Australia is a product and an agent of empire. From the mid-nineteenth century, the Australian colonies experimented with ‘sub-imperialism’, an expansionist project obstructed by the fact that the ‘self-governing’ white settler colonies of the British empire lacked external sovereignty. This chapter begins with the Australian colonies’ interdependence with and aspirations to annex ‘adjacent islands’ in the mid-nineteenth century. It follows the construction and administration of a Pacific empire beginning with the annexation of the Territory of Papua, to the administration of New Guinea and Nauru as League of Nations C Mandates and then as United Nations Trust Territories. Law proved an indispensable tool of Australian empire-building, producing complex relations of economic and cultural domination and resistance in Papua, New Guinea and Nauru. Amid the significant re-alignments produced by World War II, Australia attempted to renovate its empire in order to retain it. A professionalised administration of Australia’s territories and the regulation of legal citizenship were met with increasing Indigenous resistance and activism for real self-determination. Although decolonization in the later twentieth century brought Australian empire to an official end, the legacies of those expansionist aspirations continue to shape the Commonwealth’s legal, political and economic relationships with islands and communities in the Pacific region.

Taking a transnational and comparative approach, this chapter examines how a distinctive discourse of indigenous rights in Anglo settler states (the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) threaded claims at the level of the state – about collective identity, treaty promises, land rights, and sovereign peoplehood – together with an international language of human rights. Indigenous claims to rights of identity and sovereignty were not considered human rights in the way that international institutions and civil society was employing the concept in the 1970s. That is, to protect individuals from violence and suffering at the hands of the state. Yet indigenous peoples in the Anglo settler states argued that their claims to collective rights were matters of concern to humanity. This chapter argues for an alternative genealogy of the 1970s – distinct from the earlier anti-colonial claims of leaders in the Third World and from the increasingly individualist emphases in other human rights campaigns – in which indigenous peoples in the heart of “the West” claimed collective, quasi-sovereign, and substate rights in part by deploying, and expanding, the language of human rights.