Book review: 'Citizens without rights: Aborigines and Australian citizenship', by John Chesterman and Brian Galligan

Reviews the book "Citizens Without Rights: Aborigines and Australian Citizenship," by John Chesterman and Brian Galligan. The historical exclusion of minorities has been widely interpreted as central to the elaboration of Australian notions of egalitarianism and of citizenship and political rights. 'Citizens Without Rights: Aborigines and Australian Citizenship', by John Chesterman and Brian Galligan (Cambridge University Press, 1997) shifts the primary responsibility for the development of discriminatory administrative and legal practices from the Constitution to Parliamentary legislation extended by government administrators. Similarly, the 1967 referendum, despite its symbolic significance, is downplayed as the 'citizenship maker'. The progressive expansion of Aboriginal land rights in the legal and judiciary practices is contextualised in the gradual evolution of an administrative and political framework, revealing a slow history of continuous adjustments and renegotiations of the controversial relationship between the citizenship of Aboriginal people and the emerging concept of special Aboriginal citizenship. However, focusing on the 'letter' of the Constitution overlooks the fact that it received racist 'readings' for six decades