Eddie Mabo's legacy reminds us that this is Aboriginal land, and you are welcome too
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Version 0 of 1. When I was a boy my grandfather, a Kamilaroi man from western New South Wales, used to tell me to look around, “this is your country”, he’d say, “they haven’t taken it away from us”. This was his small protest, an act of defiance. In the same way he’d tell me I didn’t have to salute the flag or stand for the anthem. He planted a seed of questioning, wondering: Why were things the way they were? What put us here on the fringes of society? What made our people outcasts in a land that was ours? My grandfather had no real western education but he understood something very simple, very basic and very human: this was his land, his place, a place his people had made theirs for tens of thousands of years. Except this was not his anymore, not according to the law. Related: Tony Abbott praises Eddie Mabo for 'having a go' on visit to Torres Strait From the moment a British flag was placed in this soil, all rights were extinguished for the hundreds of nations that existed here. The Wiradjuri, the Bundjalung, the Arrernte, the Pitjanjatjarra, the Gunditjmara, the Paredarerme, had never seen a white man yet they were now subject to his law. And to the British these nations, people with their distinct languages, customs, laws, their etiquette, their interconnected trade routes, their song and dance and art, were simply invisible: they did not exist. This was the doctrine of terra nullius proclaiming this an empty land and free to claim uncontested for the crown. Of course it didn’t have to be this way. The rights to land of native people had been recognised for hundreds of years. Throughout the British colonies the laws and cultures of the local people were acknowledged under common law. This was the case in Africa, North America, New Zealand, where treaties were signed conferring sovereignty and tenure. So, why not here? Our fate was sealed at first sight. The early descriptions of Indigenous people dismissed us as wretched and brutish, as treacherous. As one said “the Australian nigger is the lowest type of human creature”. In the words if another we were “...in a state of moral unfitness for heaven”. The great European age of discovery brought with it theories of human origins and development that placed Europeans themselves at the top of a hierarchy that posited the so called savages and primitives at the bottom. In her book Aboriginal Populations in the Mind: Race and Primitivity in Psychoanalysis, Celia Brickman explains the term “savage” itself places its subject in the realm of nature not culture and “primitive” referred to people at the very threshold of the transformation from animal to human. Christianity identified black skinned people as the descendants of Ham, the banished son of Noah. Science developed notions of humans as animals with rank according to colour. Later, the skulls of Aboriginal people would be studied for alleged proof of our primitive minds and lack of civilisation. In the century after settlement, the publication of Darwin’s On The Origin Of Species and the growth of the study of anthropology would entrench popular notions of Aboriginal inferiority. To the British, the nations of this land had nothing they could identify as civilisation, culture or political organisation. Where were the crops and farms? Where were the fishing villages or towns? To British eyes, this was indeed an empty land. When I was a young journalist a story caught my eye of a man, like my grandfather, who didn’t believe what British law, now Australian law, said about him. Eddie Mabo was from Mer in the Torres Strait and armed with a legal team had brought a case all the way to the high court to prove that we were here, we had an inheritance passed down over millennia, and that it was time to vanquish the myth of terra nullius. Related: Stan Grant: I can tell you how Adam Goodes feels. Every Indigenous person has felt it I recall explaining to an incredulous news director that this stood to be a moment of history. Despite his scepticism I covered that first day of hearings. There were to be many more and Eddie Mabo would not live to see the judgment, but more than 30 years later a prime minister has made a pilgrimage to his grave and described it as a sacred place for all Australians. Eddie Mabo’s victory changed us as a nation. But if terra nullius has been struck down as a legal concept it lives still in our minds, our hearts and our constitution. The man dubbed the father of reconciliation, Patrick Dodson, said to me recently that recognising Indigenous people in the founding document of the nation would complete Eddie Mabo’s battle to bury terra nullius. This is a chance to ask who we are as a nation. To remember that we have a dark legacy of denial and injustice, but that our law was bigger than our prejudice. To remind ourselves that when footballer Adam Goodes is taunted as an “ape” that we haven’t yet cleansed ourselves of 18th century notions of Indigenous people as blues, savages and primitives. My Sky News colleague Paul Murray suggested that we celebrate Eddie Mabo with a national day, that here is a hero that our children should learn of. Yes, and on that day I would remember too my grandfather who taught me that this was, is and always will be Aboriginal land. And you are welcome too. |