The Mabo decision; a summary.

Although "Capt. Cook discovered Australia" is still understood by many to be incontrovertable fact there is firm evidence that ancestors of what we now call Aboriginal people got here more than 40,000 years ago; depending on which archaeological evidence you reckon stand up it can be anything up to 80,000 years bp. If you ask Aboriginal people they'll tell you they've always been here and, existentially, their argument carries weight. Cook never claimed that the Aboriginal people were not the possessors of the land they occupied but subsequent colonisers claimed that New Holland and (later) Australia were "Terra nullius" meaning that the land belonged, legally, to nobody (individually or collectively) until it was occupied by the British Crown, which then applied British concepts of land title. These all effectively dispossessed Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (the forgotten group in much of all this). Aborigines were controlled by the Crown (like the wildlife is still, today) and often restricted to Reserves similar to what Americans would know as Reservations.

Eddie Mabo, in 1973, took the Queensland State govt led by Bjelke-Peterson to court claiming that he, as one of his ethnic group (the notion of "tribe" is a European term originally from their understanding of African social organisation and then applied willy nilly to American native groups and leter, even less appropriately, to Australian indigenous peoples) technically "owned" a patch of land on the coast of North Queensland. The patch of land had boundary markers that predated white settlement and there was a continuous history, acknowledged by Eddie's community, of 'maintenance of tenure' of the land.

The case was thrown out in Queesnland but went to the Full Bench of the High Court (equivalent to America's Supreme Court and Britain's Privy Council) and, in 1983, the High Court found in favour of Eddie Mabo. Hence the term "Mabo Decision), that Australia was not and never had been "Terra nullius" and that Aboriginal people had had legitimate tenure and title to their lands. To give modern legal effect to the decision the Labor govt of the Commonwealth introduced the Native Title legislation, which I referred to above as having been effectively gutted (while a Bill) by the Opposition.

I hope this summary is helpful; others with more intimate appreciations should feel free to correct me.

Cheers, Rowan