The Aboriginal Treaty Committee had been a research project as well as a popular movement, for academic innovation was an ingredient of policy change. International law, the nature of national sovereignty, the rights of indigenous peoples – these had been topics of legal scholarship and of public policy in nations such as Canada, the United States and New Zealand, but in Australia they were still, in the late 1970s, esoteric matters. Legal scholars were aware that the Blackburn judgement of 1971 had revealed Australian law to be distinctly unyielding to any notion of customary rights of indigenous property and sovereignty, but Blackburn had scarcely exhausted the possibilities of colonial law.

If national legal traditions could not be insulated from international jurisprudence, then Australian exceptionalism was open to question. In 1979 the High Court ruled in ‘Coe v the Commonwealth’ that it had no jurisdiction over the question of indigenous sovereignty, but some lawyers remained optimistic that other issues of indigenous rights were domestically justiciable. Barrister Barbara Hocking, speaking at a conference on ‘Land rights and the future of Australian race relations’ held at James Cook University Townsville in August 1981, suggested that a test case be brought before the High Court by Queensland Aboriginal people still living on their tribal land. She inferred from the judgements in ‘Coe’ that ‘the High Court is interested in a test case’ on the existence of ‘native title’.