Town Scheming: The Kenbi Aboriginal Land Claim and the Role of Planning in Securing Possession

Abstract

This article provides a detailed history of Australia’s longest running Indigenous land claim (1978–2016), made by the Larrakia traditional owners to the coastal hinterland of Darwin, under Australia’s first land rights legislation. It reveals the efforts of the state and its planners to exercise territorial control and establish a racialised socio-political order through planning legislation and land use plans. Institutions designed to return land to Indigenous peoples represent a critical site of inquiry for understanding not only how injustice is reproduced and resisted in settler colonial contexts but how settler colonial urbanism is made and remade as imperial power.