Copyright and Tjuringa: Can Australian "Dreaming" be Owned?

This paper offers an analysis of the collisions between Indigenous (Australian) normative systems on intangible resources and the Western intellectual property regimes. This study focuses prominently on Yolngu people of North-East Arnhem Land. The first part of the paper tackles the ‘inter-ethnic’ use of a specific notion: ‘tjuringa’. This is an Indigenous Australian term adopted by Western legal language to identify those Indigenous sacred objects that incorporate native knowledge. This concept provides for a key interpretive tool to understand the ‘cosmological’ connections that articulate the Indigenous Australian understanding of the production of their knowledge and their cultural objects. The second part of the paper outlines the standard structure of a Yolngu knowledge system, that is the Indigenous normative regime governing the creation and the management of the Yolngu knowledge. The third and last part of the paper explains what issues prevent an interpretation of tjuringa as intellectual property objects.