The rhetoric of benevolence as an impediment to the protection of Indigenous cultural rights: a study of Australian literature and law

From the late nineteenth until the mid-twentieth century, non-Indigenous anthropologists and 'authors' transcribed and often published Indigenous sacred and historical naratives. Non-Indigenous authors deployed what Clare Bradford describes as a 'language of expert knowledge, of care and concern', or what we would call a 'rhetoric of benevolence', in order to describe their activities as a benevolent intervention on behalf of a 'dying race' whose culture would otherwise be lost. This rhetoric, we argue, did not simply perpetuate paternalism, a colonising strategy that subordinates Indigenous culture to non-Indigenous 'protectors', but just as importantly deflected debate from the harm caused by the distortion of Indigenous knowledge and appropriation of cultural rights. By briefly analysing the limitations of current intellectual property legislation in relation to selected examples of unauthorised publication of Indigenous Dreamtime narratives in children's literature, we will examine how the rhetoric of benevolence problematises concepts essential to property relationships acknowledged by the Australian common law tradition, and thereby sunders attributes of ownership and personhood from Indigenous communities