The legal principle was called terra nullius. It meant ‘land belonging to no one’. For over two centuries, it was the lie upon which a continent was settled. It declared that Australia, upon British arrival, was empty of systems of ownership, of law, of civilization. It rendered the custodianship of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, stretching back tens of thousands of years, legally invisible.
Eddie Koiki Mabo, a Meriam man from the Murray Islands in the Torres Strait, was not a lawyer. He was a gardener, a unionist, a storyteller. He learned his own people’s laws of land inheritance from his uncle. When he was told, casually, that his family’s land on Mer was owned by the Crown, he began a ten-year legal challenge. The case was not about guilt or compensation. It was about truth. It argued for the existence of a pre-colonial system of land title that had never been extinguished.
On June 3, 1992, the High Court of Australia agreed. By a six-to-one majority, it recognized the concept of native title. The lie of emptiness was dismantled. The court found that the Meriam people ‘are entitled as against the whole world to possession, occupation, use and enjoyment of the lands of the Murray Islands.’
Eddie Mabo was not in the courtroom. He had died of cancer five months earlier. His tombstone reads: ‘He was just a man.’ But his name is on the case that forced a nation to see itself, and its history, with new eyes. The legal victory was specific, but its resonance was existential. It asked what it means to belong to a place, and what a country chooses to remember about how it came to be.