This chapter provides the first overview of the gobierno petition-writing process. It focuses on how subjects would create and structure these documents, devoting particular attention to the contributions of many intermediary figures: formal and informal assistants, translators, and procurators, as well as notaries and others. It frames petitioning as a paper ritual emulating the vassal–ruler encounter in which the subject’s voluntad flows to the heart and mind of the monarch, and asks how these lifeless papers could come – through a scaffolded series of legal fictions – to contain this volition. Specifically, vassals might reach to the fictions of notarial truth and signatures to seal this will to manuscripts. The result was that a wide range of subjects, even illiterate ones, might partake in the petition-and-response system. Moreover, the social backgrounds of these intermediaries could be quite diverse, meaning that before these texts even reached the court this dialogue was already touched by many actants.

This chapter will explore why and how First Nations people still have to reckon with the myriad settler and Australian legal histories that have shaped their lives and histories since colonisation. I argue that we still need to reckon with law because settler law denied Aboriginal land title and continues to deny Aboriginal sovereignty. Tracing settler laws’ complicity with the colonial project, this chapter first examines how the fantasy of terra nullius was instantiated through laws which enabled the expropriation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ lands and waters. It then examines how First Nations people have been unduly affected by separate, discriminatory settler laws which governed almost all facets of their lives. Yet, Australia’s legal system to redress these injustices, constitutes new and evolving chapters in the nation’s legal history.

The Cold War threw Australian’s postwar hopes into stark relief. Social and economic rights became associated with a menacing global ideology, while the imperative of a new type of war saw political and civil rights challenged like never before. This chapter analyses the career of Australian civil libertarians in this decade, particularly in light of the 1949 trial of Communist Party of Australia leader Lance Sharkey for sedition and a 1951 referendum on whether to ban the party wholesale. While such moves drew calls of government hypocrisy in light of the recently passed Universal Declaration from civil libertarians, supporters could equally point to communism’s human rights abuses abroad. These usages commingled with and were enabled by earlier claims of British citizenship rights as instruments of political power and contestation. Similar problems emerged for Indigenous rights campaigners in the 1950s, who saw the UDHR as a roadmap for Indigenous equality. Such hopes soon gave way to the difficult reality of translating the Declaration's precepts into a very alien context and frustration at the limitations of their global influence or enforceability.

The 1960s were a decade of disappointment and depression for human rights activists. Yet, while far from a dominant framework, diverse Australians found that their needs to reorient or intervene in domestic political realities aligned with particular readings of the UDHR’s universalism. Human rights served as a way of reconceptualising socialism in an advanced capitalist democracy like Australia, recasting the Communist Party of Australia as defenders and extenders of the rights it had long dismissed as bourgeois. The seemingly monolithic power of the Australia’s Returned Servicemen’s League was shaken by a group claiming to be human rights’ true advocates by supporting those whose consciences were being trampled by conscription. Amnesty International's uptake was quick in Australia, but the nascent group’s novel reading of human rights posed as many challenges as it did opportunities, leading to often-public internal disputes over the limits of human rights as domestic political tools. The questions these groups posed – did the enjoyment of rights result from a citizen’s compact with the state, granting rights and the compulsion to obey, or universal and inhering in the individual through a relationship with god or an inalienable secular conscience? – proved central in decades to come.

As well as introducing key themes and literature, this introductory chapter deals with the concept of rights in Australian pre’s key period of investigation and setting the scene for a discussion of why human rights emerged as a common rhetorical tool in the 1940s. Movements for the abolition of convictism, appropriate treatment of Indigenous people and universal manhood suffrage from the 1820s up until the 1850s grappled with the long, contested history of British subjecthood. These could serve both democratic and elitist ends, as well as exclude those whose position as a subject was unclear. Movements for women’s rights and against restrictions on Chinese immigration are shown to have encountered some of the inbuilt fetters on the notion of Britishness from the 1850s to the 1880s – specifically its gendered and racial exclusions. Yet, inventive uses were found of the “British Rights” concept by activists working within a firmly patriarchal, racist context where ideas of universality were unpopular.

More Australians were talking about a wider array of rights than ever before in the 1970s. A new generation of militant Indigenous activists and young women saw the need for new or reimagined conceptions beyond inherited gradualist, equalitarian visions of political change. Indigenous radicals, buoyed and subsequently disappointed by the remarkable referendum victory of May 1967, were soon petitioning the UN over structural and endemic economic and cultural rights infringements. Reflecting anti-colonial rhetoric at the United Nations, activists placed the need for the right to restitution for the wrongs of colonialism at the centre of their human rights agenda. Women’s liberationists, on the other hand, rejected calls for a new international order that merely replicated divisions between the private and public, the breadwinner and homemaker. Not only would this potentially weaken gains by Western feminists, but merely replicating the demands of underdeveloped states might dramatically limit the rights of women in developing nations. The so-called Right to Life movement sought to appropriate the concept of “human” at the same time, pushing its definition beyond birth to the time of conception. As rights became more a focus of public discussion, battle lines were also being drawn as to what rights were and who could claim them.

This chapter critically understands the seemingly spontaneous emergence of rights consciousness in the 1980s, exploring first the politics of the so-called “human rights explosion”, focusing on government and activist responses to 1978’s 30th anniversary of the passage of the UDHR. Stalled bids for an Australian Bill of Rights under the Hawke government and the creation of a national Human Rights Commission (1981–6) occupy the remainder of this chapter. These developments are explored alongside synchronous campaigns for a treaty or Makarrata with Aboriginal Australians and recognition of Gay and Lesbian rights, as well as the continued intransigence of conservatives – in particular Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen and the decade’s “New Right”. Invented in the 1940s, ignored, experimented with or contested in later decades, superficially at last the 1980s saw government, the legal system and many social movements adopt human rights’ precepts at a startling pace. An explosion, even a revolution, was clearly underway: but there was seemingly as little clarity as ever on what human rights actually meant. Was this, in the end, a popular groundswell or a revolution from above?