O
n 3 June 1992 the High Court of Australia handed down its judgement in the case of Mabo v. Queensland [No.2]. It had been before the courts since May 1982 when five Meriam people from Murray Island (Mer) in the eastern Torres Strait began proceedings to assert their right to their traditional lands. The Queensland government, adopting the traditional legal doctrine of terra nullius that had been at the heart of Australian law since 1788, argued that the land had become the property of the Crown in 1879 when the islands in question had been annexed. The court made two unexpected decisions. It overthrew terra nullius and found in favour of Eddie Koiki Mabo and the remaining two plaintiffs, David Passi and James Rice. In the imperishable words of Justice Gerard Brennan, the Meriam people were ‘entitled against the whole world to possession, occupation, use and enjoyment’ of their traditional land. If that was not enough, the court decided with a six-to-one majority to apply these same principles to Australia as a whole, and, in the process, to upend legal principles that had endured for 204 years and to retell the history of Australian colonisation.
By 2022 there had been over five hundred successful claims for native title. When added to land reclaimed as a result of the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 and South Australian legislation of 1981 and 1984, this meant that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander rights and interests in land had been formally recognised across 40 per cent of the Australian land mass. In the Northern Territory and Western Australia, the area in question is much greater, amounting to over 80 per cent in the Kimberley alone.
It has been a transformation of truly global significance.