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John Chesterman and Brian Galligan, Citizens Without Rights: Aborigines and Australian Citizenship (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997), ix + 277 pp., $29.95, ISBN 0 521 59751 X.
Citizenship is a defining element in the relationship between people and the state and, in essence, questions of citizenship are the centrepiece of the book. The authors provide a thought-provoking account of how governments in Australia used laws and regulations to control the lives of the Aboriginal people and to prevent them from exercising the most basic rights and freedoms. For Aboriginal people in Australia, the citizenship mantle represented a denial rather than a protection of rights and, at some levels, citizenship was a reminder that they were captives in their own land. Citizenship was used as an enticement for people to deny their culture and commit themselves to another way of life. Most Aboriginal people refused to disassociate themselves from their own society and, as a consequence, faced a system which controlled their freedom, institutionalised them, and applied discriminatory policies to stifle their movement, limit their participation within their own family life and control their future. In some areas of Queensland, for example, Aborigines were denied freedom of...