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key indigenous australian issues
| home | news lLand case dashes Aboriginal hopesDavid Fickling in Sydney 13 December 2002 - Australia's longest-running Aboriginal land rights claim collapsed yesterday when the high court delivered a judgment regarded as the death-knell of the native title system. The claim of the Yorta Yorta people covered about 2,000sq km of tribal land along the Murray river, on the border between New South Wales and Victoria. It was one of the first cases lodged after the federal parliament recognised Aboriginal land rights in 1994. Since then more than 200 witnesses have been heard in Melbourne and on the banks of the Murray. The court ruled that the Yorta Yorta had no claim to the land from which most of their people were expelled in the mid-19th century. Comparing early descriptions of Aboriginal practices with oral history and recent testimony, the judges voted five to two against the claim. A Yorta Yorta spokeswoman, Monica Morgan, said it was a "dismal day for Aboriginal justice", adding: "It's not about native title, it's about racism. It's about recognition, it's about seeing our sovereignty." The president of the national native title tribunal, Graeme Neate, said claimants would have to rely increasingly on informal agreements with state governments, farmers and mining companies. "Most groups would see this as the law of white Australia raising yet another obstacle for Aboriginal people and putting them through more hoops to prove what they have always known: that this is their land," he said. An essential element of title claims since the breakthrough Mabo case in 1992 has been proof that the claimants have maintained connections with their land and carried out traditional practices on it since the European invasion. Courts have had the almost impossible task of judging the level of a people's spiritual involvement with their land, and the results have often been resented, because forcible removal has been enough to extinguish their claim. The system has been attacked for many years. Pauline Hanson, leader of the defunct racist party One Nation, cited it in her 1996 maiden speech to parliament as an example of "the privileges Aboriginals enjoy over other Australians". The prime minister, John Howard, refused to condemn the speech at the time, and his resistance to reconciliation has been the background to the breakdown of the native title system, although the burden of red tape seems to have been the main cause. The biggest award, an area of western desert four times the size of Belgium, was formally handed back to the Martu people in September. But a string of rulings has circumscribed the system's scope. In August the Miriuwung-Gajerrong case found that indigenous people had no mineral rights in their land and confirmed that certain rights could be eliminated by white occupation. Last month the De Rose Hill case found that connection with land could be eliminated in the lifetime of people driven from their homes. Peter Seidel, the pro bono lawyer who represented the Yorta Yorta, said the standard of proof had now been set so high that it could be impossible for future cases to meet it. Geoff Clark, chairman of the government Aboriginal affairs body Atsic, said the restrictions placed on land rights had hamstrung the movement, and called on Aboriginal people to reoccupy their land, regardless of court rulings. Source: The Guardian Further information:
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2004
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