Documenting Democracy
Australia's Story
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Land
Land
The key documents providing legal expression of relations to land in Australia show the fundamental connection of territory and nation. All legal authority has land and sea boundaries, and the documents on this pathway include those defining these limits, as well as documents covering people's legal title to land.

  • Along the boundary trail you will find documents defining land and sea boundaries.


  • The property trail follows documents regulating titles to property in land.


  • This trail also follows the legal recognition of Indigenous rights to land.


In 1869 South Australia's Surveyor-General, George Goyder, undertook the survey of Northern Territory.
   
Property trail
In 1869 South Australia's Surveyor-General, George Goyder, undertook the survey of Northern Territory land – which had already been sold at auctions immediately after the Colony's annexation of this vast area in 1863. Boyle Travers Finniss had not been able to do this work from a proposed town site at the entrance to the Adelaide River in 1864–65, and Goyder set up his base camp at Port Darwin, at the foot of Fort Hill, pictured here in 1869. This camp grew into the town of Palmerston (now Darwin), its rough buildings not only serving as the Territory's first Lands Office but housing the incoming population.

On Australia Day 1972 Aboriginal people set up a tent embassy.
   
Indigenous rights
On Australia Day 1972 Aboriginal people set up a tent embassy on the lawns in front of Parliament House. The embassy was removed by police and re-established several times until February 1975, when it closed. The following year Parliament passed the first Commonwealth law on land rights. A second tent embassy, opened on the same site in January 1992 while the High Court was deciding the Mabo Case, still stands in front of the first Parliament House.