Academic literature on the topic 'Land titles Registration and transfer South Australia'

Property as both an idea and a practice has been interpreted through the prism of a liberal, law and economics paradigm since at least the 18th century. This dominant (and domineering) perspective stresses the primacy of individualism, the power of exclusion, and the values of private commodity. By contrast, concepts of property that evolved out of the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s challenged this hegemony. Countercultural, or Aquarian, ideas of property stressed pre-liberal, long forgotten property norms such as sociability, community, inclusion and personhood, and contested a private uniformity that seemed “totalizing and universalizing” (Blomley, Unsettling 102). This paper situates what it terms “Aquarian property” in the context of emergent property theory in the 1960s and 1970s, and the propertied practices these new theories engendered. Importantly, this paper also grounds Aquarian ideas of property to location. As legal geographers observe, the law inexorably occurs in place as well as time. “Nearly every aspect of law is located, takes place, is in motion, or has some spatial frame of reference” (Braverman et al. 1). Property’s radical yet simultaneously ancient alter-narrative found fertile soil where the countercultural experiment flourished. In Australia, one such place was the green, sub-tropical landscape of the New South Wales Northern Rivers, home of the 1973 Australian Union of Student’s Aquarius Festival at Nimbin. The Counterculture and Property Theory Well before the “Age of Aquarius” entered western youth consciousness (Munro-Clark 56), and 19 years before the Nimbin Aquarius Festival, US legal scholar Felix Cohen defined property in seminally private and exclusionary terms. To the world: Keep off X unless you have my permission, which I may grant or withhold.Signed: Private citizenEndorsed: The state. (374) Cohen’s formula was private property at its 1950s apogee, an unambiguous expression of its centrality to post-war materialism. William Blackstone’s famous trope of property as “that sole and despotic dominion” had become self-fulfilling (Rose, Canons). Why had this occurred? What had made property so narrow and instrumentalist to a private end? Several property theorists identify the enclosure period in the 17th and 18th centuries as seminal to this change (Blomley, Law; Graham). The enclosures, and their discourse of improvement and modernity, saw ancient common rights swept away in favour of the liberal private right. Property diversity was supplanted by monotony, group rights by the individual, and inclusion by exclusion. Common property rights were rights of shared use, traditionally agrarian incidents enjoyed through community membership. However, for the proponents of enclosure, common rights stood in the way of progress. Thus, what was once a vested right (such as the common right to glean) became a “mere practice”, condemned by its “universal promiscuity” and perceptions of vagrancy (Buck 17-8). What was once sited to context, to village and parish, evolved into abstraction. And what had meaning for person and place, “a sense of self; […] a part of a tribe’ (Neeson 180), became a tradable commodity, detached and indifferent to the consequences of its adverse use (Leopold). These were the transformed ideas of property exported to so-called “settler” societies, where colonialists demanded the secure property rights denied to them at home. In the common law tradition, a very modern yet selective amnesia took hold, a collective forgetting of property’s shared and sociable past (McLaren). Yet, property as commodity proved to be a narrow, one-sided account of property, an unsatisfactory “half right” explanation (Alexander 2) that omits inconvenient links between ownership on the one hand, and self and place on the other. Pioneering US conservationist Aldo Leopold detected as much a few years before Felix Cohen’s defining statement of private dominance. In Leopold’s iconic A Sand County Almanac, he wrote presciently of the curious phenomenon of hardheaded farmers replanting selected paddocks with native wildflowers. As if foreseeing what the next few decades may bring, Leopold describes a growing resistance to the dominant property paradigm: I call it Revolt – revolt against the tedium of the merely economic attitude towards land. We assume that because we had to subjugate the land to live on it, the best farm is therefore the one most completely tamed. These […] farmers have learned from experience that the wholly tamed farm offers not only a slender livelihood but a constricted life. (188)By the early 1960s, frustrations