7 March 2006
The global implications of the Mabo decision, in which the Australian High Court officially recognised native title as part of common law, will be discussed by a Canadian indigenous affairs expert tonight at a Monash University human rights lecture.
Professor Peter H. Russell, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, Canada, will discuss the implications of the landmark 1992 decision when he delivers the lecture, hosted by the university's Castan Centre for Human Rights Law, on Tuesday 7 March.
"Mabo was important in a global sense and it recognised the movement of indigenous people everywhere to establish a more just and beneficial relationship with the states in which they exist," Professor Russell said.
"I fully appreciate how divided non-indigenous Australians are over the Mabo decision and the issues surrounding it. It forced people to re-think what Australia is as a society and to think of Australia as a country in which there are societies that pre-date the arrival of the British and other Europeans," he said.
Professor Russell is Canada's leading scholar on the role of courts as institutions of contemporary democracy. He was the chair of the research advisory committee to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in Canada, which delivered a benchmark report for reform in 1996.
Professor Russell has written about the emergence of the common law recognition of native title in Australia through the biographical story of Eddie Mabo. His latest book is titled Recognizing Aboriginal Title: The Mabo Case and Indigenous Resistance to English-Settler Colonialism.
What: Castan Centre Lecture -- 'The significance of Mabo for Australia and the world'
Where: Monash University Law Chambers, 472 Bourke Street, Melbourne
When: 6pm, (registration 5.30pm), Tuesday, 7 March
Who: Professor Peter H. Russell, Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto
For further information contact Ms Robyn Anns, Media Communications on +61 3 9905 9317, or Ms Jodi Rockman, Monash Law faculty, on +61 3 9905 2630.
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