I Introduction: Land as Law

Land, as it is captured by the technicalities of law, is defined as a planar surface save for the imprint of title, registered legal interests and the overlay of planning regulations. These legal forms codify the human use and occupation of a given place. By contrast, this chapter seeks to unpack the layering of land which makes a place and which gives it both spatial and temporal dimension and a sense of history, including conflicts over land use and appropriation. In short, it seeks to create a biography of land which is realised through the genealogical tracings of law. This biography is necessarily truncated; like photographs in a family album it provides snapshots through time mediated through the constructs and practices of law. The land in question is located in the South Gippsland coastal region of Victoria. Most recently it came to legal attention as the subject of a dispute around the location of a wind farm. Looking back from this conflict in 2006, this chapter describes three more slices of time. The first retrospective snapshot relates to the middle of the twentieth century, a time when Torrens Title registration systems predominated as a legal configuration for making ownership transparent, working in concert with emerging town and country planning laws. The second step backward is to the early part of the nineteenth century, a time when colonial land law was asserted in what was to become the newly settled colony of Victoria.