The Mabo case

Hi everyone; sorry I couldn't post last night. Cablevision took my payment but suspended their service and I won't have it back for 24 hours. So here I am at an internet cafè near my house.

Eddie Mabo was an Australian Aboriginal born in 1936, on a small island in Torres Strait, in the very north-east of Australia. At that time these islands were strictly controlled by the government, and as a teenager Eddie was forced to leave the island for doing something silly. He worked in many places, including as a gardener in a university, where he also read a lot of books and listened to people giving lectures. Here he had a conversation with some university professors, where he talked to them about his island and his people. The professors realized that Eddie thought the land belonged to him. Gently they told him that no, the land was Australia's, because nobody owned that land.

This is to say that the Aboriginal people, who had lived in Australia (and on the Torres Strait Islands) for thousands of years, were considered to be "nobody" and had no right to own any of the land they had lived on. It was known as "terra nullius".

Well, Eddie Mabo was completely shocked by this, and decided to take it to the High Court to challenge this law and win back the land for his people. It took over ten years of legal discussions, and in fact Eddie Mabo died (aged 55) before the High Court finally announced the verdict in 1992: that the Aboriginal people did have "native title" (ownership) and had the right to claim their land.

This legal decision became known simply as "Mabo" or "The Mabo case" and was a historic decision that has opened up new laws which make it possible for Aboriginal people to claim native title in Australia.

You can find out more about him at this site:

http://www.biographybase.com/biography/Mabo_Eddie.html

One other thing that you may not know is that when an Aboriginal person dies, their tradition is to never speak the name of that person again. They consider the name to be finished and it's a way to respect the pain of having lost that person. If anyone else in the town has the same name, they have to change it because it can't be spoken again.

So while white people talk about Eddie Mabo, now that he is dead his name is not spoken by the Aboriginal people. When they refer to this case they call it the Native Title decision.

I've referred to him by name only so that you will know more about him, and because his name is mentioned in the movie "The Castle".

See you tomorrow!