Pitfalls and Pipelines - Philippine Indigenous Peoples Links

148 Pitfalls and Pipelines: Indigenous Peoples and Extractive Industries
Australia—After the Mabo Decision
By Brian Wyatt, National Native Title Council
You have turned our land into a desolate place.
We stumble along with a half white mind.
Where are we?
What are we?
Not a recognised race.
There is a desert ahead and a desert behind.
…
The tribes are all gone,
The spears are all broken;
Once we had bread here
You gave us stone (p.109)
- Jack Davis, 1992
The Dreamers 32
The High Court’s decision in the Mabo case…has determined
that Australian law should not…be ‘frozen in an era of racial
discrimination.’ Its decision in the Mabo case ended the pernicious
legal deceit of terra nullius for all of Australia—and for all time.
The court described the situation faced by Aboriginal people after
European settlement. The court saw a ‘conflagration of oppression
and conflict, which was, over the following century, to spread
across the continent to dispossess, degrade and devastate the
Aboriginal people.’ They faced ‘deprivation of the religious, cultural
and economic sustenance which the land provides’ and were left as
‘intruders in their own homes.’
- Paul Keating, Australian Prime Minister (1991 to 1996) 33
Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have been fighting
for land justice in Australia since colonization. Our nation’s narrative
has been full of twists and turns that includes many dark and shameful
chapters, not the least of which being the systematic dispossession of
Aboriginal people from their land. It is only in the last two decades, since
the Mabo High Court decision, that Australia has really begun to address
this travesty, but many of the positive changes, through legislation as well
as national debate, have been marred by undue government tinkering and