CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Dispossessed and mistreated for more than two centuries, Australia’s Aborigines thought their luck had changed when the nation’s highest court acknowledged they had property rights over lands they had occupied for thousands of years.
But the high hopes have faded and Aborigines will mark the 10th anniversary of the landmark High Court decision with little more than a soul-searching conference titled “Unfinished Business.”
Farmers and miners feared the decision giving Aborigines a “native title” property right would turn land and resource ownership upside down, placing billions of investment dollars in jeopardy.
Aborigines, languishing at the bottom of society, hoped to win back lands snatched from them by white settlers who arrived in 1788.
On Monday, the 10th anniversary, Aboriginal leader Geoff Clark will deliver a speech in honor of Eddie Mabo, the native fisherman who took his fight for property rights to the highest court in the land and won.
Starting Tuesday, the two-day “Unfinished Business” conference will ponder the crushed hopes, lost opportunities and scattered successes that followed the court ruling.
Numbering 400,000 among 19 million Australians, Aborigines are the poorest, sickest and most frequently jailed members of society. Not even recognized as citizens until 1967, thousands still live in squalor on the fringes of towns, in remote deserts, and in inner city slums.
When the High Court ruled that Mabo and his Meriam tribe had property rights over the island off Australia’s northeast coast they had inhabited for countless generations, it overturned a 200-year-old legal fiction known as terra nullius—which said Australia was unoccupied before Europeans arrived.
“There was complete euphoria,” said Sen. Aden Ridgeway, deputy leader of the centrist Democrats Party and only the second Aborigine to hold a seat in federal Parliament.
“Indigenous people had arrived on the political landscape with a legal power that allowed them to sit at the table and negotiate material outcomes as equals,” he said.
The Mabo judgment did not give Aborigines ownership of ancestral lands, but rights of use for traditional practices such as hunting, fishing and visiting sacred sites. But the High Court also said native title could be “extinguished” by legislation, settlement and development.
The ambiguous ruling raised more questions than it answered and set the stage for a decade of legal wrangling.
Industry leaders said the decision would scare off investment in mining, agriculture and tourism. Ranchers feared for their long-term government leases to run cattle and sheep over 40 percent of Australia, and urged Canberra to overrule native title.
The year after the Mabo decision, the Labor government passed the Native Title Act that sought to reassure farmers and miners their leaseholds were safe, but gave the Aborigines rights to negotiate over land use in national parks and around tourism and mining projects.
That meant a share in profits, though not the power to veto development. But ranchers remained unhappy and when Prime Minister John Howard’s conservative government came to power in 1996 it agreed to water down native title rights.
The legislation and subsequent court decisions rubbed out native title in most of southern Australia, where most Aborigines live.
Terry O’Shane, a state Aboriginal leader, blamed the broken hopes on “the opposition of rednecks and governments. They’ve objected to it, opposed it, watered it down, attacked the ’93 legislation.”
However, Aboriginal leaders accept there have been successes.