over the constrictions of post-war life were given voice in dissenting property literature. Affirming that property is a social institution, emerging ideas of property conformed to the contours of changing values (Singer), and the countercultural zeitgeist sweeping America’s universities (Miller). Thus, in 1964, Charles Reich saw property as the vanguard for a new civic compact, an ambitious “New Property” that would transform “government largess” into a property right to address social inequity. For Joseph Sax, property scholar and author of a groundbreaking citizen’s manifesto, the assertion of public property rights were critical to the protection of the environment (174). And in 1972, to Christopher Stone, it seemed a natural property incident that trees should enjoy equivalent standing to legal persons. In an age when “progress” was measured by the installation of plastic trees in Los Angeles median strips (Tribe), jurists aspired to new ideas of property with social justice and environmental resonance. Theirs was a scholarly “Revolt” against the tedium of property as commodity, an act of resistance to the centuries-old conformity of the enclosures (Blomley, Law). Aquarian Theory in Propertied Practice Imagining new property ideas in theory yielded in practice a diverse Aquarian tenure. In the emerging communes and intentional communities of the late 1960s and early 1970s, common property norms were unwittingly absorbed into their ethos and legal structure (Zablocki; Page). As a “way out of a dead-end future” (Smith and Crossley), a generation of young, mostly university-educated people sought new ways to relate to land. Yet, as Benjamin Zablocki observed at the time, “there is surprisingly little awareness among present-day communitarians of their historical forebears” (43). The alchemy that was property and the counterculture was given form and substance by place, time, geography, climate, culture, and social history. Unlike the dominant private paradigm that was placeless and universal, the tenurial experiments of the counter-culture were contextual and diverse. Hence, to generalise is to invite the problematic. Nonetheless, three broad themes of Aquarian property are discernible. First, property ceased being a vehicle for the acquisition of private wealth; rather it invested self-meaning within a communitarian context, “a sense of self [as] a part of a tribe.” Second, the “back to the land” movement signified a return to the country, an interregnum in the otherwise unidirectional post-enclosure drift to the city. Third, Aquarian property was premised on obligation, recognising that ownership was more than a bundle of autonomous rights, but rights imbricated with a corresponding duty to land health. Like common property and its practices of sustained yield, Aquarian owners were environmental stewards, with inter-connected responsibilities to others and the earth (Page). The counterculture was a journey in self-fulfillment, a search for personal identity amidst the empowerment of community. Property’s role in the counterculture was to affirm the under-regarded notion of property as propriety; where ownership fostered well lived and capacious lives in flourishing communities (Alexander). As Margaret Munro-Clark observed of the early 1970s, “the enrichment of individual identity or selfhood [is] the distinguishing mark of the current wave of communitarianism” (33). Or, as another 1970s settler remarked twenty years later, “our ownership means that we can’t liquefy our assets and move on with any appreciable amount of capital. This arrangement has many advantages; we don’t waste time wondering if we would be better off living somewhere else, so we have commitment to place and community” (Metcalf 52). In personhood terms, property became “who we are, how we live” (Lismore Regional Gallery), not a measure of commoditised worth. Personhood also took legal form, manifested in early title-holding structures, where consensus-based co-operatives (in which capital gain was precluded) were favoured ideologically over the capitalist, majority-rules corporation (Munro-Clark). As noted, Aquarian property was also predominantly rural. For many communitarians, the way out of a soulless urban life was to abandon its difficulties for the yearnings of a simpler rural idyll (Smith and Crossley). The 1970s saw an extraordinary return to the physicality of land, measured by a willingness to get “earth under the nails” (Farran). In Australia, communities proliferated on the NSW Northern Rivers, in Western Australia’s southwest, and in the rural hinterlands behind Queensland’s Sunshine Coast and Cairns. In New Zealand, intentional communities appeared on the rural Coromandel