcolonial history of the South. Thus the interaction between the imposed legal concept and process, and that lived experience of the peoples of the South (whether we designate it as 'tradition' or not) is what is at issue in framing responses to the question of what it means to be positioned in the South.