This article will highlight the complicated political contexts that underpin discussions of intellectual property and Indigenous knowledge within Australia. On one level it aims to provide some contextual information about the development of new intellectual property strategies for protecting Indigenous knowledge. At another level, it explores the inter-relation of global intellectual property development with local articulation of reform. It seeks to respond to an increasing disjuncture: where international discussions draw on national developments but remain distanced from the discrete political contexts informing their emergence and inevitably, their contestation.