On 3 June 1992 the High Court of Australia handed down the Mabo decision on native title. Each year on 3 June Mabo Day celebrates the anniversary of this decision and Eddie Mabo's unshakeable belief that he owned his ancestral land.
The day is of such significance to the nation that I believe it should be proclaimed a public holiday. It could, perhaps, replace the Queen's Birthday public holiday. This would signify the development of our identity from the days of colonisation, where we relied on our close links with Britain, to today, where we seek to mature as a nation by owning the past and reconciling with Indigenous Australians.
The Mabo decision played a significant role in this process of maturation.
The transformation of our relations with the Indigenous peoples of Australia began in the late 1960s when historians began to investigate the record of relations between Aborigines and Europeans since 1788, and to integrate the Indigenous story into the telling of Australian history.
This revision of Australian history has had an important influence on Australian society. It represents colonisation as invasion, dispossession as theft, frontier conflict as war, the Indigenous response as resistance, the stealing of Indigenous children as genocide, and the lack of moral restraint as racism.
In the Mabo decision, the High Court determined that at the time of the British invasion in 1788, the Indigenous peoples owned the entire continent, including the Islands of Torres Strait. It acknowledged that Indigenous ownership of their traditional land survived the assumption of sovereignty by the British in 1788 and they were entitled to have their title protected under British law.
As the first plaintiff, the ruling bears Mabo's name. He was a traditional owner of land on the Island of Mer in eastern Torres Strait. In the 1960s, he left his homeland to work in Townsville. He was astonished to learn the Torres Strait Islands belonged to the Crown under Australian law.
In 1982, he and other Torres Strait Islanders took the Queensland Government to the High Court to verify their ownership.
In 1992, I was one of many non-Indigenous Australians who viewed the Mabo decision as a tidal wave of justice. The author of the lead judgement, Justice Gerard Brennan, stated that the High Court had entered a process of bringing Australian law into line with universal notions of human rights.
The decision addressed in some measure the violence, shame and racism of our founding story.