Campaigning for Land Rights

The South Coast Elders who were prominently active in the Land Rights campaigns included Gubbu Ted Thomas from Wallaga Lake. He was joined by Jacko Campbell, who had married Nan Connolly and lived with her on her country at Roseby Park for many years. Jacko was a Danghadi man from Bellbrook reserve at Kempsey. When the Protection Board threatened to take her children away, Jacko’s mother fired a shotgun over the Board Inspector’s head and then escaped with her family along the coast to Sydney. Kevin Cook had grown up around Wollongong and was close to both older men, supporting them as they campaigned to protect of important places like Mumbulla Mountain, inland from Wallaga Lake. There were land activists in each of the regions of NSW, like Clive Williams from Tabulum, Auntie Millie Boyd at Woodenbong and Julie Whitton at Boggabilla, Phoebe Mumbler and Jessie Williams at Nambucca, as well as Tartu (Will Webster), Alice Bugme and Dorrie Hunter at Wilcannia and many others.

But they were not in touch with each other, because they mainly circulated and found support in regional networks relating to culture and language, rather than in the borders of white Australian states and electorates. 

And few people in NSW were in touch with those in northern Australia – although they had been watching the progress of the Northern Territory Land Rights Act. The remote areas of northern Australia had been less impacted by heavy settler activity than those in the south east of the continent, so Aboriginal people in NSW, Victoria and southern Queensland had faced more disruption and dispossession for longer than those in Central Australia. So some of the models for the NT Land Rights act, like ‘traditional ownership’, were more difficult to implement in the heavier settled areas. Even in the Northern Territory, this model had failed to recognise the land rights of some (like those at Boorooloola). So while people in south eastern Australia wanted to strengthen traditional cultural expression including language along with rights to land, there was some caution about aspects of ‘traditional ownership’ as a key component of justice over land.  One of the few places which did have links with remote northern Australia was Tranby – with its early links with cooperatives in North Queensland, its links with the independent Indigenous-led education providers IAD and Yipirinya in NT and Strelley in the Pilbara and, through unions, with the striking Gurindji stockmen at Wave Hill. Some IAD, Yipirinya, Strelley and Gurinjdi pix

Pressure in NSW intensified when the initiative was taken, as has often been the case, by local communities. After watching the NT process of communities explaining their connections to land with a formal claim, NSW communities had begun expressing their interests in land in the same way. The first group to do this was the network of Gamilaraay people with a relationship to what had been the Aboriginal managed reserve at Terry Hie Hie, south-east of Moree. They had been forced away from the land but in May 1977, led by community elder Walter Duncan, they came together to demand that the Reserve be restored to them, as the first step in a recognition of their ownership over a wider area of land to which they had traditionally held the custodial rights. Their letter with documents supporting their claim was widely passed around among Aboriginal people, who were starting to consider how they too could make a claim on the land that was important to them. Barely two months later, in July 1977, the Minister for Lands, W.F. Crabtree, wrote to the community and rejected their claim outright, saying that the current non-Aboriginal leaseholders refused to relinquish their lease in favour of the Terry Hie Hie community.

Later that year, in October 1977, the Black Defence Group (led Marcia Langton, with Kevin Cook and Bob Bellear, as well as non-Aboriginal supporters from TUCAR Rod Pickette and Meredith Burgmann and others like journalist Toni Smith and doctor Paul Torzillo), organised a conference in Sydney on the October Long Weekend, the same weekend as the Football Knockout was held in Sydney. Aboriginal people from across NSW – and their community Rugby League teams – were all in Sydney so it was a perfect time for people to get together. The outcome was the Aboriginal Land Council an activist organisation formed by the community leaders from across NSW.  This community-led, independent fighting organisation led the campaign for land rights from 1977 until these rights were finally recognised in law. When the State Government passed its 1983 Land Rights Act, it acknowledged the key role of this earlier independent organisation by naming the bodies in its three-tiered structure as Local, Regional and State Aboriginal Land Councils.

