Eddie Mabo Case Study

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Eddie Mabo and others claimed variety of declarations about their rights to Murray Islands which was based on local customs and traditional native title. Their legal action actually began in 1982, and lasted for a decade. In 1985, the State of Queensland attempted to prevent the court action by enacting the Queensland Coast Islands Declarations Act 1985 . This Act declared that upon the ‘Island of Torres Strait becoming part of Queensland, had been invested in the Crown, in right of that state, freed from all other rights, interests and claims of any kind whatsoever.’ After the statute was passed, the state of Queensland immediately pleaded it against Eddie Mabo and other Plaintiffs’ in order to extinguish their rights and to deny them any …show more content…
The case also established two basic principles for determining the existence of common law native title. Thus the ‘recognition’ of aboriginal people’s law and customs in relation to the determination , and its twin concept of ‘ extinguishment’ of common law native title. In response to the court hearing Paul Keating the then Prime Minister of Australia, made an apologetic but historic speech in Redfern. The Prime Minister in his address formally acknowledged for the first time in Australian history the huge and deeply damaging impact of white European settlement on indigenous Australians as follows; “More I think than most Australians recognised the right of Aboriginal Australians affects us all…the starting point might be to recognise that the problem starts with us, the non-aboriginal Australians. It begins, I think with an act of recognition, Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing, we who took traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases, the alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practiced discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice, and our failure to imagine these things being done to us. With some noble exception, we failed to make most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds. We failed to ask – how would I feel if this were done to me? As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us. I think we are beginning to see how much we owe the indigenous Australians and how much we have lost by living so
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