Peninsula, east of Auckland, and in the Golden Bay region on the remote northwestern tip of the South Island. In all these localities, land was plentiful, the climate seemed sunny, and the landscape soulful. Aquarians “bought cheap land in beautiful places in which to opt out and live a simpler life [...] in remote backwaters, up mountains, in steep valleys, or on the shorelines of wild coastal districts” (Sargisson and Sargent 117). Their “hard won freedom” was to escape from city life, suffused by a belief that “the city is hardly needed, life should spring out of the country” (Jones and Baker 5). Aquarian property likewise instilled environmental ethics into the notion of land ownership. Michael Metzger, writing in 1975 in the barely minted Ecology Law Quarterly, observed that humankind had forgotten three basic ecological laws, that “everything is connected to everything else”, that “everything must go somewhere”, and that “nature knows best” (797). With an ever-increasing focus on abstraction, the language of private property: enabled us to create separate realities, and to remove ourselves from the natural world in which we live to a cerebral world of our own creation. When we act in accord with our artificial world, the disastrous impact of our fantasies upon the natural world in which we live is ignored. (796)By contrast, Aquarian property was intrinsically contextual. It revolved around the owner as environmental steward, whose duty it was “to repair the ravages of previous land use battles, and to live in accord with the natural environment” (Aquarian Archives). Reflecting ancient common rights, Aquarian property rights internalised norms of prudence, proportionality and moderation of resource use (Rose, Futures). Simply, an ecological view of land ownership was necessary for survival. As Dr. Moss Cass, the Federal environment minister wrote in the preface to The Way Out: Radical Alternatives in Australia, ‘”there is a common conviction that something is rotten at the core of conventional human existence.” Across the Tasman, the sense of latent environmental crisis was equally palpable, “we are surrounded by glistening surfaces and rotten centres” (Jones and Baker 5). Property and Countercultural Place and Time In the emerging discipline of legal geography, the law and its institutions (such as property) are explained through the prism of spatiotemporal context. What even more recent law and geography scholarship argues is that space is privileged as “theoretically interesting” while “temporality is reduced to empirical history” (Braverman et al. 53). This part seeks to consider the intersection of property, the counterculture, and time and place without privileging either the spatial or temporal dimensions. It considers simply the place of Nimbin, New South Wales, in early May 1973, and how property conformed to the exigencies of both. Legal geographers also see property through the theory of performance. Through this view, property is a “relational effect, not a prior ground, that is brought into being by the very act of performance” (Blomley, Performing 13). In other words, doing does not merely describe or represent property, but it enacts, such that property becomes a reality through its performance. In short, property is because it does. Performance theory is liberating (Page et al) because it concentrates not on property’s arcane rules and doctrines, nor on the legal geographer’s alleged privileging of place over time, but on its simple doing. Thus, Nicholas Blomley sees private property as a series of constant and reiterative performances: paying rates, building fences, registering titles, and so on. Adopting this approach, Aquarian property is described as a series of performances, seen through the prism of the legal practitioner, and its countercultural participants. The intersection of counterculture and property law implicated my family in its performative narrative. My father had been a solicitor in Nimbin since 1948; his modest legal practice was conducted from the side annexe of the School of Arts. Equipped with a battered leather briefcase and a trusty portable typewriter, like clockwork, he drove the 20 miles from Lismore to Nimbin every Saturday morning. I often accompanied him on his weekly visits. Forty-one years ago, in early May 1973, we drove into town to an extraordinary sight. Seen through ten-year old eyes, surreal scenes of energy, colour, and longhaired, bare-footed young people remain vivid. At almost the exact halfway point in my father’s legal career, new ways of thinking about property rushed headlong and irrevocably into his working life. After May 1973, dinnertime conversations became very different. Gone was the mundane