Walking with Empire

Abstract

This article considers the place of movement in common law and, in particular, the relation between movement and place in the time and space of common law in the Colony of New South Wales. Attending to jurisdiction as a way of sliding beneath the rhetoric and representations of sovereignty and territory that tend to dominate the ways in which we understand the place of law, this article links movement to place and suggests that it is through practices of movement that common law comes to be in place. Drawing on testimony provided in a 1799 colonial trial, the elliptical centre of this article is a burial party that walked into the woods beyond an emerging frontier settlement to bury the dead..