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KARA:

Filling in for Ruby Jones, I’m Kara Jensen-Mackinnon. This is 7am.

It’s been over 30 years since the high court acknowledged that terra nullius was a lie, that Australia was not empty – that the Indigenous people had an ongoing claim to the land beneath our feet.

But still today, officially, large stretches of Australia are held as what’s called ‘crown land’.

What is crown land? And what do the assumptions about it say about the attitudes to land ownership in modern Australia?

Today, author and Noongar woman, Claire G. Coleman on the case for returning crown land.

It’s Thursday, January 26.

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Archival tape -- Invasion Day Rally - Always Was Always Will Be chant.

KARA:

Claire, I want to start by talking about a rally cry. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land. It's something that you hear a lot at the protests that will be happening around the country today and I wonder what that chant really means to you.

CLAIRE:

Well, it's funny cause it's got exactly what you need from a protest chant. It's rhythmic, it's easy to remember. It's catchy. It's like a catchy rock song. It gets stuck in your head and it gets stuck in your head all the time. And it's simple to understand, the idea that this always was Aboriginal land.

That's exactly what the Mabo decision was, that Australia always was and always will be Aboriginal land.

Archival tape -- Invasion Day Rally - Always Was Always Will Be chant.

CLAIRE:

Of all the political chants in the Australian land rights movement, it’s probably the one that's most enduring. We stick with it, we remember it, we keep going with that one all the time. Unfortunately, and there is an unfortunate thing about it.

I think by repetition, it's become a bit of just lip service, it’s lost a bit of its meaning. You sit down and you say a word enough times. You can say a word until it loses its meaning.

And what it means is that even when our land rights have been erased, it doesn’t erase our cultural connection to this land. So they are true statements that this always was and always will be Aboriginal land, absolutely true. But I think people are chanting it without knowing what it means.

Archival tape -- Protest Speaker:

“We’ve been renting for too long, we should be owning our land but we’re renting on our own country. How long are we going to keep renting for? We don’t own our land. That’s got to change. We want our land back. We’ve already got rights to our land, but we don’t own it.”

KARA:

Yeah, and I guess January 26 obviously has always represented a day of mourning for Indigenous people. And it feels kind of like after decades of stagnation, we're slowly witnessing a little bit of a shift in the way this day is framed politically and socially. Later this year, for instance, we’ll be headed to the polls to vote in a referendum for an Indigenous voice to parliament. And I suppose while the shift towards truth telling and recognition is a positive one, there are some important issues that aren't being addressed, namely land rights. And so I wonder how you reflect on that being left out of the conversation the country is having right now.

CLAIRE:

The discussion around the voice referendum and the government pushing for voice has been incredibly complicated and fought for a couple of years now.

The Uluru statement and Voice treaty truth ignores the land rights battle that's been ongoing for a long time. And the thing about land rights, which both people don't realise and they say that 50% of Australia is Indigenous land, but so ignore the fact that all that Indigenous land is essentially in the parts of the Australian outback that the colonial government has no interest in using. And ignores for example, my people, the Noongar people of the south west of WA, our land is contained within Perth and most of the arable parts of Western Australia, the parts that colonial governments have considered useful. So any attempt by my people to claim our land rights have been fought tooth and nail by the government, and they will fight us to the very end because although they're happy to give Indigenous people our land back, they're not happy to give us our land back when they think it might be of use at some point of the colonial government. And that kind of thinking around land rights is counterproductive to the idea of land rights. And I think that's something that while not necessarily has to be addressed first, I think it's something we should stop ignoring.

KARA:

And I suppose to understand why land rights are so important, we need to go all the way back to the Mabo decision back in the High Court in 1992, which recognised that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have rights to the land, rights obviously that existed far before the British arrived and which still exists today. So, can we go back and can you tell me a little bit about that important moment in history?