monopoly of mortgages, subdivisions, and cottage conveyancing. The topics now ranged to hippies, communes, co-operatives and shared ownerships. Property was no longer a dull transactional monochrome, a lifeless file bound in pink legal tape. It became an idea replete with diversity and innovation, a concept populated with interesting characters and entertaining, often quirky stories. If property is a narrative (Rose, Persuasion), then the micro-story of property on the NSW Northern Rivers became infinitely more compelling and interesting in the years after Aquarius. For the practitioner, Aquarian property involved new practices and skills: the registration of co-operatives, the drafting of shareholder deeds that regulated the use of common lands, the settling of idealistic trusts, and the ever-increasing frequency of visits to the Nimbin School of Arts every working Saturday. For the 1970s settler in Nimbin, performing Aquarian property took more direct and lived forms. It may have started by reading the open letter that festival co-organiser Graeme Dunstan wrote to the Federal Minister for Urban Affairs, Tom Uren, inviting him to Nimbin as a “holiday rather than a political duty”, and seeking his support for “a community group of 100-200 people to hold a lease dedicated to building a self-sufficient community [...] whose central design principles are creative living and ecological survival” (1). It lay in the performances at the Festival’s Learning Exchange, where ideas of philosophy, organic farming, alternative technology, and law reform were debated in free and unstructured form, the key topics of the latter being abortion and land. And as the Festival came to its conclusion, it was the gathering at the showground, titled “After Nimbin What?—How will the social and environmental experiment at Nimbin effect the setting up of alternative communities, not only in the North Coast, but generally in Australia” (Richmond River Historical Society). In the days and months after Aquarius, it was the founding of new communities such as Co-ordination Co-operative at Tuntable Creek, described by co-founder Terry McGee in 1973 as “a radical experiment in a new way of life. The people who join us […] have to be prepared to jump off the cliff with the certainty that when they get to the bottom, they will be all right” (Munro-Clark 126; Cock 121). The image of jumping off a cliff is a metaphorical performance that supposes a leap into the unknown. While orthodox concepts of property in land were left behind, discarded at the top, the Aquarian leap was not so much into the unknown, but the long forgotten. The success of those communities that survived lay in the innovative and adaptive ways in which common forms of property fitted into registered land title, a system otherwise premised on individual ownership. Achieved through the use of outside private shells—title-holding co-operatives or companies (Page)—inside the shell, the norms and practices of common property were inclusively facilitated and performed (McLaren; Rose, Futures). In 2014, the performance of Aquarian property endures, in the dozens of intentional communities in the Nimbin environs that remain a witness to the zeal and spirit of the times and its countercultural ideals. Conclusion The Aquarian idea of property had profound meaning for self, community, and the environment. It was simultaneously new and old, radical as well as ancient. It re-invented a pre-liberal, pre-enclosure idea of property. For property theory, its legacy is its imaginings of diversity, the idea that property can take pluralistic forms and assert multiple values, a defiant challenge to the dominant paradigm. Aquarian property offers rich pickings compared to the pauperised private monotone. Over 41 years ago, in the legal geography that was Nimbin, New South Wales, the imaginings of property escaped the conformity of enclosure. The Aquarian age represented a moment in “thickened time” (Braverman et al 53), when dissenting theory became practice, and the idea of property indelibly changed for a handful of serendipitous actors, the unscripted performers of a countercultural narrative faithful to its time and place. References Alexander, Gregory. Commodity & Propriety: Competing Visions of Property in American Legal Thought 1776-1970. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Aquarian Archives. "Report into Facilitation of a Rural Intentional Community." Lismore, NSW: Southern Cross University. Blomley, Nicholas. Law, Space, and the Geographies of Power. New York: Guildford Press, 1994. Blomley, Nicholas. Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property. New York: Routledge, 2004. Blomley, Nicholas. “Performing Property, Making the World.” Social Studies Research Network 2053656. 