The Land Is the Law
For Mary Graham, Kombumerri Elder and philosopher, the land is neither property nor backdrop: it is the sacred entity from which all law, kinship, and meaning proceed.
Before even her first sentence, Mary Graham sets two epigraphs side by side. The first is a dialogue she invents for her own text:
English Western: What’s the meaning of life?
Aboriginal: What is it that wants to know?
English Westerner: What is the meaning of life?
Aboriginal: Who wants to know?
Where one seeks an answer to fit inside a mind, the other shifts the question toward what, within us, asks it. Then comes a second epigraph, this one borrowed from Bill Neidjie, a Bunitj Elder from Kakadu:
English The white man’s law is always changing, but Aboriginal Law never changes, and is valid for all people.
English White man’s law keeps changing; Aboriginal Law never changes, and applies to everyone.
Two voices, two nations—Neidjie is Bunitj, from Kakadu; Graham is Kombumerri, connected to the Wakka Wakka of Queensland. She does not speak for herself here; she cites him, setting the tone her own text will follow. From this, Graham formulates what she calls the two foundational axioms of the Aboriginal worldview. The first:
English The land is a sacred entity, not property or real estate; it is the great mother of all humanity.
English The land is a sacred entity, not property or real estate; it is the great mother of all humanity.
The Land is the Law—not a law about the land, enacted by some authority and applied to territory assumed neutral: the land itself legislates, for it is the source of all meaning. Graham draws from this an architectural rather than moral consequence. The relationship between land and people comes first; the relationship among people themselves is secondary, shaped by the first. Society does not decide how to treat the land: how one treats the land determines, upstream, what a society can become.
This shifts a word French thinks it knows. “Property” assumes a subject and an object: someone owns, something is owned, and the relationship ends where the deed does. What Graham describes has no such shape. The land belongs to no one because it is the origin of all—“the great mother of all humanity” is not poetic metaphor tacked on afterward; it is the very structure of the statement: a mother is not her child’s property, yet everything the child is comes from her.
What remains is a tension Graham does not smooth over: she speaks from a precise position—Kombumerri, woman, academic—and yet articulates axioms she presents as broadly valid, beyond her own people. She does not claim to speak for all Aboriginal nations of Australia; she offers her own articulation of a foundation she considers shared. “According to Graham,” then—never “Aborigines say.”
Western law has a word for what can be sold, bequeathed, bounded: property. It has no real word for what Graham describes—a land one proceeds from rather than possesses, which remains the ultimate reference for any rule humans set among themselves. The land, and how we treat it, is what determines our human-ness, she writes: the land, and how we treat it, is what determines our very humanity. This is not a clause to be added to law. It is what law, in her view, should proceed from.
Sources cited
- Mary Graham, Some Thoughts about the Philosophical Underpinnings of Aboriginal Worldviews, ed. 1999 ; repris in Australian Humanities Review, n°45, 2008 (ANU Press, accès ouvert), trans. texte original anglais (voix kombumerri nommée) ; rendu français maison.
- Bill Neidjie (cité par Graham), Kakadu Man, ed. épigraphe reproduite in Graham, art. cité, 2008, trans. texte original anglais (voix bunitj nommée) ; rendu français maison.