More than 40 years on, the NSW Aboriginal Land Rights Act speaks to an enduring desire for a strong future
- Written by: Lawrence Bamblett, Senior Lecturer, Australian Centre for Indigenous History, Australian National University
Land Back, a collection of essays edited by Gomeroi professor Heidi Norman, marks over 40 years of the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1983, New South Wales.
The act had a pervasive effect on daily living for Kooris in New South Wales. It established local Aboriginal land councils, setting out their constitutions, membership rules and functions. It established the rules relating to the authority, functions and powers of local land councils and their staff and leadership.
Land Back: Aboriginal Land Rights in New South Wales, Today and Always – edited by Heidi Norman (UNSW Press)
At Erambie Mission near Cowra, the act guided the community in creating and operating small businesses, a community housing company, and cultural organisations.
The Land Rights Act was created at a time when my community at Erambie was buzzing with ideas and disagreements about what to do in the economic and cultural fields. The community won some land back and people were politicking, managing, budgeting, employing, planning and making important decisions about the future.
This is why most families there kept a printed copy of the act. Some people even memorised every section of it. They recalled its statutes during internal community politics and when dealing with mainstream agencies.
It was impressive how some community members would quote from memory relevant sections of the act. The way they spoke about it, the act seemed to come to life in people’s minds as the arbiter of fairness. They would say “the act says” what you can or can’t do.
Even as a mostly disinterested teenager, I was aware of the act and its involvement in our daily lives. My parents kept two bound copies of the act in our lounge room. They studied and discussed it with people from the community. I have vivid memories of the meetings my parents hosted in our lounge room to talk about land rights generally and specific parts of the legislation.
Every day they talked about what a free and fair life was supposed to be like under the act.
This collection tells people so much about life in a range of NSW Koori communities. One of the impressive things about the book is how well it shows the reach of the act and the impact land rights had on people’s lives.
Lawyers, academics, activists and organisers, NSW Aboriginal Land Council Youth Committee members and students were invited to reflect on four decades of operation of the act and to nominate opportunities created by land rights.
Their accounts are organised around four themes: how laws function, what people did to make the act work, the things that are still left to do, and future directions for land rights and the act.
The book adds new knowledge about land rights by documenting the experiences of Kooris in the south-eastern part of the continent. People from dozens of Koori communities have shared more than 42 years of the successes, failures and possibilities for land rights in NSW.
The successes were built on the back of a rights movement which, as Ed Wensing notes in his chapter, used decades of protests and street marches to have the Aborigines Protection Act (1909) repealed and the Aborigines Welfare Board disbanded.
There were significant changes after the colonial welfare system was dismantled. The Land Rights Act included an imperative to support Indigenous economic development, along with the right to apply to have “claimable crown lands” returned to clans and used for economic benefit. A land purchase fund complimented access to crown lands.
A contribution from the late Peter Thompson, an environmentalist and land rights activist, argues that one of the failures of the act is that much more land should have been returned. According to Thompson,
The Act could easily have returned over one million hectares if funds had been spent on the core purpose of the Act […] Sadly, and shamefully, we might have to admit that the Aborigines’ Protection Board (APB) made the greatest contribution to land rights in NSW. Most of the parcels of land that Aboriginal people are enjoying in NSW today were set aside by the racist, paternalistic APB (as reserves and managed stations).
Still, communities took back the right to manage and protect their own cultural heritage in ways they saw fit. At Erambie, the returned land was used to raise cattle, grow and sell crops, and build infrastructure for creating employment.