5 Aug. 2013 ‹http://ssrn.com/abstract=2053656›. Braverman, Irus, Nicholas Blomley, David Delaney, and Sandy Kedar. The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2014. Buck, Andrew. The Making of Australian Property Law. Sydney: Federation Press, 2006. Cock, Peter. Alternative Australia: Communities of the Future. London: Quartet Books, 1979. Cohen, Felix. “Dialogue on Private Property.” Rutgers Law Review 9 (1954): 357-387. Dunstan, Graeme. “A Beginning Rather than an End.” The Nimbin Good Times 27 Mar. 1973: 1. Farran, Sue. “Earth under the Nails: The Extraordinary Return to the Land.” Modern Studies in Property Law. Ed. Nicholas Hopkins. 7th edition. Oxford: Hart, 2013. 173-191. Graham, Nicole. Lawscape: Property, Environment, Law. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011. Jones, Tim, and Ian Baker. A Hard Won Freedom: Alternative Communities in New Zealand. Auckland: Hodder & Staughton, 1975. Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac with Other Essays on Conservation from Round River. New York: Ballantine Books, 1966. Lismore Regional Gallery. “Not Quite Square: The Story of Northern Rivers Architecture.” Exhibition, 13 Apr. to 2 June 2013. McLaren, John. “The Canadian Doukhobors and the Land Question: Religious Communalists in a Fee Simple World.” Land and Freedom: Law Property Rights and the British Diaspora. Eds. Andrew Buck, John McLaren and Nancy Wright. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2001. 135-168. Metcalf, Bill. Co-operative Lifestyles in Australia: From Utopian Dreaming to Communal Reality. Sydney: UNSW Press, 1995. Miller, Timothy. The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1999. Munro-Clark, Margaret. Communes in Rural Australia: The Movement since 1970. Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1986. Neeson, Jeanette M. Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Page, John. “Common Property and the Age of Aquarius.” Griffith Law Review 19 (2010): 172-196. Page, John, Ann Brower, and Johannes Welsh. “The Curious Untidiness of Property and Ecosystem Services: A Hybrid Method of Measuring Place.” Pace Environmental Law Rev. 32 (2015): forthcoming. Reich, Charles. “The New Property.” Yale Law Journal 73 (1964): 733-787. Richmond River Historical Society Archives. “After Nimbin What?” Nimbin Aquarius file, flyer. Lismore, NSW. Rose, Carol M. Property and Persuasion Essays on the History, Theory, and Rhetoric of Ownership. Boulder: Westview, 1994. Rose, Carol M. “The Several Futures of Property: Of Cyberspace and Folk Tales, Emission Trades and Ecosystems.” Minnesota Law Rev. 83 (1998-1999): 129-182. Rose, Carol M. “Canons of Property Talk, or Blackstone’s Anxiety.” Yale Law Journal 108 (1998): 601-632. Sargisson, Lucy, and Lyman Tower Sargent. Living in Utopia: New Zealand’s Intentional Communities. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2004. Sax, Joseph L. Defending the Environment: A Strategy for Citizen Action. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971. Singer, Joseph. “No Right to Exclude: Public Accommodations and Private Property.” Nw. U.L.Rev. 90 (1995): 1283-1481. Smith, Margaret, and David Crossley, eds. The Way Out: Radical Alternatives in Australia. Melbourne: Lansdowne Press, 1975. Stone, Christopher. “Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects.” Southern Cal. L. Rev. 45 (1972): 450-501. Tribe, Laurence H. “Ways Not to Think about Plastic Trees: New Foundations for Environmental Law.” Yale Law Journal 83 (1973-1974): 1315-1348. Zablocki, Benjamin. Alienation and Charisma: A Study of Contemporary American Communes. New York: Free Press, 1980.

Includes bibliographical references. The origins of the Torrens System of land registration are not clear. Examines the claim of Dr. Ulrich Hübbe who asserted that he collaborated with Torrens to bring about the adoption of the land law of his hometown Hamburg in the form of the Real Property Act 1858 (SA). An historical examination (collecting and analysing all relevant historical sources), shows that it is likely that Hübbe was the actual draftsman, while a comparative legal analysis (contrasting Hamburg's land law at the beginning of the 19th century with the first bill of the Act) demonstrates that there is a strong similarity between Hamburg's land registration system and the original Torrens System; and, that the outstanding differences between the systems can be explained by the natural adaptation processes which are implied by the adoption of laws.

Thesis (LLM )-University of Stellenbosch, 2004.
150 leaves printed on single pages, preliminary pages i-xi and numbered pages 1-138. Includes bibliography.
