Paper short abstract:

In this paper I explore how Aboriginal people in Cape York Peninsula attempt to reconcile the reality of having deceased kin buried away from their traditional homelands, and how this sits within a broader, rights-based discourse.

Paper long abstract:

Much has been written about death and mortuary practices and beliefs in Australian Aboriginal societies. In this paper, I want to bring attention to the ways in which such practices and beliefs, tied as they are to systems of land ownership and spiritual and bodily consubstantiality with country, are enmeshed in a broader socio-political discourse of rights. In Cape York Peninsula in remote far north Queensland, a violent colonial frontier coupled with government-imposed removals of Aboriginal people from their traditional territories up until the 1960s, led to the creation of diasporic populations across Queensland. Deaths and subsequent burials, or the holding of human remains in exile, in 'another man's country', away from their homeland, their kin, and the spirits of their own dead, are a source of great anguish for the living. I argue that the need for the diasporic dead to return to their homelands, and the efforts of the living to achieve this and gain control over the process can be understood at least in part, in terms of the rights, of both the living and the dead, to their traditional country, a discourse which plays out in the context of intra-Indigenous relationships and state recognition and control of Indigenous lives.