The cover blurb to Peter Sutton’s book announces that: ‘Native title continues to be one of the most controversial political, legal and indeed moral issues in contemporary Australia.’ The moral issue, qualified by the adverb, is perhaps the one that most strongly engages the general reader, but it is not the central concern of these books that are mainly for the specialist reader. Morality, ‘indeed’, is something that the social scientist must keep at bay, in order to do the work that, as a native title expert, he or she is qualified to do. The expert, usually an anthropologist, provides evidence within the terms of the various native title acts, translating the knowledge of indigenous informants so that it can count in the courts.

Peter Sutton’s ethnographic perspective on the issue must be the most lucid introduction in the field, coming well after the more excited legal discussions immediately following the Mabo case in 1992. An elder of the anthropological tribe, Sutton provides that leadership appropriate to seniority by showing how to write a thorough, useful and wise account of what he has learnt over years of consultation and research. Anthropology is in fact the key in the encounter of the two sets of laws and cultures because it has the means, the knowledge and the methodology to understand the complexities of differing social systems. As Sutton says, to those who may be impatient ‘certainty-seekers’ in this domain: ‘There is no certainty in false simplicity. It is usually the complexity of claims over country, not some allegedly vague indeterminacy or inherent rubberiness of the claimant situation, that prevents their reduction to fixed formulae.’