First Nations Law Council

The saddest thing for us, as First Nations people, is to understand that those who wrote the Native Title Act thought they knew what they were doing, but for us the mockery and pretence is so bold for all persons with common sense to see that the Native Title process is truly an insult and a mockery to common sense, but it is a way to maintain control over First Nations Peoples, our resources and all that we seek to do.

7 July 2020

Ghillar Michael Anderson the Convenor of the Sovereign Union announces today that, after years of discussion and consultations with senior Law men and senior Law women, they have now founded the Wati Law Council in the Western Desert cultural block and, in the case of the Euahlayi Nation in the east of Australia, the Euahlayi Law Council. Discussions are continuing with other Nations’ ceremonially educated Law-holders.

The processes and procedures that have been adopted are to formalise the ancient Customary Law procedures for the modern era. The adaptations only deal with process and procedure and do not impact on the core of First Nations Law. They have been agreed to in order to make them more understandable to the western mind.

The two Law Councils named above have finalised an agreement on the design for the Law Room, otherwise referred to in western society as the courtroom.

It is a well-known fact that since 1975, the Whitlam Labor government, at the time, established the Australian Law Reform Commission and gave it Terms of Reference, which were to investigate and recommend the recognition and inclusion of First Nations’ Customary Law within the Australian legal system and practice.

In 2005, the Western Australian government also asked its own Law Reform Commission to look at recognising First Nations’ Customary Law and its ability to be included in the western common law process.

Ghillar said that the conclusions of his years of discussions with senior Lawmen and women are that First Nations Law is our Law and can only be presided over by ceremonial-educated senior Lawmen and senior Law women. These Laws are the ancient Celestial Laws of these lands and waters. They are the Law of the Land and are inalienable.

Many may ask what does it mean when we talk about the inalienability of First Nations Law and Customary practices? In short, the Customary practices of First Nations Peoples are the ways in which we live our lives and order our society and relationships, both internally and externally. Included are the recognition of rights of access to come into and pass through other Nations’ lands and waters for whatever reason. These practices have formed societal norms of customary practices dating back thousands of years. I would like to remind the western scholars that Cicero, who died in 43BC, said that customary law had the force of statute law, in the absence of a relevant statute.

As a consequence of time, our Customary practices have emerged with their own processes and punishments for violation of these established and recognised customary practices and social norms amongst First Nations Peoples, internally and externally. This equates to English common law, in which customary laws are both criminal and have strict liability.

The Laws come from the Creation and are themselves Celestial Laws. They are called Celestial Laws because they are Laws laid down for human society to observe and follow in the strictest orthodox manner, meaning strict adherence to correct or accepted beliefs, especially in spiritual religious practices. These Celestial Laws are laid down in our ritual statutes and our men and women receive them through oral transmission, including through song and dance, as we pass through our sacred ceremonial initiation rituals. People who have not gone through these Rites of Passage and sacred ceremonies have no authority whatsoever to make commentaries, reference or interpret our ancient customary ways and Law practices. Just as it is in the western legal system, there are men and women of high degree and not every man and woman achieve the status of a high degree person, e.g. the Tjilpi status is reserved to the selected few senior Lawmen and senior Law women have their language name and process.

The reasons behind asserting our legal system is to address and recover from the interventions of the western legal system, which continues to subvert and misdirect how our Law and Customary practices are to be interpreted in the occupiers’ legal world. In fact, they are practicing sedition and continue to violate our symbols of sovereignty, thereby continuing to perpetrate terrorism on First Nations Peoples.

The founding of and instituting of Law Councils is to address this subversion, which is the fraud of the occupying legislative powers to write into their colonial law how our Celestial Law and Customary Practices are to be interpreted. Fraud is a two-step process. 1. By rhetoric, words or other conduct, to induce a person to alter his views to false views that are to his own detriment. 2. To induce him to act on these new false views, to his own detriment.

In the case of Native Title law in this country, the absolutism associated with First Nations’ Law and Customary Practices is left to be defined by colonial ‘experts’, anthropologists!! One comment that can be made on this matter is that the occupying courts require that the ‘expert’ provides satisfactory evidence to support the Peoples’ claims of their continuity to the Law and Customs, as they were at the time of the occupiers’ claim to sovereignty – 1788, in the case of the eastern States, and 1829 in the case of Western Australia.

The saddest thing for us, as First Nations people, is to understand that those who wrote the Native Title Act thought they knew what they were doing, but for us the mockery and pretence is so bold for all persons with common sense to see that the Native Title process is truly an insult and a mockery to common sense, but it is a way to maintain control over First Nations Peoples, our resources and all that we seek to do.

Dr H C ‘Nugget’ Coombs 1906 - 1997

We do understand what the late Dr H C ‘Nugget’ Coombs said when he objected to the Native Title Act when it was assented to. He said it was not about justice or recognising First Nations’ connection to Country according to First Nations Law and Customary practices. It was creating a means that would fool the world and the public of Australia that they were attempting to address the legacy of the ‘unutterable shame’ of being beneficiaries to the crime of genocide and thereby lay claim to all possessions of the First Nations Peoples, whom they killed, imprisoned and kidnapped their children. Coombs wrote in Aboriginal Autonomy:

It is equally clear that the legislation [Native Title Act 1993] responds to the agenda of powerful corporations in the mining industry (though not responsibly enough according to mining interests) and to particular state interests, and other significant economic and social interests, especially those arising from ecological and environmental aspects of the use of natural resources, were substantially subordinated in the preliminary discussions held about the legislation.

If the High Court itself focused only on particular legal issues and, as a consequence, limited its findings to that degree, then subsequent Commonwealth legislation proposes even more specific conditions upon the recognition and exercise of native title. What is being granted by the Commonwealth legislative largess is an Aboriginal native title engineered to suit white proprietary interests. [added emphasis]

[Coombs, H. C. 1994, Aboriginal Autonomy: Issues and Strategies, Cambridge University Press, pp. 209-210.

In this book Nugget Coombs was disgusted that the First Nations participants, during these negotiations, would co-operate with law-makers to facilitate a process of surrendering claims to the Country, in order to permit expeditious processes of the exploitation of the natural resources on and within First Nations lands and waters across this continent. It is a well-known fact that many of those First Nations negotiators for the Native Title Act, later had personally benefitted significantly from both government and mining companies alike and their services are still funded to this day by government and/or mining companies.

Australia has a Black history and it has benefitted from the proceeds of the most horrendous and horrific crimes against innocent Peoples, who had governed this land in a sustainable way that we survived two known Ice Ages and other major climatic changes during the thousands of years of our habitation of these lands and waters.

We have Laws that are Celestial Laws that connect us to the past, present and future. We have Customary Practices that have maintained us for thousands of years.

It has been concluded by senior Lawmen and senior Law women, with whom we have had discussions, that no western legal practitioner or ‘expert’ shall have any further rights to interpret our Law or to conclude any resolution under the occupiers’ rules about our rights and interests. Matters of concern are currently being considered by Law Councils. This is our Law and we will govern ourselves, and others who come onto our lands, through it.

We understand that the British and their occupying power have ruled by superior force. It is an unutterable shame to see how governments use their military and police to quash First Nations and their supporters of their opposition to the exploitative processes of the extractive industries and other developments. The theft and abuse continue in Australia unabated, for the most part aided and abetted by western judges who ‘wrest the law unto themselves’ to maintain the illegal skeletal colonial framework.

Contact: Ghillar Michael Anderson
Convenor of the Sovereign Union,
Head of State of the Euahlayi Peoples Republic
Contact Details here