The festival as constitutional event and as jurisdictional encounter: colonial Victoria and the Independent Order of Black Fellows

Abstract

The year 2020 marked the first meeting between an Australian government–the Government of Victoria–and First Nations in a treaty-making process. Given the importance of this, it is timely to recall a moment when another opportunity to meet was missed. That moment was a foundational one for the nascent colonial state: a public festival held in 1850 to celebrate the inauguration of the Colony of Victoria. There are two aspects to this festival that are of interest here. The first is how it was a ‘constitutional’ event involving an act of jurisdiction that gave shape to the lawful authority of the colonists, to the legal subjectivity of Aboriginal peoples, and to legal relations between the Colony and First Nations. The second aspect, implicit in the first, is how the festival was also an ‘international’ meeting, which the colonists failed to attend. As the article shows, these two aspects–the festival as constitutional event and as jurisdictional encounter–are inseparable, the success of the former being integral to the failure of the latter. And it is this failure that the colonial state must still contend with as it begins treaty negotiations almost two centuries later.