Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Psychology, August 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / The official version of law in Australia is that the state has a monopoly over sovereignty: there is only one Australian law whose meaning is determined by the courts. However, the courts have implied that there is another law, the law of Indigenous peoples which exists as a social fact. It can be recognised by the state for particular purposes, such as the protection of the ‘native title’ of Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders to their traditional countries. Native title is characterised as the translation of a primarily spiritual connection to land into proprietary rights and interests, requiring proof of the connection that a particular Indigenous society has under traditional laws and customs continuously acknowledged since Britain claimed sovereignty. Given the special nature of native title, the preference is to recognise title by negotiated agreement. This thesis undertakes a study of some of the assumptions and inconsistencies on which the recognition of native title – and this ‘not quite’ legal pluralism – rests. It questions law’s relation to fact, time, space, identity, language and practice as these are deployed in calibrating Indigenous peoples’ claims, and so reaches across disciplines to History (questioning the knowable past), Philosophy (the notion of recognition), Legal Theory (the concept of law as rules and the separation between law and fact), Anthropology and Literary Studies (the possibility of translation), Aesthetics (the rationality of proof), and Geography (the alternative space of negotiation). In looking closely at the practical and discursive process of making a claim, an account of native title can be given that refuses the cogency of the monopoly of sovereignty, and envisages instead a multi-faceted phenomenon that is the ‘unofficial’ law of native title. Native title is a set of practices which stimulate new articulations of Indigenous law and settler law and put them in relation with one another: the process of recognition is also a creative process of transformation.

Human adolescents exhibit higher levels of sensation seeking behaviour than younger or older individuals, and sensation seeking is higher in males than females from adolescence onwards. Data suggest that changes in gonadal hormone levels during adolescence and differences in the dopamine neurotransmitter system are the bases for why some people exhibit sensation seeking behaviour while others do not. However, causal relationships between physiology and behaviour have been difficult to establish in humans. In order to explore the physiological influences on novelty-seeking behaviour, we looked at response to novelty in a laboratory rodent. This research examined responses to novelty in the conditioned place preference (CPP) task and the novel object recognition (NOR) task in Lister-hooded rats, and assessed the benefits and limitations of each methodology. While the CPP task was not found to provide a reliable measure of response to novelty, the NOR task was more successful. In order to understand the ontogeny of sex differences in novelty responses, both males and females were tested from adolescence through to adulthood. While no sex difference was found in adults in the NOR test, mid-adolescent males exhibited higher novelty preference behaviour than either younger or older males, or females at each stage of development. Since gonadal hormones levels rise during adolescence, a pharmacological agent (a gonadotrophin-releasing hormone antagonist) was used to suppress gonadal hormone levels from early adolescence before again examining responses on the NOR test at mid-adolescence. Gonadal hormone suppression from early adolescence onwards eliminated the sex difference in the NOR test at mid-adolescence by reducing the male response to novelty, while no difference was measured in the female animals. These findings suggest that gonadal hormones play a significant role in the development of response to novelty, especially in males, and the implications for our understanding of human sensation-seeking behaviour are discussed.