The law and practice relating to the Crown (or state) lands of Australia is often a topic not well covered in a student’s journey through property law. Yet, Crown lands legislation dealing with the alienation and management of the lands of the Crown has been a feature of the legislative framework of the various Australian jurisdictions since their respective creations.Given that some such interests or rights authorised under the various legislation may rarely be granted or exist only in small numbers, this chapter focuses on some of the enduring principles of Crown lands law and practice.

This chapter discusses the key knowledge requirements or threads of Crown land law and practice that will give both student and practitioner a solid understanding of how to approach the complex legislation of the jurisdiction with its peculiar interests and rights; the public interest, modern land tenure, and Crown lands legislation; Crown lands legislation and Crown land; grants and the Crown’s general power to deal with Crown land; reservations and exceptions in Crown grants; interpreting a Crown grant; public purpose land

Australian land law can now only be viewed through the prism of Mabo’s reframing of the history of land law to include First Nations’ law within its purview and to bring it and the colonising land law into relation with each other. Thus Mabo (and Wik) provide the framework for this chapter. The arrival of a foreign, colonising power in 1788 disrupted the complex systems of First Nations’ land law that had covered the Australian continent for millenia. The baggage of English land law including the feudal doctrines of tenure and estates became the law of the land and operated to dispossess but could not destroy First Nations’ land law and relationships. By the mid nineteenth-century, unique and significant departures from English land law and feudal doctrines emerged, reflecting the particular social, economic and geographical environment of the colonies: for example, the creation of pastoral leases, development of Crown reserves, the regulation of mining by way of leases and licences distinct from the common law and the creation of the unique title by registration scheme by Robert Torrens. Mabo’s reassessment of this “peculiarly Australian land law freed the law of some of its common law feudal origins, particularly by redefining the nature of Crown title. Paradoxically it also reinstated the prominence of the doctrines of tenure and estates as the land law’s “skeleton of principle” which remains the major impediment to a truly Australian land law.