This article adopts the concept of frontier encounters to explore the continuities between extractivism as a phenomenon characterising the immediate colonial phase in Australia following assertion of British sovereignty, and a contemporary energy resource extraction frontier in the Northern Territory. Drawing on the wider historical context whereby various capitalist forms of extraction have precipitated the imperial transposition of colonial governance into the land and waters occupied by Indigenous peoples, it 'reads in' the dispossession of Aboriginal Peoples as integral to the trajectories of resource exploitation in Australia. Through a retrospective reading of Mabo v Queensland [No 2], it demonstrates how the colonial imposition of sovereign title over resources has provided the underlying legal property form, including the derivate native title regime, that bridges colonial dispossession and Australia's continuing contribution to climate change via export of carbon resources. In articulating the interlinkages between the two phases of frontier encounter, the article challenges the designation of the Anthropocene as an explanatory rationale. It suggests that the underlying knowledge and legal system supporting the Anthropocene are part of an ideology and set of scientific practices that are entwined with the histories and legacies of colonialism and imperialism, as well as the shifting parameters of capitalism across time.
This paper begins with the quest by a Kenyan small-scale gold miner for a mining license that turns out to be almost impossible to secure. The artisanal and small-scale mining license is a comparatively recent focus of the assemblage of transnational law and policy initiatives organised around the promotion of sustainable or 'responsible' mining. Consensus is emerging across this assemblage that the formalisation of artisanal and small-scale mining, principally through licensing, is essential for enhanced development outcomes through improved mining regulation. This paper explores the emergence of this license within transnational law and policy initiatives as an account of the ritualistic law reform processes underway to address various social and environmental dynamics linked to mining. In tracing the colonial and post-colonial contexts in which artisanal and small-scale mining becomes a category of regulation, the paper focuses on the material practices and discursive possibilities that emerge in the spaces of tension created when law reforms are enacted, almost ritualistically, in the full knowledge of their near impossibility. Drawing on research conducted in a Kenyan gold mining area as well as in transnational policy arenas, the paper argues for closer examination of the sites where legal regulation unfolds in relation to resource extraction.
