absit omen, lex cessat, and I will get there too, to the front door — but one is less than astonished to learn that the sitting judge held the opinion upon the law upon the question that it was quite simply that the Queen would continue seised or possessed of this land, and, at appeal, together with his colleagues, decided outright to omit a variety of topics introduced in aid of them with which we have as judges, nothing to do, and which were indeed of too popular a character, merely, to justify further notice by us, as they were pleased to have it printed. The Attorney General had after all been alerted as to Brown’s activities by the Commissioner of the Australian Agricultural Company, subject to a grant of one million acres for the cultivation and improvement of waste lands in New South Wales and for other purposes relating thereto. I hope I have answered my question now. But as to the question of the overlooked distinction between ownership and dominion, the difficulty pointed to in this case arose precisely from the fact that what in England had effectively become a legal fiction, that is, that all land was held in deference to the Crown, was treated here as sied a mainmise in living memory, resting on the premise that New Holland and what was associated with it at the moment of settlement was virgin country, or at least that the droits of the soil and all lands in the colony had, jure coronae, become vested immediately upon settlement in the King. Whether or not one might wish to imagine it implying the recognition of a sort of use in fact, and in a frail case being o’ercounted, between abandoning plans to build a penal colony on the South West African Skeleton Coast, and directing the establishment here with all its shape and internal consistency, the British Government’s Committee of Transportation also let fall the provisions initially laid in place for buying or leasing land from the natives. Now if it is property which stretches and indeed ends up twisting like the ribbon in your typewriter, no I beg your pardon you are out of ribbons I can see that, what Forbes in a letter recalled Burke referring to as the chief security between a country and her colonies, light as silk, but strong as links of iron, that is, the similarity of institutions, if the essence of fealty is the fusion of property and sovereignty, one can well appreciate the sitting judges’ insistence on the abruptness of a case that raised, in 1829, incidentally, and I admit quite irrelevantly, the same year from which the Solicitor-General promised to prove to the court hearing R. v Steele that the government had been in possession of what we know as the Botanic Gardens in the Domain, a question of criminal jurisdiction implicitly skipped over five years earlier in a general discussion pertaining to trial by jury, though no doubt appearing to Forbes’ own mind on the occasion of a signal murder case only two years earlier, as well as on their unpreparedness as on the informal nature of their remarks, Forbes finding that it may be a question of doubt, whether any advantages could be gained, without previous preparation, by ingrafting the institutions of our country, upon the natural system which savages have adopted for their own government, that nature prompts them to disdain the interposition of a race of people whom they find fixed in a country to which they did not originally belong, with Dowling recognising the implications for property disputes, an evocation from which with genuine abruptness he breaks off: in raising the lex loci, supposing that the analogy with what had hitherto been its scope failed, thus describing an exceptional limit to jurisdiction within the colony itself, he had indeed just pulled the cloak from beneath his feet, for, mutandis mutatis, so-called unoccupied land came under the scope of the English legal phenomenon of waste lands and that was in the Crown. What is exactly the same thing, the man in question, whom the court thus refrained from trying for the murder of one of his own people, on the presumption that he possessed what it and its dependents had given up, the following year, at the head of his tribe, accompanied the police to the bloody puddle of Van Diemans Land. (They could not try him as their ancestors would have tried a pig, and thus assigned him the place of the animal in their system.) Forbes partially recovered such excess within a few years’ time, when he explicitly distinguished between the limits of settlement and of the colony, ascribing to the former the extent of police protection, and setting down that those settling without its limits were, if wanting Government permission, acting illegally, but if Lord Glenelg shared a sense of the great importance that land sales by the natives not be tacitly assented to, and indeed what went down over Melbourne was a vacant gesture, legally invalid in at least one direction, contrabanded, I beg your pardon, I’m not sure if that is a correct use of the word, prohibited in reasonable time by the colonial government, for if there must be ritual, and if the deed that resulted from the dubious advice of Mr. Gellibrand was in fact an earthy throwback to the source of the Latin participle, which preserves the trace of a period before the Norman conquest, the growth of writing and the use of the wax seal, when the document evidenced rather than embodied a transaction, it failed, comparable in this too to Windeyer’s plea, in the face of such authority as could be accumulated from the experience in North America, or the fact that occupation did not imply ownership, or the unreserved right to alienation, the Government simultaneously desired nothing more than that, on the elided fringe of big business, the squatters be as true to themselves, as Government to the undisclosed buttons of town and civic institutions, and if that returns us to Forbes’ and Dowling’s preliminary skirting, providing the outlines of a perfectly circular argument with its proper supplement, so that none of my learned friends has succeeded in cracking it, that is because it is none other than the very vinculum of our bovine right, but never forget that the court’s evocation of a doctrine of which the Government had had no need to get started, expressed what was at that moment actually beginning to be felt to be the case for both sides, for if the one was made to feel it in the most brutal way, for the other, and in it orbi, it said perfectly clearly more than it had ever meant to, the flagrant if misrecognised tenor of which one is permitted to glimpse in all its vividness in the anxiety surrounding the same inconsistencies where they appeared as the shock received by legal categories finally found incapable of administering to current modes of production, and which, comme de rigueur, with that end of the jumelles front and forward, would be mended as well as for the said infant colony to be set en marche before the century was out. A tout bon compte: nine years after the question of the interest rate was settled by a committee established in the wake of Macdonald v Levy, in order, in part, to hear the opinions of representatives from financial, commercial and pastoral interests, including the globally inaccurate claim on the part of Dr. Wardell that, respecting money, nothing finds its own level more readily and with greater certainty, and the solid and amusing contribution from J.B. Montefiore to the effect that the rise in capital, the so called seed-corn of industry, resulting from a fixed interest rate, would stimulate the economic development of the Colony, and despite the continued antagonism of Justice Burton, whose losing battle in despising what he felt to be repugnant to the laws of England, may be gleaned from the eager tone of the complaint issued in the