The state we now call Australia emerged through successive worlds. The old worlds did not disappear, but persist to this day. From time to time their unresolved legal contradictions burst into the present to pose radical challenges to the dominant legal order in the continent. This chapter retells the legal history of Australia through three successive worlds. The first world is the ancient history and unfinished business of inter-national relationships between First Nations, and between them and the settler state. The second world is the British Empire, a global state that aimed to impose a single legal order over its imperial jurisdictions. The third world is the international system of sovereign states that covers the globe today. If Australians have pursued a ‘rules-based order,’ this pursuit has always reflected their own conflicting desires for the liberation and domination of neighbouring peoples, lands and seas.