The Real Australia

(11 of 12)

Around 1910, an even more shameful policy came in: the "stealing" of children from their natural, Aboriginal mothers. These kids, whose only crime was to be Aboriginal, were abducted by the white authorities to be assimilated, as orphans, into white society. The members of this stolen generation were not told their parents' names, and most would never see their mothers again. This odious experiment was not abandoned until 1970 and did not become general public knowledge until 1997, when a report on it, "Bringing Them Home," by Sir Ronald Wilson, caused national outrage.

The key to all Aboriginal rights is land. Land is identity; to own none is to be no one, deracinated, invisible. Land is also theology. In Aboriginal myth, the Australian earth--its valleys, hills and watercourses, together with everything that grew and lived on it--was shaped by ancestral beings during an ahistoric period called the Dreamtime. When these ancestors withdrew from the earth, they left behind not only the humans they had created but also a body of sacred law, embedded in dances, songs and images, that described their worldmaking acts. These images showed how the spirits of the dead were continually absorbed into the land and recycled into the newborn living. Hence, to Aborigines, land is far more than real estate. In their struggle for rights, it is the key element.

But it has taken a very long time to drag the Australian courts and government into admitting that the Aborigines owned their land before white arrival--that the doctrine of terra nullius (no- man's-land) was legally invalid. This finally happened in 1992, when Eddie Mabo, a member of the Meriam clan on the Murray Islands in the Torres Strait off northern Australia, successfully argued before the high court that his people had been there before the whites and had never given up their ancient rights of ownership. This was the first "native title" victory in Australian law.

Its results have been explosive. Huge deposits of minerals, including, at Jabaluka in the Northern Territory, the richest known uranium deposits in the southern hemisphere, lie beneath the earth. No less than 15% of the total land area of Australia is owned or controlled by Aboriginal groups and councils. Some 700 land claims, covering 50% of the Australian landmass, await determination by the courts, and more are coming in every day. This avalanche has caused legal and bureaucratic gridlock. Few Aboriginal groups accept mediation by whites. No two groups agree on land use. Some, for instance, think that tribal land should not be exploited at all, and left sacrosanct. Others are for all-out mining.