Recent cases before the High Court of Australia have raised the question as to the appropriate degree to which international law should influence Australian law and politics.1 Crucial to the reasoning in the leading judgment of the landmark 1992 Mabo case,2 by which the Australian judiciary recognised for the first time a native title to land, was the finding that Australia had not been terra nullius at the time of colonisation. The leading judgment accepted the categorisation of Australia as a settled colony which had been established by the Privy Council in Cooper v. Stuart.3 In this judgment Lord Watson had held that Australia, as a “settled” colony, had received transplanted British law “except where explicitly changed or considered irrelevant”.4 This had given rise to the assumption, confirmed by Milurrpum v. Nabalco Ltd (the Gove Land Rights case of 1971) that, since no legal rights to land of indigenous people existed in British law and none had been explicitly acknowledged in relation to Australia, no basis existed for their later recognition.5 The leading judgment in Mabo went on to declare, however, that the notion that British law had been transplanted into a settled colony had been based on the assumption that the “indigenous people of a settled colony were … without laws, without a sovereign and primitive in their social organisation”.6 Since “the facts as we know them today” do not “fit this theory” the leading judgment asserted there to be “no warrant for applying in these times rules of the English common law which were a product of that theory”.7