The enigma of access: James Dawson and the question of ownership in translation

Through an account of the efforts of Scottish immigrant settler James Dawson to negotiate legitimate access to Indigenous country (in south-west Victoria), a theory of ʻthe law of accidentsʼ is outlined. Such a law is based on a performative conception of language: it is grounded in accidence, the aspect of grammar that articulates speaking positions. The case is made that Dawsonʼs publication Australian Aborigines (1881) is especially alive to this nuance, conserving in its Indigenous word-lists individual ideolects as well as clear evidence that right speaking and proper placing (in the landscape) were understood to be related. It is suggested that an interactional and contextual determination of legitimacy also changes the nature of the environment thus made available: no longer an exclusively held territory, it is reconfigured as a zone of intercommunication. This model has implications for postcolonial redefinitions of sovereignty, identity and indeed the foundational narratives of the nation-state.