Tents and trespass: material practices unsettling private property

In 2015, trespass law was used to evict a group of Indigenous people from a gentrifying area of inner city Sydney. What made this unusual was that the landowner was also Indigenous – the Aboriginal Housing Corporation (AHC) – and the site was the Block, one of the most recognizably Indigenous places in Australia. Led by Wiradjuri elder Jenny Munro, the trespassers set up a “tent embassy” in protest against the AHC’s plans for the site, plans Munro argued were at odds with the AHC’s mandate and the nature of the Block as Indigenous land. The AHC’s response, upheld by the Supreme Court, was that the Block is private property, making it theirs to develop as they wish. In this paper, we reflect on trespass at the Block to examine the limitations of private property, emphasizing the power of material interventions to reassert the multiple histories, social norms and material relationships that shape rights and responsibilities in relation to land. We conclude that challenges like Munro’s bring the normative and moral underpinnings of property to the fore, and, in this way, can work against, rather than entrench, the exclusive rights of title holders.