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Indigenous Australian laws of war: Makarrata, milwerangel and junkarti

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 October 2021

Samuel White  and
Ray Kerkhove
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Abstract

Studies in Australian history have lamentably neglected the military traditions of First Australians prior to European contact. This is due largely to a combination of academic and social bigotry, and loss of Indigenous knowledge after settlement. Thankfully, the situation is beginning to change, in no small part due to the growing literature surrounding the Frontier Wars of Australia. All aspects of Indigenous customs and norms are now beginning to receive a balanced analysis. Yet, very little has ever been written on the laws, customs and norms that regulated Indigenous Australian collective armed conflicts. This paper, co-written by a military legal practitioner and an ethno-historian, uses early accounts to reconstruct ten laws of war evidently recognized across much of pre-settlement Australia. The study is a preliminary one, aiming to stimulate further research and debate in this neglected field, which has only recently been explored in international relations.

Keywords

Indigenous Australianslaws of warspectrum of conflictlegal historyregulated battlecustomary lawpayback
Type
Research Article
Information
International Review of the Red Cross , Volume 102 , Issue 914: Emerging Voices , August 2020 , pp. 959 - 978
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the ICRC

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Footnotes

*

This paper draws upon and refines research conducted by the authors, recently published in “Indigenous Australians”, in Samuel White (ed.), The Laws of Yesterday's Wars, Brill Nijhoff, Leiden, 2021. The authors would like to extend their thanks to Mr Angus Murray, a Wiradjuri man completing his PhD at the University of Newcastle on pre-settlement warfare, who provided valuable inputs, direction and unique fragments of knowledge that underlay this work. The views presented in this article are the authors’ own and do not represent those of any organizations with which they are affiliated.

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