It’s August 1966 and Vincent Lingiari has had enough. The Gurindji stockmen working on Lord Vesty’s Wave Hill cattle station to the north-west of Tennant Creek are getting paid a pittance. Lingiari leads his people in a walk-off and sets up camp on traditional land at nearby Wattie Creek. What begins as a ‘pay and conditions’ stoush quickly becomes a struggle for land rights. Eight years later, the fight has been won as Prime Minister Gough Whitlam arrives at Wave Hill to present Lingiari with a title deed. The ‘handful of sand’ photo, featuring these two great leaders, is to become an icon in the battle for indigenous land justice.
In the heady days of the early 1970s a new and exciting vision held sway. Amid the blossoming of Australian culture and identity there were calls for a better deal for Aboriginal Australia. But high school students still studied Blackstone’s dictum, and learnt that land ‘desert and uncultivated’ could be claimed simply by occupancy, because no legal code or land tenure existed. Any moral qualms about the dispossession of the Aboriginal people had to be subjugated. Our whole system of property law depended on it. So 20 years slipped by and indigenous Australia languished. However, the notion that our first peoples were entitled to something more had taken root and would continue to grow.
In the early hours of 22 December 1993 the Senate erupted in applause. Technically senators are not supposed to clap. Protocol demands that they should instead strike the table in front of them with the flat of their hand and chant ‘hear, hear’ in a robust and affirming manner. But this was special. After more than a year of tortuous negotiation with indigenous leaders, pastoralists, miners, state governments and myriad other interested parties, the Native Title Act would become law. Don Watson describes the scenes of jubilation in the galleries as ‘probably unprecedented in the parliament’s history’. People wept. Lowitja O’Donoghue said the Act was ‘the greatest proof yet of the probability of reconciliation’.
The preamble to the Act is almost poetic. It speaks in part of ‘ensuring that Aboriginal people receive the full recognition and status within the Australian nation to which history, their prior rights and interests, and their rich and diverse culture, fully entitle them to aspire’.
The contribution Eddie Mabo made to this renewed momentum for land justice cannot be overstated. Edward ‘Koiki’ Mabo was born