Wominjeka fellow travellers, imagine if you will, a group of people who came to your house while you were out working, your personal effects were clearly on display, your photos, images of your life, tools and artifacts in the yard, fishing lines and your boat. Upon returning that evening, you find you are locked out of your home, your children are now hungry, you’re not able to get inside to get them dinner. You go to the authorities and they tell you they have no evidence of anyone living at that house, ever. A Casa Nullius so to speak (an empty house). Crazy idea? And yet this is what we as Australians were taught to believe, Terra Nullius, an empty country, right up until the 3rd of June 1992.
When Captain James Cook claimed the east coast of Australia for Britain in 1770, the British considered the Indigenous population of the country too “uncivilised” to hold legally recognised sovereignty or property rights. This self-serving opinion alone provided the legal justification to dispossess Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of their land and disregarded their existing laws, societal and political structures.
This doctrine remained the cornerstone of the British and Federal Administration of Australia, setting forth the cynical and unjust treatment of our First Peoples by giving cover in law to every dispossession, resettlement, assimilation attempt and force removal of children that subsequently transpired.
In 1981 Eddie Mabo, a lands rights activist from Murray Island in the Torres Straits, brought a case against the state of Queensland. He was seeking to revoke British inheritance laws and reinstate the native title laws held by his people to their own land on Murray Island. After a ten-year battle where the best legal minds in Australia were pitted against Mabo’s assertion of continuity of title, the case was decided in favour of Eddie Mabo and Murray Island. The law in effect, recognised for the first time since Captain Cook in 1770, that British occupation did not extinguish native Indigenous title and ownership of their land.
This week, Wednesday, being the 3rd of June and the 34th anniversary of that historic court ruling, we pay respect to Eddie Mabo, his family and those native peoples who are still fighting to overturn the historic and cataclysmic assertion of Terra Nullius, which perpetrated so much continuous pain and deprived a proud people of the way of life, their language, their culture and their home.
Always was, always will be, Aboriginal Land.
Till next week Triganin – see you soon.
References:
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?hl=en&tab=wm#inbox/FMfcgzQgMLvxKnkRXZsfJbJpTJFwFZMV
Video with more information: https://youtu.be/jBJ_OjnPgYA?feature=shared
Picture of the Eddie Mabo monument in Townsville, Wikipedia Commons