Legal Footprints
Legal Footprints recognises the violence of colonisation while celebrating the resilience of First Nations’ laws, languages and Country; First Nations’ ongoing resistance to the lies of terra nullius; and encourages everyone – especially law students and lawyers – to tread carefully as they make change.
What is Legal Footprints?
With our feet on the ground, what forms of law do we see, feel, and hear? What laws do we carry, inhabit, inhibit? What laws do we trace, what laws do we stand on, and what laws might we disturb? Olivia Barr, ‘Legal Footprints’ (2017) 21 Law Text Culture 214 at 223
Legal Footprints is a multi-faceted research project led by Associate Professor Olivia Barr that explores relationships between laws and land, languages and Country. Initially a research project resulting in academic journal articles, in 2022 it took on an artistic dimension with the creation of a Legal Footprints mural used in Legal Footprints performances. Since 2023, a purpose-built print of this mural has been hanging in the foyer. In 2025, it was joined by photographs and video (below) of a Legal footprints performance that occurred in class at Melbourne Law School.
Who made the Legal Footprints mural?
Olivia Barr, in collaboration with artist Andrea Davies, created a large, colourful, 5m x 5m canvas mural of First Nations’ languages in Australia based on ‘Gambay - First Languages map’, using data from January 2022 with permission from First Languages Australia. Gambay is a live map of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages created by First Languages Australia who work with regional language centres nationally to reflect the names and groupings favoured by community.
The Legal Footprints mural has been used in a number of installation performances. In the foyer hangs a printed version of the Legal Footprints mural alongside photographs of Melbourne Law School students experiencing the mural during a Legal Footprints performance during class.
What is the Legal Footprints performance?
In this three-part performance, participants use their feet, the Legal Footprints mural and some white body paint to experience research on legal footprints by feeling two laws.
To begin, participants walk slowly and imagine their own legal footprints by reflecting on the famous quip by English jurist Sir William Blackstone included in the foyer display: 'For as the law is the birthright of every subject, so wherever they go, they carry their laws with them' and published in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (Clarendon Press, 1st edition, 1765). Participants are then invited to visualise how they carry settler law – perhaps as a burden, a backpack or a pair of shoes – and are asked to feel the laws they carry as they walk, and imagine the legal footprints they leave behind, both individually and collectively.
Second, participants explore the Legal Footprints mural to learn to recognise the complex relationship between law, language and land, including that First Law is carried through land. As Kombumerri and Wakka Wakka woman Aunty Mary Graham writes, which is also included in the foyer display: 'Aboriginal Law refers to a complex relationship between humanity and land which extends to cover every aspect of life' as published in her ground-breaking article, 'Some Thoughts about the Philosophical Underpinnings of Aboriginal Worldviews' (2008) 45 Australian Humanities Review 181.
Finally, participants are then asked: If First Law is carried through land and settler law is carried through feet, how does it feel to walk with colonial law on Country? In response, volunteers place their feet in white body paint, metaphoric of settler law, and walk on the mural, performing the legal moves of colonisation creating terra nullius, attempting to erase First Nations’ laws, languages and Country. In a silent, heavy performance, participants often baulk at destroying the mural, and participating in these legal movements, but slowly recognise that despite terra nullius – despite the white paint – First laws continue. The performance ends by reflecting on the experience and the violence of colonisation, and the resilience of First Nations’ laws, languages and Country.
How is Legal Footprints taught at Melbourne Law School?
As a mural, Legal Footprints is an educational resource that is permanently available to all students, staff and visitors to Melbourne Law School. It has been used in classrooms in various ways. For example, the mural helps students writing case notes identify where a case occurred.
As a performance, Legal Footprints has been taught by Olivia Barr at Melbourne Law School on several occasions, including to Legal Method and Reasoning students in February 2024. Here is a video created by Greta Robenstone capturing the performance:
How might Legal Footprints make legal plurality visible?
Not until my adulthood did I realise that the special rules of Aboriginal life in Indigenous communities were laws …
Marcia Langton in Marcia Langton and Aaron Corn, Law: The Way of the Ancestor (Thames & Hudson, 2023) at 14
There are many laws in Australia, including settler law inherited from England, as well as a diverse range of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander laws. Different laws manifest differently, which sometimes makes it challenging for law students and lawyers to recognise First laws as law. As Professor Marcia Langton writes in Marcia Langton and Aaron Corn, Law: The Way of the Ancestor (Thames & Hudson, 2023) at 18, 'These laws are not easily understood, which partly explains why the British legal system denied their existence, and continues to do so in several ways. But exist they do … I came to understand that there are many of these subtle rules in a larger body of laws of a sacred and esoteric nature.'
As an installation, Legal Footprints helps visualise the astronomical diversity of laws in Australia, and offers the hope that law students and lawyers might work with First Nations’ to better accept, recognise and celebrate living in a place of extraordinary legal diversity. By treading carefully into the future, we might just find better ways of living together in harmony with all laws.
Artist profiles
Olivia Barr
Dr Olivia Barr is an Associate Professor at Melbourne Law School. She is a non-Indigenous lawyer-turned-academic, who grew up on Whadjuk Noongar Boodja and now lives on Wurundjeri Country. She has previously worked as a government solicitor, in law reform and for the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, and studied at UWA, UBC (Canada) and Melbourne. Olivia researches in the interdisciplinary field of law and humanities, with expertise on the many relationships between law, place and sovereignties.
Olivia has three main research areas. She has a long-standing interest in the overlooked topic of legal movement and its role in colonisation, including the role of walking, political marches and public ceremonies, as captured in her book, A Jurisprudence of Movement: Common Law, Walking, Unsettling Place (Routledge, 2016). She is interested in mapping out a new field of inquiry on law and place, which links legal theory with several other disciplines, including geography, art, architecture and geology, to offer insights into the localised, grounded and overlapping nature of multiple laws, such as in her legal footprints project. She also conducts research that applies these theoretical insights to more practical legal settings, including investigating future possibilities for state recognition of First Nations’ sovereignty, sovereignties, and self-government.
First Languages Australia
First Languages Australia is the national peak body working to ensure the strength of all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages and have developed the interactive map ‘Gambay – First Languages Map’. Gambay is a live map of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages. Gambay is created by First Languages Australia who work with regional language centres nationally to reflect the names and groupings favoured by community.
Andrea Davies
An acclaimed visual artist and muralist, Andrea Davies has over 35 years of experience as a multidisciplinary practitioner, working internationally with a focus on Europe and Australia. She is passionate about Tromp l’oeil on large scale art works. Her work is commissioned and exhibited internationally and can be seen in a number of prominent places, including at Q Station in Sydney, ANZ Bank, Vivid and Art Month, Sydney. She also works in close collaboration with advertising agencies as a designer, illustrator and artist, and was integrally involved in a number of Cannes Graphite Pencil (DAAD)-awarded projects as well as film and TV. A designer for the series of costumes for La Galerie Mobile, her work is transformed into three-dimensional form of vibrancy and life.
Melbourne Law School is committed to respecting and promoting the laws of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Nations. The artworks on display in the foyer, including the Legal Footprints display and the eel traps form a visual part of this commitment.