Yesterday, Victoria’s parliament received the final report of Australia’s first-ever formal truth-telling inquiry. The four-year commission, which culminated last week with an organised march across hundreds of miles across Victoria to commemorate the occasion, was tasked with understanding the legacy of colonisation on the state’s Aboriginal communities. Conducting interviews and collecting evidence, it’s revealed a shocking range of abuses against the state’s First Nations peoples, encompassing everything from incarceration and corporal punishment to outright murder. In one case, a woman described how Aboriginal mothers were banned from giving birth in hospitals, instead forced to deliver their babies in the blazing Australian sun.
Little wonder the report labelled these injustices a “genocide”, and certainly the testimonies show how the gap in living standards between white and indigenous Australians was forged. And, even now, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations die far younger than their white compatriots, while they struggle more with unemployment and workplace discrimination. These problems, repeated right across Australia, feel intractable — and in the end, they’re all based on the continent’s dusty red soil. For centuries, indigenous Australians have had their land snatched from beneath their feet, pushed metaphorically and literally to the outer limits of their ancestral homelands. This physical expulsion continues to have disastrous consequences, not just socially but also culturally, with communities struggling to preserve their traditions or determine their futures. Money matters here too: landlessness among many indigenous Australians means that they’ve long been shut out from the profits of the country’s vast mineral wealth.
Now, though, things may finally be changing. The Truth Commission’s final report is likely to transform life for Victoria’s First Nations peoples, with land reform just one result among many. Victoria is far from alone. It is part of a broader trend increasingly repeated from coast to coast. Taken together, Aboriginals now have rights or ownership to over half of Australia’s territory, and are increasingly being treated as partners in resource management — even if their fight for land, and the wider struggle for equality and fair treatment, is very far from done.
Indigenous dispossession has a long history in Australia. Britain started settling the continent in the late 1700s, establishing a penal colony at Botany Bay in 1788. A mix of settlers and convicts soon arrived — and what they found were some of the oldest cultures on earth. Most Aboriginal Australians were hunter-gatherers, and their ties to the land were intimate and complex. Consider the Kulin clans of central Victoria state, where tribal members traditionally inherited land access and use rights through the male line, but could also hunt and gather in other selected areas, and had additional access via their mother.
Soon enough, though, British settlers had displaced Aboriginals en masse, even as European diseases ravaged their populations. The government largely justified land seizures on the basis of racial superiority — and the fact that Aboriginal cultures didn’t have a centralised sovereign state to speak on their behalf. That native Australians lacked Western conceptions of property rights didn’t help either, with an 1837 House of Commons report summarising Aboriginals as “barbarous” and “entirely destitute of the rudest forms of civil polity.”
Beyond official grants, meanwhile, some whites simply squatted on Aboriginal land. Ranchers claimed huge areas of the continent’s interior, setting up what became known as “stations”. Their sheep and cattle often destroyed the local ecosystems that Aboriginals relied on for food. With no good alternatives, many Aboriginals formed encampments at the headquarters of stations and worked for settlers, sometimes in slave-like conditions. Others migrated to towns or Christians missions, or else crowded into insalubrious “reserves” separate from whites.
“Protection” policies appeared from the 1860s. They quickly devolved into an ugly form of quasi-feudal control, with the mixed children of Aboriginal parents snatched away and given to white families. Segregation endured well into the Fifties and Sixties, at which point there was a shift toward assimilation. The Australian government increasingly started treating Aboriginals like other Australians before the law. But though that bolstered their individual rights, it ignored their unique ties to the land.
“Segregation endured well into the Fifties and Sixties”
The Yolngu are a powerful example of a community that helped drive Australia’s transformation in its treatment of First Nations people. When the government created the “exclusively Aboriginal” Arnhem Land Aboriginal Reserve in the Northern Territory, in 1931, the Yolngu thought that their land would be safe from outside incursions. But they were wrong. The Australian government intervened in the area several decades later, with the aim of handing a piece of the Yolngu reserve over to a bauxite mining firm.
The Yolngu were not consulted in the land seizure, and in response crafted a now-famous set of petitions to the House of Representatives. Fashioned out of tree bark, their 1963 argument was simple. They’d used the land in question for hunting and food gathering “from time immemorial: we were all born here”. Even so, the government denied the Yolngu petition, while a 1969 court case they launched also failed. Over subsequent years, the mining company, “came and they destroyed the land” one Yolngu leader, Djawa Yunupingu, told me. That loss of resources put pressure on the Yolngu, while the fight to get it back strained clan relations too.