CLAIRE:

I feel it’s necessary to point this out, that I’m not a lawyer, or a politician. But the point of the Mabo decision was, that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have an ongoing cultural connection to the ancestral lands that we have always lived on. And that arrival of the British settlers on our land in 1788 did not erase those connections. Now that sounds like a kind of fairly simple statement to make that we were here and that arrival of the colonisers didn't erase our existence. But you've got to remember that until 1992, the assumption of Australian laws of the land here was virgin soil that anyone who claims it can claim, in theory. And the assumption was that when Commodore Phillip landed on Australia and raised the flag and became the first governor, the Aboriginal connection to land was erased, if there was any. And that the land became essentially the sovereign land of the British Crown to hand out or distribute as the Crown saw fit.

KARA:

And Claire thinking back, what was it actually like at the time being there? How was this decision framed on television by the media? What were the politicians saying at the time?

CLAIRE:

Yeah, I did give thought, it was 1992, but I was 18. So, of course, most 18 year olds have other things on their minds. But I remember, particularly in Western Australia, which is where I grew up and where I was living at the time, the response by the media was a whole bunch of scare articles and things like on 60 Minutes and whatever these current affair shows were like Today Tonight and all those shows. I can’t remember which shows they were but, like…

The Mabo decision is your backyard in danger!

…all this aimed at white landowners telling that if they don't resist the Mabo decision, Aboriginal people are going to come and steal their land.

Archival tape -- Bill Hassell:

“Mabo to me is ultimately as bad as I see it to be because of its potential to destroy our society.”

Archival tape -- Hugh Morgan:

“The economic and political future of Australia has been put at risk and our territorial integrity..”

Archival tape -- Talkback:

“The mining industry is absolutely horrified about the prospects following the now famous, some say infamous, Mabo decision which could give Aboriginal people land rights all over the countryside in a lot of mining areas as well. Why don't you just…”

CLAIRE:

Of course this never happened, and the resistance by the White government was profound, even though the Mabo decision did state that it would not be right to give back land that had been purchased since colonisation to the traditional owners.

Archival tape -- Jeff Kennett:

“It's not only every lease, it's every property in Australia that could be at risk.”

CLAIRE:

And of course, it doesn't matter how strong your native title claim is, there's no way to claim anyone's backyard or steal someone's house.

But that's how the media has always presented the Mabo decision that, if you're not careful, Aboriginal people come and steal your house.

That's nothing but racist scaremongering, an attempt to undermine what is essentially a process that is designed to prevent land rights claims. People think that land rights claims are easy, but in reality the system has been set up to make it as hard as possible for land rights claims to succeed.

KARA:

We’ll be back after this.

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KARA:

Claire, you’ve been talking about people’s misconceptions about where land rights really are at right now in Australia. So, can you tell me a bit about the kinds of things we’ve seen play out, following the Mabo decision, for people as they’ve tried to make claims under the native title system?

CLAIRE:

We're talking about a system where rather than a conciliatory system where the government goes in and tries to find out who the traditional owners are, so the land can be handed back, it's more like a case of some issue of a land rights claim, and the government spend millions of dollars on high powered lawyers to try and stop it from happening. It's kind of the exact opposite of what you think would happen, it’s the exact opposite of this idea that once you have a land rights claim, you'll just take the land because it very rarely fails.

The Hindmarsh Island was quite a famous case where the traditional owners were trying to stop a bridge being built across the Murray River from what's now a place now called Goolwa to Hindmarsh Island. There was no reason for traditional owners to lie about this issue. All they said was that there should not be a bridge. There was already a ferry, incidentally, where you could cross to Hindmarsh Island, but that was too slow for the wealthy people who lived there. So the government decided to build a bridge and the land rights claim was that it's a sacred site for women and that a bridge across the river at that point would actually permanently harm the soul of the people, which the government refused to acknowledge and actually fought against in court.

That was in 1994, a couple of years after Mabo, and a few years later the courts looked into it, discovered the sacred women business was true. No one was lying about their cultural connection to that land and that ignoring those land rights claims was actually the wrong thing to do. And yet it was already too late, the bridge had been built.

So, John Howard passed a special law to prevent the land rights claim on that site so that the bridge could go ahead.

The adversarial land right system has caused heartbreak, when surely the Mabo decision claims that will suggest that land rights claims should take precedence over development claims because it suggests that the Indigenous people were indeed on the land first.

