In the Uluru Statement from the Heart, released on 26May 2017, a delegation of Aboriginal and TorresStrait Islander people calls for establishing a‘First Nations Voice’ in the Australian Constitutionand for a so-called Makarrata Commission tosupervise a process of ‘agreement-making’ and‘truth-telling’ (Referendum Council 2017, i). Intheir statement, they emphasise that Aboriginal andTorres Strait Islander people were the firstsovereign nations of the Australian continent andits adjacent islands. They substantiate this claimto sovereignty as follows:

The part in italics explicitly links the UluruStatement to the Mabo judgement. Justice Brennanquotes these words from the Separate Opinion of VicePresident Ammoun, appended to the Advisory Opinionon Western Sahara, issued in 1975 by theInternational Court of Justice, to dismiss thenotion that a land can be terranullius (Mabo 1992, 40). The Uluru Statement canthus be read as a direct response to Mabo and thediscourse of Indigenous rights toself-determination, pointing out the continuingstruggle of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanderpeople for recognition of their sovereignty in theform of an unbroken interconnectedness with theland. In other words, this passage highlights whatMabo denied to admit in 1992, namely thatacknowledging relationality with the land cannot bedetached from a recognition of unceded Indigenoussovereignty.

In this chapter, I use the term ‘sovereignty’ in thesense of embodied relations with the land or, morebroadly speaking, an all-encompassing relationality.Such a definition follows the views of someAboriginal scholars and authors, such as AileenMoreton-Robinson and Kim Scott. Moreton-Robinson,for instance, argues that Indigenous sovereignty iscomposed of embodied relations rather than anabsolute, supreme authority, as ‘it is groundedwithin complex relations derived from theintersubstantiation of ancestral beings, humans andland’ (2007, 2).