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key indigenous australian issues
| home | news lAboriginal case foundersBy Virginia Marsh in Sydney 13December 2002 - Australia's longest-running Aboriginal land claim has been dismissed by the country's top court in a judgment expected to have far-reaching consequences for other native title disputes working their way through the legal system. The High Court yesterday upheld an earlier federal court decision that the forebears of the Yorta Yorta people had ceased to occupy their land in accordance with traditional laws and customs and that their claim, lodged in 1994, could therefore not proceed. The Yorta Yorta had tried to establish native title over 2,000 sq km of prime farming land straddling New South Wales and Victoria, their traditional home. But under Australian native title legislation they had to prove a continuous link with the land, something they said they had been unable to do because they had been driven off the land by white settlers. The decision was welcomed by the centre-right government, which has watered down native title legislation and refused to apologise formally to Aborigines for past injustices, but greeted with dismay by Aboriginal groups. "It creates a difficult, if not impossible, burden of proof," said Peter Seidel, lawyer for the Yorta Yorta. "Other native title claims will be affected." Geoff Clark, chairman of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders' Commission, the government agency for indigenous people, said: "This decision means [native title] doesn't exist. It is a legal dispossession of Aboriginal people. We are penalised because our traditions are not recognised by the legal system." The Yorta Yorta were among the first Aboriginal peoples to lodge a land claim after the Labor government of Paul Keating brought in ground-breaking native title legislation in 1993. The legislation followed the 1992 Mabo case under which the High Court, for the first time, ruled that Australia had not been unoccupied at the time of British occupation in 1788, and said the rights of Aborigines had to be considered. Source:The Financial Times
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its one year on from the Australian Governments controversial intervention into NT Indigenous communities
action Roll back, listen to Indigenous community voices speaking about the intervention |
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