Though the Yolngu lost the case, the episode marked a turning point for Aboriginals. Native activism spread from the mid-Sixties, and episodes like the Gurindji “walk-off” at the Wave Hill cattle station brought national attention. The 1972 election swept Labor to power, with the party vowing to advance Aboriginal land rights. That culminated in a landmark 1976 bill, known as the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act.
Aboriginals could now claim ownership over land in the Northern Territory — where most of them lived — if they could prove traditional association to it through songs, stories or rituals. The Yolngu took full advantage of this. After finding the head of a crocodile in an illegal fishing camp, likely severed by an intruder, in 1996 they started painting a series of tree bark images of their stories and philosophies, and how that linked to their sandy coastal home. Those paintings became key documents in a landmark court case that granted them sea rights in the Blue Mud Bay from 2008.
The Aboriginal Land Rights Act ultimately helped transfer 50% of the Northern Territory to Aboriginal ownership, more than initially envisioned. All the same, the 1976 Act had limits. The biggest was that it applied only to the Northern Territory, which was administered by the federal government. Most of the Aboriginal population living in other Australian states, with a few exceptions, still lacked recourse for traditional land claims.
That changed in 1992, with a historic High Court decision that upended policy dating back to the British: it ruled that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people could hold “native title” to land based on traditional laws and customs, and that this would be recognised under Australian common law. In Mabo v. Queensland, the court held that while the British crown, and subsequently the Australian government, could extinguish native title — it could nonetheless survive in places where the state didn’t explicitly dispose of it. Follow-up laws established a legal basis for lodging claims to recuperate land, and strengthened native title by allowing it to operate alongside pastoral or mining leases.
Some of the wins for land protections for First Nations peoples of the early and mid-Nineties were subsequently rowed back. In some places, especially in areas settled by whites, rights tended toward protecting heritage and access to sacred sites — rather than gaining full control over land. Yet, despite setbacks in parliament and in court, the return of land to First Nations people has advanced in ways that can’t easily be undone, putting Australia on a new trajectory in its relations with Aboriginal communities. First Nations people now have native title over about 40% of Australia, and that figure is only growing.
In 2019, on behalf of the Gumatj clan, the Yolngu filed a claim for native land title in Arnhem Land, and also lodged an application for compensation for the government’s decades-old land seizure in the area. The government argued that it had the authority to overturn native title — and that it didn’t have to provide compensation for property it repurposed in that corner of Australia. Ultimately, though, the Federal Court rejected all of these arguments, and allowed the case to proceed. In May 2023, in a decision with potentially wide-ranging repercussions, the Federal Court ruled that the Gumatj clan was eligible for compensation over the government land grab. In mid-March this year, the High Court upheld the decision.
Even so, the case highlights how the nature of Aboriginal land rights varies across Australia’s states and territories. First Nations people own more land and have stronger rights in the western half of the country. The Northern Territory stands out as the high point of Aboriginal land rights, notwithstanding remaining contestation over claims.
But land rights are now expanding across prized eastern areas too. In 2021, for instance, the Queensland government returned four nature reserves, including the iconic Daintree National Park, to the Eastern Kukuu Yalanji people. Spanning nearly half a million acres, it’s only one of several local parks now owned by Aboriginals. Marking the handover, Queensland’s environment minister said the move “rights the wrongs of the past” and marks “a step forward in that path to reconciliation.” In 2023, meanwhile, the state of Victoria recognised the Eastern Maar people as owners of a considerable tract of coastal land, including part of a national park.
Despite the progress for First Nations people, however, restitution is incomplete. There remain hard and controversial limits to land returns in Australia. Most of the land recognised as belonging to Aboriginals sits in remote areas of the country, far from cities or sources of wealth. At the same time, the Australian government retains the power to limit native title to grant mining or pastoral leases. Using this power, the Queensland government squashed native title over 1,385 hectares of Wangan and Jagalingou country in 2019. For all the fanfare, Victoria’s truth commission may yet run into problems too, with the state government reluctant to reform the state’s criminal justice system, and its national counterpart under pressure to go further, faster.
History has a long shadow — and for Aboriginal Australians, that shadow is dark. Two centuries of dispossession, cultural erasure, segregation and assimilation can’t be remedied in a generation or two. Even so, the growing recognition of Aboriginal land rights can serve as a foundation for closing the gap with whites, whether in Yirrkala or anywhere else.
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Adapted from Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn’t, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies (Basic Books)
