Land rights: the beginning

'Terra Nullius' (Latin for 'land belonging to no one') that was how Cook described Australia and how it was officially viewed up until the last decades of the 20th Century. When the First Fleet arrived in 1788 the British took over the land without a second thought as to its ownership. They discounted the fact that there were original inhabitants of the continent and declared it empty. Legally this meant that no one lived there and therefore no one could claim rights under English law.

This was not the practice in other countries that Britain colonised - in Canada and New Zealand treaties were signed with the Indigenous people in order to take land. Even though the treaties were very weighted in British favour and the Indigenous peoples of those countries were not treated any better than Indigenous Australians; the fact that treaties existed meant that their prior ownership of the land was established in law. In English law theIndigenous Australians did not exist, therefore their right to the land in Australia did not exist either.

The removal of land from the Aboriginal peoples started in 1788 and continued through the frontier war, and the setting up of the reserves a hundred years later. When the Indigenous people were given reserve lands they had been told it would be theirs to keep - but by the 1960s the Commonwealth government had reclaimed much of the land for housing and commercial projects such as mining.

Indigenous protests over how reserve land was managed and how it was being taken away became more and more frequent, until in the 1960s it erupted into a country wide movement for land rights. Not only did the Indigenous population of Australia want to preserve the land they already had, but they wanted to be recognised as the legal owners of their traditional lands so that no one, not even the government could take them away in the future.

The Yirrkala bark petition in 1963 (see previous chapter) was only the beginning of the land rights movement, a movement that continues in Australia to this day.

In August 1966, 200 Indigenous men, women and children left the Wave Hill cattle station in the Northern Territory. They were protesting about their living and working conditions on the massive station. The people of the Gurindji language group had been used as virtual slave labor for the British company Vesteys since they had established Wave Hill in the 1880s. Instead of continuing to accept the low wages and terrible housing they walked off the station and set up camp at a nearby creek. Under the leadership of Vincent Lingiari their strike lasted nine years and was a model for other strikes and walkouts on big cattle stations. See image 1 and animation

The Gurindji action was initially about low wages and poor living and working conditions, but by the next year it developed into a land rights campaign. The Wave Hill station was situated on land that the Gurindji people had lived on for thousands of years before Vesteys had even been established, yet they were denied any rights as to how that land was used. They were now campaigning to have their traditional, sacred lands returned to them. The Gurindji people eventually won their fight and in 1975 their lands were officially given back to them by the Prime Minister Gough Whitlam.

The protests over land rights in Australia were happening during a time of great global change and protest. Civil Rights movements were taking place all over the world, as were anti war demonstrations. The 1960s and 1970s were more liberal decades in Australia; as fears about communism subsided and people began questioning involvement in the Vietnam War the Australian people became more open to political activism and demonstrations.

It was in the early 1970s, with a new Labor government, that the treatment of Indigenous people began to come to the fore in Australian politics. Aboriginal activism then stepped up onto a global scale. In 1971 the Aboriginal Advancement League sent letters of protest to the United Nations. Again the main focus of the demonstration was about land rights and the return of land to its traditional owners with compensation for what had been done to the land. Strikes on farms and stations around the country continued to make headlines in Australia, but the land rights campaign was about to make headlines around the world.

On Australia Day (26 January) 1972 the Indigenous protest movement took another new turn. An Indigenous embassy appeared outside Old Parliament House in Canberra. The Aboriginal Embassy was a group of tents erected in one afternoon by four Aboriginal activists; Michael Anderson, Tony Coorey, Billy Craigie and Gary Williams. Earlier that day the Prime Minister William McMahon, had announced his government would never grant land rights to the Indigenous people of Australia as it would 'threaten the tenure of every Australian'. McMahon said they would be allowed to lease (rent) land off the government (but only if it was for a project that would make money) and that mining would continue on Indigenous land. See image 2

The Aboriginal Tent Embassy helped focus attention on the land rights issue - both in Australia and all over the world. It became a powerful icon of Indigenous activism and solidarity. The Aboriginal flag also made its first international appearance when it was flown over the Embassy in 1972. Another important symbol of the protest movement, it was created in 1971 by Indigenous artist Harold Thomas. The black in the flag represents the colour oftheir skin, the red represents both the blood that has been spilt and the colour of the land, and the yellow circle is the sun that gives life and brings renewal. See image 3

The government ordered the police to remove the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, but it was put straight back up again. The men who started the protest were joined by Aboriginal people from all over the country; they helped rebuild the Embassy when it was torn down by the police. It stood for over six months in 1972 as a symbol of the protest movement and has made reappearances in Canberra over the years during times of protest.