Mary Graham

Works

• 1999Some Thoughts about the Philosophical Underpinnings of Aboriginal Worldviews

  Essay setting out two precepts of Aboriginal philosophy – “the Land is the Law” and “you are not alone in the world” – and deriving from them a custodial ethic, a relational idea of the self, non-coercive autonomy and a logic that admits many valid perspectives.

• 2023The Law of Obligation, Aboriginal Ethics: Australia Becoming, Australia Dreaming

  Essay in the philosophy journal Parrhesia that derives Aboriginal ethics from the obligation to care for Land: a Custodial Ethic joining a nurturing relation to Land and community with the autonomy of each Place, against a “survivalist ethos” of rivalry.

Position

Graham is on the map as a philosopher who has set out Aboriginal thought as a philosophy in its own right. “Some Thoughts about the Philosophical Underpinnings of Aboriginal Worldviews” (1999), based on university courses of the 1980s, starts from two precepts: “the Land is the Law” and “you are not alone in the world”. Land is a sacred entity, not property; the relation between land and people is the template for all social relations, so that all meaning comes from land. From this Graham derives a custodial ethic, a self that finds its identity in kin and country, an autonomy respected through example rather than command, and a logic that admits many valid perspectives and warns that a single “true way” leads to ideology. Graham presents these precepts as common to Aboriginal societies; the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples comprise many nations, each with its own Law and Country, and their philosophies differ. Later work develops these ideas as “relationalism”: in a reply to Martin Weber (2014) Graham proposed, against Descartes, that one exists because one is located; “The Law of Obligation” (2023) presents Aboriginal society as a “civilisational culture” whose Custodial Ethic counters a “survivalist ethos”; and with Morgan Brigg and Weber, Graham has brought Aboriginal relational political ordering into the theory of international relations (2021). Deborah Bird Rose introduced the reprint of the 1999 essay as the work of an Indigenous philosopher, and the philosopher Michelle Boulous Walker read Luce Irigaray together with Graham’s law of obligation (2022). No documented lines yet connect Graham with others on the map.

Life & context

Mary Graham was born in Brisbane and grew up on the Gold Coast; an author’s note of 2008 describes Graham as a Kombumerri person who is also affiliated with the Wakka Wakka through the maternal line. Graham was administrator of the Aboriginal and Islander Child Care Agency, worked on native title negotiations with the Foundation for Aboriginal and Islander Research Action, sat on the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation in its first term and served for six years on a regional council of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. Graham was a commissioner of the Queensland Corrective Services Commission, a member of the Ethics Council of the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples and a founding director of Australian BlackCard, a cultural competency programme based on university courses developed with Lilla Watson. Graham has lectured on Aboriginal history, politics and comparative philosophy at the University of Queensland, where Graham is an adjunct associate professor, and holds honorary doctorates from the Queensland University of Technology and, since 2023, the University of Queensland.

Further main works

• Aboriginal Notions of Relationality and Positionalism: A Reply to Weber (Global Discourse 4:1, 2014)
• Relational Indigenous Systems: Aboriginal Australian Political Ordering and Reconfiguring IR (with M. Brigg and M. Weber, Review of International Studies 48, 2022; online 2021)