Yoongoorookoo: First Law, legal comparison, and a Martuwarra/Fitzroy River creation story

Title: Yoongoorookoo: First Law, legal comparison, and a Martuwarra/Fitzroy River creation story

Summary: The Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council (MFR Council) was established in 2018 in the Kimberley region of Western Australia by six independent Indigenous nations to preserve, promote, and protect their ancestral river: the living serpent being known as Yoongoorookoo.

The Martuwarra-Fitzroy River and Yoongoorookoo are experiencing aggressive political and financial pressure from the colonial settler-state to ‘develop’ land and water resources and the river is facing threats from over extraction of water, land clearing, fracking, and water pollution.

It is time to recognise the pre-existing and continuing legal authority of Indigenous law, or ‘First Law’, in relation to the river, and preserve its integrity through a process of legal decolonisation. This project will present a dialogical translation of one First Law story relating to Yoongoorookoo and create a semantic bridge between two apparently distant legal worldviews.

Funding:

$20,000

Investigators:

Dr Erin O’Donnell (CI)
Dr Anne Poelina (PI)
Dr Alessandro Pelizzon (PI)

Organisations:

The University of Melbourne
Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council
Southern Cross University