→ Read ‘A Modern Day Corroboree: Towards a History of the New South Wales Aboriginal Rugby League Knockout’ Heidi Norman 2006

Supporters

These Aboriginal activists were supported by a number of non-Aboriginal activists. As well as the TUCAR group, some were lawyers like Peter Tobin, who as a law student had travelled around rural NSW, talking with many Aboriginal activists. To support them, in 1972 Peter published Aboriginal land rights in N.S.W.: demands, law and policy in 1972. He became the first lawyer in an office outside of Sydney, starting work as the ALS lawyer in Brewarrina under the direction of Field Officers Tombo Winters (in Brewarrina), George Rose (in Walgett) and William Bates in Wilcannia.

In Sydney, Kaye Bellear was an active presence across Aboriginal politics, at the same time constantly supporting her husband Bob through his legal studies and later judicial career. In union and ALP mobilisations, Meredith Burgmann played a long-term role to support Aboriginal political and cultural demands. Terry Fox, an activist, former priest and in later years a sculptor, accompanied Percy Mumbulla, Ted Thomas and Jacko Campbell on their many travels, offering transport, advice and carefully documenting their work in his 1997 book with Lee Chittick, Travelling with Percy: A South Coast Journey. Grace O’Clerkin, originally from Charters Towers in Queensland, was a singer and songwriter who had lived with her Irish husband Con in Erskineville since 1947, supporting emerging Aboriginal singers like Jimmy Little, Olive McGuinness and Eva Bell. After Grace’s death in 1964, Con worked closely with Pastor Frank Roberts, the Bandjalang leader from Cabbage Tree Island near Lismore. Pastor Roberts had founded the Aboriginal Lands and Rights Council in 1970 and travelled widely to promote it. Con drove Pastor Frank around for many years before he moved to the South Coast, where he supported the land rights campaigners there.

Another former priest was Dick Buchhorn at Boggabilla in the north of the state. Dick later married Lilla Watson, a Queensland Murri activist and was a long-time supporter of land campaigns on both sides of the border formed by the McIntyre River. He researched in particular the early history of settler massacres of Murris along the north western rivers. 

Linguist and archaeologist Peter Thompson, another non-Aboriginal man married into the Aboriginal community, was a key figure in supporting the continued active use of Gamilaraay (at Boggabilla) and Barkantji (at Wilcannia and along the Darling River). He contributed to extensive research into Indigenous rights to and claims over land across western NSW. His commitment to supporting Indigenous control of land was fired not only by his intense conviction that this was justice but by his belief in the need to repair the environmental damage done by white settlement to fragile environments which had been managed sustainably over millenia by Aboriginal owners. All his life he was a dedicated campaigner for environmental justice and in his later years could often be found on picket lines and blockades to stop fracking and deforestation in the north west of NSW. 

Anthropologist David Morrissey was another important non-Aboriginal campaigner from the mid 1970s. He taught at Tranby and established the Land Rights Support Group there, in 1978, through which non-Indigenous supporters could contribute to the extensive work needed to build the broad support needed to push through substantive reforms. David Morrisey supported Phoebe Mumbler and Jessie Williams to research and lodge a land claim over Stewart Island in the Nambucca River on the north coast of NSW, adding still further to the body of land claims emerging across the state.

NSW Land Claims

The Black Defence Group pressured the NSW Australian Labor Party (ALP) to commit to the implementation of Land Rights at its Annual Conference in 1978. Bob Bellear, then studying law, widely respected among the ALP members and later to be chair of the Tranby Cooperative Board, moved the successful motion to embed Aboriginal Land Rights in the party platform. So the ALP, which had come to State government in 1976, was compelled by its own platform to act. Premier Neville Wran established a Select Committee in 1978 to inquire into a number of Aboriginal concerns, one of which was land. 

Soon after, land claims were lodged by communities from across the state: the Jerringa at Roseby Park in February 1978, the Yuin at Wallaga Lake, in June 1978, then the Barkandji at Wilcannia, then the people of La Perouse, and onwards, including Warangesda, Bodalla, Toomelah, Stewart Island at Nambucca Heads, Bourke and Brewarrina.

The Land Rights Support Group and the campaigning organisation, the NSW Aboriginal Land Council, republished the early Land Claims. The book included claims from Terry Hie Hie, Roseby Park, Wallaga Lake, Wilcannia, La Perouse, Warangesda, Bodalla, Toomelah, Bourke and Brewarrina. 

