Roy here's your chance to teach us Dominicans that Australia's Whites have NOT done the things the UN and other authorities and experts allege they have done to the Aborigines.

"You [Atabey] dare to compare the treatment of Aborigines with your treatment of Tainos? Aborigines are better off now than they were for 40,000 years. Your ancestors enslaved then exterminated the Tainos. Aborigines were never enslaved, exterminated or children stolen - that's proven to be opportunist mythology. Aborigines and part-Aborigines enjoy many privileges and benefits not available to other Australians. Spend some time in remote communities as I have, then you might discover the reality of the situation."





5 June 2012 Last updated at 20:05 ET


Eddie Mabo, the man who changed Australia

By Duncan Kennedy BBC News, Sydney


Eddie Mabo




People gathered this week in Townsville, Queensland, to remember a seminal moment in the nation's history, and the efforts of one man to bring it about.

Aboriginal Australians are celebrating the 20th anniversary of their landmark victory over land rights.

It was on 3 June 1992 that the Australian High Court overturned more than 200 years of white domination of land ownership.

The victory was largely down to one indigenous man called Eddie Mabo.

That's why the legal decision is universally known as "Mabo".

But who was Eddie Mabo, why did he take up what must have seemed like a hopeless cause and what is the legacy of his campaign?

"Quite simply, Eddie Mabo brought an end to a two-centuries-old lie," says Rachel Perkins, director and inspiration behind the new movie, Mabo, released to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the historic High Court case.

"For two centuries, the British and then white Australians operated under a fallacy, that somehow Aboriginal people did not exist or have land rights before the first settlers arrived in 1788."

The "fallacy" that Perkins speaks of is the concept of Terra Nullius, land belonging to no-one. Concocted by the early settlers, it was used, systematically, cynically and effectively to deprive the indigenous people of their own land.

It was also a flagrant disregard of Britain's own existing laws, which stated that the Aboriginal people did have title rights over their own land.

Yet, the first colonialists decided, for commercial reasons, to ignore all that and peddle the view that Aboriginal people were primitive, disorganised, culture-less creatures who deserved no rights over land.

The assumptions were quite erroneous, of course, but Terra Nullius was set in unshakeable motion and stayed rooted in place for two hundred years, even though Aborigines had been in Australia for at least 40,000 years.

When the decision overturning Terra Nullius eventually came, the judges referred to the policy as "the darkest aspect of (our) national history" and one that left "a legacy of unutterable shame".

“Start Quote

Until Mabo, we had been a forgotten people”

Douglas Bon

It would most likely still be in place had it not been for Eddie Koiki Mabo.

Mabo was a Torres Strait islander from Mer (Murray Island), off Australia's north-east coast.

Born in 1936, Mabo started life like so many other indigenous people, deprived of a meaningful education, denied access to whites-only buses, cinemas, even toilets. This was apartheid in Australia, not South Africa.

He married Bonita, his teenage sweetheart and with whom he had 10 children in a loving partnership that lasted 30 years.

Mabo ended up on the mainland working a number of jobs, including labouring on the railways.

It was during a stint as a gardener at the James Cook University at Townsville in Queensland, that his eyes were opened to the greatest injustice his people had ever been subjected to.

In 1974, he became involved in a discussion with two academics.

He told them of his dream of ending his days on Murray Island, on the ancestral land that had been handed down through his family for 15 generations.

Aborigines in Sydney The debate about Mabo's legacy still goes on today

According to accounts of the conversation, the two scholarly figures looked at each other and then, delicately, told Mabo that he didn't own the land and that it was Crown land.

Mabo expressed disbelief and shock. He's recorded as saying: "No way, it's not theirs, it's ours." But he was wrong.

He was another victim of Terra Nullius, like so many of his fellow indigenous people had been before him. Unlike them, however, Mabo wasn't going to accept it.

At 31, this affrontery became his epiphany. He immediately saw the injustice of it and from then on dedicated his life to reversing it.

"He became a driven man," says his friend and documentary maker, Trevor Graham. "Koiki was ambitious for himself and for his people."

Life of Mabo

Eddie Koiki Malboy born on Murray Island, 1936
Name changed to Mabo when adopted
Became a gardener at James Cook University in Townsville
It was there that he resolved to right the injustice of land rights
Died in Jan 1992
Five months later, the landmark ruling was made in his favour

Mabo gained an education, became an activist for black rights and worked with his community to make sure Aboriginal children had their own schools.

