Aboriginal Land Rights Report

Hello and welcome to ST Leo’s justice group my name is charbel saliba and I will be talking to you about aboriginal dreaming and land rights. The quote I said earlier was a spiritual view of life based on the dreaming which cannot be separated from the land; that is why the aboriginal people’s connection towards the land is inexorable. The two are intertwined; to separate them would be impossible, one would not work without the other thus they are just as important. The land is used as a physical link between human beings and all that is unseen and eternal. It creates a

Under the ‘terra nullius’ law, the Aboriginals lost their land, which is now known as dispossession. To justify this dispossession, the English followed the set of beliefs that are now identified as social Darwinism. “Social Darwinism, with its powerful racially based doctrines, ranked Indigenous Australians as inferior to Europeans and provided a rationale for dispossession by drawing on the ‘laws’ of natural selection to justify the ‘inevitable’ extinction of Indigenous Australians in the face of the arrival of the ‘superior’ white race” (Psychology and Indigenous Australians, Foundations of Cultural Competence, 2009, pp. 75). By having their land taken away from them, the Aboriginals lost part of their spiritual connection and their sense of belonging and identity because Aboriginal culture is based heavily on the spirits of the land. These connections that bonded the Aboriginals to the land were never understood by the English settlers, who only saw the land as possible income (Psychology and Indigenous Australians, Foundations of Cultural Competence, 2009.). They also lost a lot of their sacred areas, spiritual areas and meeting places because they were on the land that the white people had divided and fenced of the land that these areas were on and if an Aboriginal was trying to

Aboriginal people struggled to uphold their traditional customs and rituals as they did not have the rights and access to their own land prior to and post federation in 1901. Healey ed. (2002), experienced editor and author states, when the British settlers arrived they overlooked the fact that Aboriginal people claimed and were sustaining the land of Australia. Britain had declared Terra Nullius despite their knowledge of the inhabitants of the land, the traditional owners. Throughout settlement, policies were put in place by the colonists to minimise land used for spiritual reasons by Aboriginal Australians (Korff, 2016). Hillman (2001), educator and author, infers that with this their culture was dramastically changed. Aboriginal people fought back for their rightful land, but their protests were insignificant

When European colonists settled in Australia they treated the Aboriginal people extremely different to that of their fellow white men. The Aboriginals were not seen as first class citizens through the European eye and as a result were victims of extreme oppressions and had nearly no rights or freedoms. Since then Aboriginal people have fought to be treated equally to the white men through various different ways. I will discuss the previous struggles faced by the Aboriginals, the Australian strife for equality and finally the level of success and degree of rights and freedoms given to Aboriginals in modern Australia.

Aboriginal religion is based on land. Land is the heart of Aboriginal Dreaming and provides the assurance needed for the continuation of rituals and ceremonies (king, 2010, p.213). The effect of Dispossession on Aboriginal spiritualities related to the separation from their land was enormous and overwhelmingly detrimental.

The land is the centre of aboriginal spirituality, it is the core of their religion. The land is the people and the people are the land. The land is where they believe the ancestors are. To aboriginals their “god” is not one singular god up in the sky but many ancestors that are part of the earth and formed and are part of everything natural that is seen today. They believe that the ancestors came through the earth

Aboriginals believe that they own the land only inasmuch as the land owns them. "The sacred myths were like a title to land, a charter to ownership...even less sacred stories contained this message...as a local, territorial centredness, a territorial focus." (Saxby, 1979, p.146). Aboriginal myths connected the people to the land, and the land to the people. This was a view that was alien to the European colonisers of Australia, who did not understand the Aboriginals ' connection to the land, and the vital importance it had for all tribes.

Eddie Mabo was a revolutionary figure in the rights of Australia’s Indigenous people. With the introduction of white people to Australia in 1788, they followed the idea of terra nullius which was a Latin term meaning ‘land belonging to no one’. The white settlers ripped the Indigenous people’s land from under their feet therein making the original Australians a displaced group of people. Mabo’s court case enabled the Aboriginal people to have ownership of their own land. By taking the request for land rights to the High Court of Australia, Eddie Mabo brought the plight of the landless Indigenous people into the public spotlight.

Dockery (2010), points out that the effects of dispossession on the Aboriginal people have been overwhelmingly detrimental. The loss of land has destroyed cultural significance and the ability to fulfill their spiritual responsibilities has been lost.

285). The notion of not being conquered implies, that the early European colonists and ancestors of the current Aboriginal people had established means for a harmonious life between the two, one that would allow the Aboriginal people to continue their traditional lifestyle, while allowing the colonists to make a new life on their land. That is to say, the land was not taken by force or otherwise from the Aboriginal people. The colonists and Aboriginal people had established their friendly occupation of the land by means of creating many various Aboriginal and treaty rights (pg. 288) that would allow them to sustain their ways of life and to govern

Land was a common resource village leaders could assign to families to live on but not to own. Indians believed that the land was common to everyone and can’t be sold because it doesn’t belong to anyone. Black Hawk, a leader of the Sauk Tribe, said, “The Great Spirit gave it to his children to live upon and cultivate as far as necessary for their subsistence, and so long as they occupy and cultivate it they have the right to the soil”.

Back in time the indian people were the first nation people to arrive on his land, some aboriginals entered into a treaty negotiation in the late nineteenth centry because they were told they will be given specific amonts of land which in their view was known as the promise land. The promise for the “Promise land” was not kept rather it was a profound and dispossession time for the aboriginal people because, the land they were promised were rendered to other immigrants. “ aboriginals needs to understand that everything the whites have done was for their own good” this statement is harsh but true what the white people did was better then what the aboriginals could have done. We all agree that the aboriginal people were here before the white

Aborigines are believed to have lived in Australia for between 60,000 and 40,000 years, their early ancestors coming from South-East Asia. Precise population details for the period before European colonisation are unavailable, but it is estimated that there were between 300,000 and 1,000,000 Aborigines in Australia when European settlers first arrived in 1788.

For over 200 years Aborigines have endured a long history of suffering due to the unpropitious effects of internationalism and western colonization; in Europeans attempt for cultural assimilation and taking their land to which has caused catastrophic consequences within individuals and the community as a whole by

Australian Aborigines believe that to destroy or damage a sacred site threatens not only the present inhabitants but also the spiritual inhabitants of the land. Broome described that "Each tribe believed that its boundaries were fixed and validated by the stories about the movements of their ancestors, and therefore there was no reason to desire or try to possess the country of another group: it would have seemed meaningless to them since their creation stories only related to their own piece of territory" (14). Australian Aborigines traveled around a land that was a symbolic and religious world. There were not simply rocks, trees, and watering holes but they were objects and places that the great ancestors had created and places where they still lived. The Aboriginal culture stressed continuity over change.