KARA:

Yeah, and when we talk about the system it’s hard I guess not to talk about the huge amounts of land that are legally held as so-called crown land. And under the current system that we've got, under native title, it works by Indigenous people needing to prove their connection to the land to make a claim on that crown land. And you say that really that should be reversed, that the Crown should have to justify why they're entitled to that land. So, do you think you could elaborate a little bit on that, please?

CLAIRE:

Absolutely. Well, the Mabo decision was quite clear, although it didn't use the term ‘crown land’ when talking about these issues. The court that set down the Mabo decision did state that all land except where native title has been specifically extinguished by the land haven't been put to use is Aboriginal land. Okay, there's more than one type of crown land. One category of crown land is land that belongs to the government because it has not yet been put to some other purpose. Road reserves are crown land, the side of the highway is crown land in theory. Riverbanks are crown land. There's a few other examples where the crown land has a purpose as being set aside as a crown reserve and has been reserved for public use or whatever, which is still considered crown land. But the vast majority of crown land is land that is claimed by the government but has not yet been put to a purpose. And this is land that they, for example, they’ll sell to people for new developments, they use to gazette new towns, if they want to build a new town somewhere. They allow mining on it, they lease it as agricultural or pastoral leases. There’s all these uses of land as ‘port’ - that’s land that, according to the law, belongs to the crown, belongs to the crown but is administered by the state or federal government.

So there will always be people out there who believe that any land rights claim is just Aboriginal people trying to get land without paying for it, ignoring the fact that the current system of land in Australia is the non-Indigenous government getting land without paying for it.

There are people out there who are ready to have that conversation, and this discussion’s been, that is a very good point, “why hasn't crown land been handed back?” had been a common discussion. On the other hand, I remember watching on television a couple of years ago when the Djab Wurrung trees were on the news, white people from the area screaming to the camera that Aboriginal people just want something for nothing.

How people react to this issue will depend entirely on their political maturity and understanding Aboriginal land rights politics. And there's certainly a large number of people in our society, some of them quite racist, who are not ready to accept the idea that the land is not theirs to keep or give away. The land actually belongs to the Aboriginal people. The correct and non-racist thing to do would be to hand back all the crown land.

KARA:

And finally, Claire, are you optimistic or are you pessimistic? Do you think that Australians are even ready to kind of grapple with those sorts of conversations? Do you think they'll ever be ready?

CLAIRE:

It's my considered opinion in almost any field of human endeavour that pessimism is a natural way to look at everything. The world can always and often will always get worse. And I think that's the same with land rights, I think. I'm not optimistic at all about land rights or the voice or even the ability of Indigenous people to stop fighting amongst ourselves. You know what? The idea that we should be some homogenous culture that never argues about politics amongst ourselves is a bit of a kind of racist way of thinking.

We are people the same as any other people, and we are allowed to fight amongst ourselves. But I'm not really optimistic they will stop fighting. I'm not optimistic about the voice and I'm certainly not optimistic about land rights. And I'm a natural pessimist. But I believe in hope. Because without hope, there's no reason to keep resisting. If you're optimistic, you believe everything will be okay, that everything is going to come together. Because if you're pessimistic, you believe everything is going to go to shit. But if you’re a pessimist who’s hopeful, you know everything is going to go to shit but you really hope you're wrong and you've got something to fight for. You can fight for this notion that you might be wrong and that you can fight and succeed and change things. So that's my stance on land rights as well, that I believe it's all going to go terribly. But I really hope I'm wrong.

KARA:

Claire, thank you so much for your time.

CLAIRE:

Not a problem at all. Thank you very much.

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KARA:

Also in the news today,

Inflation has reached new heights in Australia, reaching 7.8% in the year to December.

According to the index, food and housing costs alone have risen by around 10%. The findings prompt speculation the RBA will yet again raise the Reserve Bank interest rate next month.

And rumours that Kanye West could be about to visit Australia have led Education Minister Jason Clare to say the artist could be denied a visa to enter the country.

Ye, whose anti-semitic views proved too shocking even for renowned conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, could be planning a visit after his recent marriage to Australian architectural designer Bianca Censori.

If he is denied entry, Ye will find himself alongside extreme right figures David Icke and Milo Yiannopolous, who have also been refused visas.

I’m Kara Jensen-Mackinnon, this is 7am, see you tomorrow.

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