He also co-operated with members of the Communist Party, the only white political party to support Aboriginal campaigns at the time.

Mabo rejected the more militant direct action tactics of the land rights movement, seeing the most important goal as being to destroy the legal justification for what he regarded as land theft.

He petitioned, campaigned, cajoled and questioned Terra Nullius for 18 years.

Then, in June 1992, the years of sacrifice and persuasion came to fruition.

A panel of judges at the High Court ruled that Aboriginal people were the rightful custodians of the land.

The judges satisfied themselves that Aboriginal people had been in Australia first, did have a long, rich culture that denoted civilisation and had voluminous evidence of land demarcation, usage and inheritance, to back up their claims of longevity and history.

But it was a bittersweet moment for the indigenous population.

The man who had engineered the historic change of law, never lived to witness it himself. Mabo died five months earlier from cancer in January 1992, at the age of 55.

Later in 1992, Mabo was posthumously awarded the Australian Human Rights Medal. In 2008, a library at James Cook University was named after him.
The Block, Sydney Many indigenous Australians still live in poverty

Other forms of recognition have been added. But 20 years after the judgement, there's still a debate among constitutionalists, lawyers and politicians about the legacy of Mabo.

It clearly did not, for instance, lead to vast numbers of white Australians being forced from their homes, businesses, mines or farms.

Nor did the judges intend that it should. They ruled that the Mabo decision in no way challenges the legality of non-Aboriginal land tenure.

In fact, the court went to considerable lengths to establish that the impact of its judgment will be minimal on non-Aboriginal Australians.

“Start Quote

The High Court, which is not elected by anybody, not accountable to anybody, had presumed to move into the legislative area to make a whole new law”

Jeff Kennett Victoria state premier

Only land such as vacant crown land, national parks and some leased land, can be subject to claims by the Aboriginal owners.

So, in many ways, the victory has been more symbolic than practical.

But that hasn't stopped indigenous people, like Queensland elder Douglas Bon, taking great satisfaction in the ruling.




"It gave us back our pride. Until Mabo, we had been a forgotten people, even though we knew that we were in the right."

Others, mainly white opponents, regarded the judgement as a mistake.

The former president of Western Australia's Liberal Party, Bill Hassel, said the ruling was greeted with "outrage".

"The High Court, which is not elected by anybody, not accountable to anybody, had presumed to move into the legislative area to make a whole new law," he said.

Some went further, fuelling the hysteria with unsubstantiated claims - Jeff Kennett, then the premier of Victoria, said suburban backyards could be at risk of takeover by Aboriginal people.

Ten years later, he conceded his fears were unfounded.

"I think that like many others, I was trying to deal with something that was new, that was undefined," Kennett told The Age newspaper.

The practical effects of Mabo have, indeed, been mixed, judging by figures from the Koori Mail, a national indigenous-owned newspaper.

Up to April 2010, 84 native title cases had been dealt with by the courts, and 854,000 sq km (330,000 sq miles) is now covered by native title determinations.

But that's just 11% of Australia's land mass. In New South Wales, the most populous state, Aboriginal people have title over only 0.1% of the land.
Map showing land under native title

Les Malezer, chairman of the Foundation for Aboriginal and Islander Research Action, is critical of the native title system for its failure to deliver for indigenous people.

"If Koiki Mabo were alive today he would be an angry man," says Malezer. "The rights he won in the High Court have been eroded away by government, courts and socio-economic pressure."

Others, while acknowledging the shortcomings of Mabo's long-term legacy, still regard it as a watershed moment in Australian political, cultural and economic life.

Rachel Perkins, director of the new film, says Mabo's is "an iconic story in the tradition of great Australian tales, how a man, his wife and his mates profoundly changed the nation".

That is the view most widely endorsed by history.

Eddie Mabo had challenged the very ideological establishment of Australia and the first Australians.

He had refused to surrender his interests, or those of his people, to the domination of others.

He was, if you like, an Australian Nelson Mandela, someone who led his people in a struggle against incalculable odds, to what was rightfully theirs.