Digitized at 600 dpi grayscale to pdf format (OCR), using a Bizhub 250 Konica Minolta Scanner.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The concept of sectional ownership has been unknown in the Botswana common law because of the maxim superficies solo cedit, which does not recognize separate ownership of apartments in a building. The law must always serve the felt and real needs of the times, and in order to give effect to those needs, the Botswana Sectional Titles Act was enacted in 1999. It is based on the South African Sectional Titles Act of 1986, as amended, which repealed the 1971 Act. In this thesis, a comparative analysis of the South African and Botswana sectional titles law is made to determine whether and, if so, how the existing position in the South African sectional titles law could aid interpretation and application of the sectional titles legislation of Botswana, specifically pertaining to aspects of establishment of sectional title schemes. The main focus is on the legislative provisions of both jurisdictions. However, South African case law is also considered. Landownership and sectional titles is discussed, to determine whether sectional ownership is genuine ownership. This entails a discussion on the publicity principle, which in the case of land is normally achieved by means of registration in the Deeds Registries. The thesis analyses the Botswana and South African statutes on the requirements and procedures involved in the establishment of sectional title schemes to bring to light any shortcomings that may exist in either of the two statutes. An understanding of the shortcomings of the South African statute is relevant to the interpretation and application of the Botswana statute. An examination of the procedural aspects of establishment of a sectional title scheme, as well as the roles of the parties involved in the establishment thereof is undertaken, so as to identify consequences that may ensue if they fail to comply with the requirements of either of the statutes. Consequently, a comparative analysis on the effect of registration of the sectional plan and opening of the sectional title register is made. Although it is not suggested that the Botswana Act should be completely similar to the South African Act, as Botswana may have its own peculiar circumstances, suggestions as to the amendment of the Botswana statute are made. Amendments would make the Botswana Act even more flexible, and would open up the possibilities of development to achieve greater access to land. Further more improvements to the Act will have to be made, some before its implementation, and some after a period of application of the Act, as real practical problems become apparent.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Die konsep van deeltitel was tot dusver in Botswana se gemenereg onbekend weens die maxim superficies solo cedit, wat nie aparte eienaarskap van woonstelle in 'n gebou erken nie. Die wet moet altyd die werklike behoeftes van die tyd dien, en om te voldoen aan daardie behoeftes is die Botswana Wet op Deeltitels in 1999 uitgevaardig. Dit is gebaseer op die Suid-Afrikaanse Wet op Deeltitels van 1986, soos gewysig, wat die 1971 Wet herroep het. In hierdie tesis word 'n vergelykende studie gedoen van die Suid-Afrikaanse Wet op Deeltitels en die gelyknamige Wet in Botswana om te bepaal of, en indien wel, hoe die bestaande posisie in die Suid-Afrikaanse Wet op Deeltitels kan help met die interpretasie en toepassing van die deeltitel wetgewing van Botswana, veral waar dit gaan oor die vestiging van deeltitelskemas. Die tesis fokus op die wetgewende bepalings in albei lande, maar konsentreer op probleemareas in die nuwe Deeltitel wet van Botswana. Grondeienaarskap en deeltitels word bespreek om te bepaal of deeltiteleienaarskap werklike eienaarskap is. Dit behels 'n bespreking van die publisiteitsbeginsel, waaraan gewoonlik, in die geval van grond, voldoen word deur registrasie in die Akteregister. Die tesis ontleed die Suid-Afrikaanse statuut en die statuut van Botswana wat gaan oor die vereistes en prosedures betrokke by die vestiging van deeltitelskemas en enige tekortkominge wat bestaan in enige van die twee statute. Dit is belangrik om die tekortkominge van die Suid-Afrikaanse statuut te begryp, as die statuut van Botswana geinterpreteer en toegepas moet word. Die prosedures wat gevolg word in die vestiging van 'n deeltitelskema, asook die rolle van die verskillende partye betrokke, word bespreek sodat die gevolge as daar nie aan die vereistes van die statuut voldoen word nie, identifiseer kan word. Gevolglik word 'n vergelykende ontleding gedoen van die effek van registrasie van die deeltitelplan en die opening van die deeltitelregister. Die slothoofstuk bevat aanbevelings vir verdere navorsing. Alhoewel daar nie voorgestel word dat die wet in Botswana identies aan die Suid-Afrikaanse wet moet wees nie, (Botswana het te make met ander omstandighede) word voorstelle aan die hand gedoen vir die wysiging van die wet in Botswana. Hierdie wysigings sal die wet meer buigsaam maak en daar sal meer moontlikhede wees vir ontwikkeling wat groter toegang tot grond sal bewerkstellig. Verder sal daar verbeterings aan die wet aangebring moet word nadat dit eers in werking getree het en die werklike probleme kop uitsteek.

