Frontier Extractivism: Climate Change and Indigenous Dispossession

This article adopts the concept of frontier encounters to explore the continuities between extractivism as a phenomenon characterising the immediate colonial phase in Australia following assertion of British sovereignty, and a contemporary energy resource extraction frontier in the Northern Territory. Drawing on the wider historical context whereby various capitalist forms of extraction have precipitated the imperial transposition of colonial governance into the land and waters occupied by Indigenous peoples, it 'reads in' the dispossession of Aboriginal Peoples as integral to the trajectories of resource exploitation in Australia. Through a retrospective reading of Mabo v Queensland [No 2], it demonstrates how the colonial imposition of sovereign title over resources has provided the underlying legal property form, including the derivate native title regime, that bridges colonial dispossession and Australia's continuing contribution to climate change via export of carbon resources. In articulating the interlinkages between the two phases of frontier encounter, the article challenges the designation of the Anthropocene as an explanatory rationale. It suggests that the underlying knowledge and legal system supporting the Anthropocene are part of an ideology and set of scientific practices that are entwined with the histories and legacies of colonialism and imperialism, as well as the shifting parameters of capitalism across time.