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Australia, the revenge of the Aborigines
A historic case began on October 11 at the Federal Court in Perth, Australia. Twenty-seven thousand Aboriginals have joined forces against the government. The prize is an area of almost 200 thousand square kilometers, which includes most of the state of Western Australia including the city of Perth.
The Aborigines – guided by the South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council (SWALC) – are claiming tribal rights on property they consider to be the land of their ancestors. They are members of the Nyoongar tribe, which lived in the area long before the arrival the Europeans in the nineteenth century.
Now they have joined together to fight a collective battle that could bankrupt the government, forcing it to pay many millions of dollars in compensation.
For Vance Hughston, the lawyer for the Aborigines, the key to the case is to demonstrate that there is continuity between the Noongar people of today and those of two centuries ago. “The Noongar people exist”, says the lawyer, “they identify themselves as Noongar, they speak Noongar”.
The history of Western Australia will be called to the witness stand through anthropological evidence and artifacts and also through the testimonies of the Aborigines themselves. In fact, after the first hearing in Perth, the court will make a kind of a tour between the communities of the region, stopping in Jurien, Albany and Kellebrin. For its part the government will present other historical accounts, based on testimonies left by the colonials, according to which there is no continuity between the original peoples and the current ones. So there is potential for a clash between two different versions of history, the indigenous one and the British one.
A similar claim wouldn’t have been possible fifteen years ago. The rights of indigenous peoples on tribal territories were acknowledged for the first time in 1992 when a Supreme Court sentence, the Mabo Act, returned the lands of his ancestors to Eddi Mabo, a Torres Strait Islander. It marked the end of the principle of Terra nullius: Australia had in fact been declared “no man’s land” by the British Empire.
(20/10/2005)
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