Numerous land reform policy instruments and initiatives that have been implemented since the beginning of the 1990's are mediating the on-going battle between formal land tenure systems and informal customary land tenure arrangements. The policy instruments and initiatives seek to establish a delicate balance that will suit the diverse needs of the population of South Africa with respect to land. The enormity of this task is evident when one is faced with the reality that South Africa has the third highest Gini index (a measure of inequality in the distribution of land) in the world. The Eastern Cape Province is one of the poorest provinces in South Africa, and has been affected most by the land segregationist and homeland policies of previous colonial and apartheid regimes. It is not only the unequal distribution of land, but also the vast array of insecure tenure arrangements that have had a detrimental effect on the development and empowerment of communities resident on communal land. This research analyses one initiative that intends to strengthen the security of tenure of existing occupants of communal land in the remote rural areas of the Eastern Cape Province. The research critically appraises the Administrative Area Boundary Project of the Department of Land Affairs (that aims to identify and complete the formal surveys of all administrative area boundaries in the Eastern Cape) in the light of the intentions of the Communal Land Rights Act (No. 11 of 2004) (CLaRA), and highlights the challenges in formalising the informal tenure arrangements of occupants of communal land. The different aspects of the Administrative Area Boundary Project (both office work and field work) were evaluated in order to determine not only its feasibility, but also its impact as an effective instrument of land reform in its endeavour to provide secure land rights to millions of South Africans residing in former homeland areas. To this end, both desktop and case study methodologies were used in order to collect and analyse the research data.
Thesis (M.Sc.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2006.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the conveyancing process in South Africa with a view to identify how the process might be improved in terms of its efficiency and effectiveness. Land is an asset and still remains a valuable factor in production, even in the modern knowledge economy. In many parts of the world, land is a limited resource, therefore, in most countries, custodianship and ownership of land and landed properties generally tend to be guarded through the meticulous capturing, recording and storage of appropriate data and information. Legislative provisions for the transfer of custodianship and/or ownership require the involvement of a variety of role players in the conveyancing processes that culminate in the registration of land and associated immovable property. In some countries, the conveyancing processes tend to be complex and cumbersome. The study provides a conceptual framework for conveyancing processes based on a content-based review of land and immovable property registration systems in five countries, namely, Barbados, the Netherlands, Australia, Taiwan and South Africa. The study further investigates the South African conveyancing processes. Quantitative questionnaires were completed by six respondent groups from the conveyancing service chain, and qualitative interviews were conducted with two of the four major banks in South Africa. Descriptive statistics was used to analyse the quantitative data, and content analysis was used to analyse the qualitative data. The findings were used to develop a de-bottlenecking framework for South African conveyancing.
Business Management
M. Com. (Business Management)

The purpose of the Restitution of Land Rights Act 22 of 1994 is to provide for the restitution of rights in land to persons or communities dispossessed of such rights after 19 June 1913 as a result of past racially discriminatory laws or practices. The restitution of a right in land can include the restoration of a right in land. The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the requirement of feasibility in restoring land rights and in particular the role of feasibility studies and the courts’ interpretation of the feasibility requirement in restoring such rights. The methodology used includes a review of literature, legislation and policies on land restitution and an analysis of case law. The outcome of the research indicates that while actual restoration ought to take preference in all instances, it may only be granted once all the relevant circumstances and factors have been considered. In certain circumstances it may not be feasible to restore land rights.
Private Law
LL. M. (Property Law)