Ata, we should never expect Roy-Stone to outer about this

I did asked him the same question for so long time ago I am still waiting for his answer
Roy your are nowhere to be found be once and for all a really Australian

Roystone quips: "Your ancestors enslaved then exterminated the Tainos."

An ignorant statement at best. A flat out lie at worse. Explain, then, Mr. Stone, why there are individuals such as myself walking around with Amerindian genetic markers if our ancestors "exterminated" the Tainos. The Tainos are among our ancestors and that is fact.

"In February 2008, Mr Rudd apologised to Aboriginal people for centuries of injustice, including the "stolen generations" of indigenous children taken from their families and placed in foster care with white families or institutions.

The apology was widely applauded at the time but Mr Rudd's centre-left government has since been criticised for failing to follow up the gesture by improving the live of Aborigines, Australia's most impoverished community."


Not even some of the Whites have been protected:

"Former wards of the state have told of how they were forced into "slave labour", sodomised, starved and beaten during the years they spent in government-run institutions. Many of the British children, sent to Australia between 1920 to 1970 to populate the colony with "good white stock", were put on ships without their parents being informed. Many believed they were orphans, but this was often not true."

I am sure that you all know that there are very few pure aboriginees in Australia ,,they have either mixed with the white population generations ago or have progressively died out .
Yes , originally the aboriginees were decimated by guns and the infections that the white population brought into Australia but that was centuries ago and last century there was an enormous effort by all governments to try to improve the life of the aboriginees but no matter what policy was adopted , they all have failed .It is quite clear that the aboriginees of mixed blood or the pure ones do not want to blend in with the overwhelming majority .Literally billions of dollars have been given to aboriginees for better housing ,better education ,for training in trades but they are a race that seems to be unable to improve itself. They are adicted to alcohol and unhealthy lifestyles and have tempers that when flaired cause much damage to property and to people .
It has been a very sad situation for generations ,At one stage the governments thought that if they sent the aboriginal children to boarding schools or if they lived with a white family , this may introduce a change but years afterwards, they called this incentive ,,the stolen generation . I honestly can believe that the bestthing for the aboriginees is for them is to breed with other races and quickly become a better lot of people ..

I cant believe you actually responded to Roy's assertion with this comment. Im here laughing all over the floor. It is absolutely clear that Taino Indians are extinct, it is also clear they were enslaved. I think the better approach to Roy's comments were to show how aborigines in his country suffered in some way the same treatment, but to say that Tainos are not extinct because a fool like you think you are walking around with their genetic markers is ridiculous.

I see more Dominicans walking around with the genetic markers of African slaves than I do Taino Indians. does this mean African slaves are among your ancestors as well?

Thank you Ricky, for injecting some balance and compassion into this forum.

What many well-meaning people fail to take in to account is the fact that Australian Aborigines are unique, in that they were cut off from the rest of the world, before the dawn of civilization, about 10,000 years ago. They remained stone-age hunters and gatherers. Before European civilization of Australia, they had no agriculture, stored-grain, domesticated animals, permanent dwellings, written language. Despite an area almost as large as Europe, in 40,000 could only sustain a population of a few 100,000, had no concept of the shape or extent of Australia, something like 200 different languages were constantly at war with each other, the flora and fauna.

Successive governments have indeed tried, mostly in vain, to help. The assumption is made that they have the same aspirations as Europeans - a nuclear family, a permanent house and a job, and compliance with a British-based legal system. It just doesn't work, despite the billions of tax-payer funded dollars thrown at it.

Part of the problem is that much of the funding has been creamed-off by those least in need, the "white" Aborigines. By law, if you are 15/16 Caucasian and 1/16 Aborigine, you can call yourself Aborigine and receive all the benefits.

Take a look at:
blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments
/column_white_is_the_new_black

Or the white-skinned, blue-eyed blonde Danie Mellor, winner of Australia’s richest art prize for Aborigines.

http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/all_the_tribe_must_be_white/

"Amerindian genetic markers"? There are also people today (especially amongst Australian Aborigines) with some Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA. Are you saying then that Neanderthals did not die out 20,000 years ago?

My distant ancestors were Homo erectus in Africa, despite the fact they became extinct about 1.3 million years ago.

Get real!

I answered all of tschotschua's questions in earlier posts, many before he even asked, so I won't bother repeating myself here.