Analysing what it means, and has meant, legally, to ‘be’ Australian, through exploration of key constitutional cases in which a person’s claim to ‘belong’ was the central issue.
The issue of belonging is foundational to individual and collective life and is currently in flux. It has never been so frequently and fundamentally legally contested, across disparate areas such as citizens’ mobility rights under COVID-19, the position of Indigenous Australians and the power to unilaterally deprive a person of citizenship.
This project will include original archival research on key constitutional cases in which an individual’s claim to ‘belong’ to Australia was the central issue. It will go behind the decisions and reasoning of the courts, by looking at the court files, other archival records, and records of the contemporary public, parliamentary and governmental reception of the cases. Decisions will be placed historically within associated ideas of each of the case’s eras about Australian society, nationality and nationhood.
This project is funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) Special Research Initiatives 2020 SR200200550.
The outcomes of this project will include a jointly-authored academic monograph and a jointly-authored work for a wider non-legal, non-academic audience.
