I like poetry. I like words.
I want to begin by honouring and quoting the words of the now late chief justice of the High Court of Australia, Sir Gerard Brennan, the words he wrote in his lead judgement in the Mabo case:
“The common law itself took from Indigenous inhabitants any right to occupy their traditional land, exposed them to deprivation of the religious, cultural and economic sustenance which the land provides, vested the land effectively in the control of the imperial authorities without any right to compensation and made the Indigenous inhabitants intruders in their own homes and mendicants for a place to live. Judged by any civilised standard, such a law is unjust …"
The words are carefully chosen to sit alongside each other with just the right length and the right tone, each one setting up the other and chosen for both meaning and music. I like how the words create a rhythm.
They can raise us to anger — then soothe us. Love, kindness, forgiveness; always love.
Love, suffering, hope, justice and truth
Eddie Mabo knew about love too. He knew about suffering. He knew about hope and he knew about justice. And he knew truth.
The truth: This was his land. This is our land. This will always be our land.
Truth.
And he was right. As much as Australia’s law tried to tell him he was wrong, he knew his law and he knew that even the law of Britain that had stolen this land had to admit — finally admit — what we all knew, what Eddie Mabo knew.
This was not empty land. This was our land.
Words.
I like words. Words speak across tongues. Across language itself.
Words like han. Han is Korean and it is more than a word. It is a feeling. It is lament. It is sadness beyond the word sadness itself.
Han.
Our people know han. We know sadness. Our land sings gently a song of sadness. I have heard it at dawn as the earth crackles, the river waters run, and the animals stir as the Sun peers above the hills and the light strikes the trees on my beloved Wiradjuri country.
Land remembers.
Wounds.
The memory of wounds. The great polish poet Czeslaw Milosz said perhaps all memory is the memory of wounds.
Milosz wrote into the horror of the 20th century as he saw war all around him.
He spoke of impermanence: He knew things did not last and yet we do. We go on, he said, ever, ever, ever on.
We cross rivers and we are changed like the water itself. We cannot cross the same stream twice.
Words. Listen to Milosz:
"The golden house of is collapses. A world turning. A culture and a people facing devastation. The golden house of is collapses and the world of becoming ascended."
The golden house of is — of culture and connection, of blood and dreaming, of time immemorial — how the golden house of is collapses.
Of invasion. Of law. British law under a British flag.
A law that did not see us.
Words.
Words like terra nullius — empty land.
The fall of the golden house of is — but not the end.
Words hid the truth
We did not end. The world of becoming ascends.
Words.
Australian law for two centuries hid the truth behind words.
To seek justice we had to speak the words of British law.
Court cases in the mid-19th century challenged the idea of British settlement — at the time the rulings were in favour of the Crown.
British law was the law of the colony and usurped and superseded Aboriginal law.
Other cases persisted. In one, the presiding judge said the mere introduction of British law did not extinguish Aboriginal customary law.
Justice John Willis said: "In Australia it is the colonists not the Aborigines are the foreigners."
These legal challenges continued into the 20th century — rulings maintained the legitimacy of the Crown but could not extinguish completely the Aboriginal claims.
Justice Blackburn ruled Australia was indeed a "settled colony", that this was "desert and uncultivated". But he had to find words to speak a deeper truth — even as he upheld the myth of terra nullius — that Aboriginal people, he said, had a "subtle and elaborate system of law".
"If ever a system could be called a government of laws," he said, "it is shown in the evidence before me."
A path to the High Court
In 1979 Wiradjuri man and law student Paul Coe walked the path that Eddie Mabo would follow — all the way to the High Court of Australia.
The court dismissed his challenge to Australian sovereignty, but in his opinion Justice Lionel Murphy rattled the bones of the Australian settlement.
" … the Aborigines did not give up their lands peacefully; they were killed or removed forcibly from the lands by United Kingdom forces or the European colonists in what amounted to attempted (and in Tasmania almost complete) genocide."
Words. Powerful words.
I sensed this man Mabo would change Australia
A decade later, I was a young reporter — still in my early 20s, finding my way into the foreign world of journalism — when I saw a listing for a case at the High Court.
Few Australians then knew the name Eddie Mabo.
I had read about the case as it moved through the lower courts. Rejected at each turn.
I was no lawyer but I knew — I sensed — this was different. There was something of destiny in the air.
It felt in this case that the time had come.
Words.
I walked into the news meeting at the ABC with words. This case, I said — this man Mabo – will change Australia.
There was scepticism, even cynicism, but I was able to report the story. You can find it still, somewhere buried in the archives of ABC News.
How might this case shatter the myth of terra nullius?
In 1992 the High Court handed down its historic ruling. Eddie Mabo would not live to see his final victory, but in that judgement he became immortal. Eternal.
Words.
The justices spoke of a legacy of "unutterable shame" and that the dispossession of Indigenous people was the darkest aspect of Australia's history. The nation remained diminished.
Here we are 30 years later, still on that journey.
Words.
We are still trying to find the words to equal the full measure of Eddie Mabo's devotion.
Words. Sovereignty.
That word is emblazoned still at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy on the lawns of the Old Parliament House in Canberra.
It remains a collection of canvas and tin, but it has grown in those years since a handful of young Aboriginal activists planted a beach umbrella and wrote the word Embassy on a manila folder, to shake a fist at the power on the hill.
Today in the midst of winter there is still smoke from a campfire, framing a word spelled out on the lawn: Sovereignty.
We are still here
For 50 years this embassy has stood as a reminder that we are still here.
Words. Words like the Uluru Statement from the Heart:
“We, gathered at the 2017 National Constitutional Convention, coming from all points of the southern sky, make this statement from the heart:
Our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes were the first sovereign Nations of the Australian continent and its adjacent islands, and possessed it under our own laws and customs. This our ancestors did, according to the reckoning of our culture, from the Creation, according to the common law from "time immemorial", and according to science more than 60,000 years ago.
This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or "mother nature", and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty.”
Words.
"This is the torment of our powerlessness."
Words — makaratta. A Yolngu word meaning to come together after a struggle. To make agreements. To sign treaties.
Words.
“We leave base camp and start our trek across this vast country. We invite you to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future.”
Australia stands at a moment of history
Well, Australia now stands at a moment of history. The new Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, says there will be a referendum to enshrine a voice — an Indigenous representative body — in the Australian constitution.
There will be many words between now and then.
I want to give two words from my people, Wiradjuri. Yindyamarra winanghanha.
Yindyamarra is respect: It is quiet, it is humble.
Winanghanha is to return to knowing: to know what we have always known.
That was Eddie Mabo’s gift. To build a world worth living in.
When our world is ablaze with conflict. When democracy is teetering and autocracy is rising. When voices within democracies silenced and marginalised are demanding to be heard, we are bringing ours and challenging our democracy to examine itself and for our constitution to be seeded in the first footprints, not just the first settlers.
To strengthen our democracy as Eddie Mabo strengthened our law.
As this brave man’s voice — even as he had passed — was heard by another man who is now gone and together they changed us.
To Eddie Koiki Mabo and chief justice Sir Gerard Brennan.
We thank you.
This is an edited extract of the 2022 Mabo Lecture, delivered by Stan Grant on June 3, 2022, to commemorate 30 years since the Mabo decision.
Stan Grant is the ABC's international affairs analyst and presents China Tonight on Monday at 9:35pm on ABC TV, and Tuesday at 8pm on the ABC News Channel, and a co-presenter of Q+A on Thursday at 8:30pm.
