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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 7 Hansard (4 June) . . Page.. 1864 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

It was not until the 1940s that anyone began to battle for Aboriginal political rights. Various lobby groups took up the cause, and in 1949 the Chifley Labor government passed an act to confirm that all those who could vote in their states could vote for the Commonwealth. The symbol "o" disappeared from the electoral rolls, but not much was done to publicise the change and most Aborigines, told for so long that they could not vote, continued to believe it.

In the 1960s moral outrage at the way countries like South Africa and the United States treated their black populations stirred Australians to look at their own behaviour. Many changes in Aboriginal rights and treatment followed, including at long last full voting rights. The government gave the Commonwealth vote to all Aborigines in 1962. Western Australia gave them state votes in the same year, and Queensland did not follow until 1965. It was only then that all Aborigines in Australia had full and equal voting rights.

Next on the agenda was representation in parliament and Aboriginal land rights. In 1971 Neville Bonner was nominated to fill a vacant seat in the Senate. He was the first Aborigine to sit in any Australian parliament. Since then a number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been elected as parliamentary representatives at all levels of government in Australia.

In relation to land rights, yesterday the nation celebrated Mabo Day, not yet a holiday but a day of enormous significance. The day, as we know, is named after a man whose lasting legacy on the debate around the inseparable relationship between land and identity is beyond measure, and its effects are still being felt today, 10 years on, throughout the nation. By insisting that the law recognise his traditional ownership of Murray Island, he helped secure land rights for indigenous people across Australia and changed the way the nation sees its past, such was his impact.

Eddie Mabo's great challenge was to convince the court that his people had a system of law, a system of social organisation and a system of property rights and that these systems survived the annexation of Murray Island from the British to Queensland in 1879.

In fact, there was a system, a way of life, that had a great affinity with the land, a land that in turn gave their people their identity. It is connection to land that helped illustrate in the parlance of the law that there were systems of traditional law and therefore traditions of ownership in Murray Island culture.

Eddie Mabo proved to the High Court that Murray Island culture clearly defined the boundaries of ownership of their land. In a practical sense this manifested itself as rocks marking the boundaries of the land, piles that were recognised by Murray Island families as denoting ownership. Murray Islanders have had to fight to maintain their identity.

Another enduring legacy of the Mabo case is the recognition of the nature of connectedness to land-that there is no such thing as terra nullius, land belonging to no-one. Shamefully, even at the time when Eddie Mabo's epic struggle was coming to a close, Australia stood out as the only former British colony that did not recognise the pre-existing rights of its indigenous people. Every former colony had reconciled with its indigenous people by treaty or otherwise, except Australia.

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