This article explores a cascade of deathly entanglements between nations, legal systems, communities, and individuals. Its focus is the vitally important, yet under-theorised corner of Australia's private law known as burial disputes: disputes relating to the disposal of the body of a deceased person. As many as three-quarters of burial disputes in Australia involve at least one Indigenous party. The impetus for this paper is twofold: first, the need to situate these burial disputes in their nomocidal colonial context; and second, the radical reshaping of the legal doctrine employed by courts when resolving these disputes. In particular, and grounded in the capacity of the corpse to act as a site of creative necroresistance, it draws on work done by Australian Indigenous and decolonial scholars to offer a critical, yet affirmative, reading of this doctrinal development, which, it argues, has occurred primarily in response to the Indigenous insider presence in the burial dispute case law.
Kate Falconer (Wed,) studied this question.