After this further Aboriginal pressure, the Select Committee was instructed to report first on land – and to inquire not into whether to grant Land Rights but instead on how to implement Land Rights.

The Federation of Land Councils – across Australia 

Land Rights activists in NSW - and particularly those at Tranby - had been in close touch with the Land Councils in the Northern Territory, who were threatened with losing any chance at Land Rights when the Whitlam Government was sacked in 1975. A watered-down version of the NT Land Rights Act was passed by the Fraser Government and the NSW land rights movement had supported the Northern Territory land councils to make it as strong as possible. When the Federation of Land Councils was formed in 1980, as a fighting coalition of all the Land Councils in Australia, the independent NSW Aboriginal Land Council had been a key member and continued this association into the following years. 

NSW Select Committee Reports: August 1980

After hearing evidence from these and many other communities, the Select Committee’s first report, tabled in August 1980, was focussed on land and it was met with a huge crowd of Aboriginal people and supporters blocking Macquarie St outside Parliament House, demanding immediate land rights.

The Committee’s recommendations were rapidly turned into draft legislation, in a process shrouded in secrecy at the time inside the Government and office of Frank Walker.  Many years later, Walker, a senior minister in the Wran Government and the driving Parliamentary force behind the Bill, explained these internal negotiations – which saw strong opposition coming from right-wing and rural ALP members, hostile local governments and from the National Parks and Wildlife Service, who saw Aboriginal people as undermining its conservation goals. 

The Green Paper 

The draft was then circulated widely for public discussion as a ‘Green Paper’. This draft had left out some important things – there was, for example, no exemption from Land Tax for Aboriginal people. Nevertheless, there were many aspects of the draft that were widely welcomed: any Crown Land that was vacant was available to be claimed, and the grounds for claim were wide. Aboriginal people could claim land on the basis of economic and cultural needs, on the basis of long-term association, on the grounds of traditional rights and for compensation for the damage done to their communities from dispossession and exploitation. In a state where so much land had already been alienated by sale or lease and so was no longer available to claim, there was at least a substantial funding source – 7.5% of Land Tax annually for 15 years – half to be placed in an investment fund and the other half to be divided between the Locals, with which Aboriginal people could purchase land. The funding had a ‘sunset clause’ – it would cease after 15 years, by which time the Investment fund was expected to allow an ongoing funding stream.

The draft Bill, like the Select Committee Report, acknowledged Indigenous means of decision-making within cultural and language areas with its ‘Three-Tiered Structure’. Land was to be held in perpetuity by Local Aboriginal Land Councils (LALCs) which were to be made up of all Aboriginal people living within the LALC boundary. The LALCs were to be grouped within Regions, which were to be based on language areas and made up of representatives of the LALCs. The Regional Land Councils (RALCs) would receive the funds each year and would then disburse them to the LALCs. It would be the Regional Councils which would be the major decision-making forums about land purchases through discussion among LALC representatives. The NSW Aboriginal Land Council (NSWALC), made up of two representatives from each Regional Council, was to be no more than a forum to share information about and give support to the decisions made at Regional and Local Level.

Aboriginal determination to have their rights to land restored were displayed in many marches and demonstrations over this period, all aimed at ensuring the Government acted on the Land Rights Green Paper. There was great support from civil society groups and religious bodies, including the Quakers and the Catholic Church in particular. The newly formed TUCAR mobilised wide union support which was an important way to lobby a Labor Party government. Significantly, the Land Rights movement won crucial backing from right-wing unionists like Charlie Oliver, head of the powerful AWU, with whom Kevin, despite his own left-wing affiliation, had built up a strong personal relationship.

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LINKS

→ Heidi Norman 2015 What do we want?’: A political history of Aboriginal land rights in New South Wales Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra. Read an extract - Chapter 7 [PDF 170KB]

→ Heidi Norman, 2006: ‘A Modern Day Corroboree: Towards a History of the New South Wales Aboriginal Rugby League Knockout’. Aboriginal History 30, no. 1 (2006): 169– 86

→ Heather Goodall 2008 Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770–1972, 1770–1972

→ Heather Goodall 1990 ‘Land in our own country', published in Aboriginal History, vol 14 [PDF 1.9MB]