Archival footage of John Hewson and Paul Keating debating from their respective podiums in the Parliament.
(Chatter)
SPEAKER:
Order!
JOHN HEWSON:
The megalomaniac at the desk wants to go down in history as the one person who wanted to reconcile black and white Australia.
PAUL KEATING:
We will triumph with this bill of principle and while the nation will embrace it for righting a wrong 200 years in the making...
MEMBERS:
Hear, hear!
(Applause)
Shot of Kerry O'Brien in Four Corners studio, speaking to the camera.
KERRY O'BRIEN:
Volatile politics at the time, but a rare historic breakthrough for Aboriginal Australians. Welcome to Four Corners. Eddie Mabo was a remarkable Australian who grew up naively believing that he owned his traditional family land in the Torres Strait Islands. He was working as a humble gardener at James Cook University in Townsville when he discovered otherwise and launched a case that challenged the accepted common-law principle of terra nullius - that Australia was essentially unoccupied when white settlers arrived here in 1788. He was David taking on Goliath. Legal Aid was his slingshot. It took ten years, but on June 3, 1992, 20 years ago next month, the High Court ruled against terra nullius, and native title was enshrined in common law. But that was just the beginning. What followed was a riveting moment in Australian political and social history, when then Prime Minister Paul Keating took up the challenge to provide a legislative framework for a ruling that promised to change the fundamental relationship between black and white Australians. It was an intense and highly charged process of negotiation, with Aboriginal leaders, the States, and powerful mining and pastoral interests, with some opponents predicting all kinds of dire outcomes for white Australians. On the eve of the anniversary, Liz Jackson has obtained exclusive interviews with the key architects of Mabo and its outcome, including former High Court Chief Justice Sir Anthony Mason, for this compelling report.
Time-lapse shot of dawn breaking over the horizon.
LIZ JACKSON:
Judgement day - June 3, 1992.
Series of shots of the High Court.
LIZ JACKSON:
There was nothing in the early morning papers to tell Australians that this was the day the High Court would release its historic judgement in the Mabo case. It concerned what the judges would call the 'darkest aspect of this nation's history' - the parcel-by-parcel dispossession of Aboriginal people from the land they owned, what the judges would call 'our nation's legacy of unutterable shame'. The judgement overturned 200 years of common law and found that native title had survived British sovereignty. And it tore the country apart. The Chief Justice, Sir Anthony Mason, saw it coming.
Shot of Anthony Mason speaking to Liz Jackson.
ANTONY MASON:
I foresaw that the judgement would be controversial, but as often happens, you don't actually foresee the extent of the controversy, nor do you see the consequences of the controversy. I certainly thought there would be controversy. I thought that there would be objections from mining interests and from pastoral interests.
Series of shots of the High Court building. Camera cuts to shot of Campbell Anderson speaking to Liz Jackson.
CAMPBELL ANDERSON:
I don't think we said that we'd lost, but we'd said, 'Goddammit. What the hell's happened here? What are we going to do?'
Shot of the High Court followed by a shot of Paul Keating speaking to Liz Jackson.
PAUL KEATING:
Oh, I thought this was a spark that could light... light the fire.
Archive footage of the judges walking to the High Court bench.
LIZ JACKSON:
Six of the seven judges on the High Court bench declared the law to date had been based on a fallacy, 'terra nullius' - that the land was owned by nobody.
Camera pans across the bench with close-up shots of the judges.
LIZ JACKSON:
While clearly there were people here when the British arrived, 19th-century judges had deemed them too backward, too barbarous, too primitive to have their rights over land recognised and respected. It was time to change the law.
Shot of Anthony Mason speaking to Liz Jackson. On-screen text reads, 'Sir Anthony Mason, Chief Justice, High Court 1987-1995'.
LIZ JACKSON:
What was it, factually, that persuaded you that way?
ANTHONY MASON:
Uh... the fact that, first, Australia was not an uninhabited country. Secondly, that... the Indigenous people were not uncivilised, without customs of their own and recognition of some rights of their own. And thirdly, that they did have ties with land - as is apparent, of course, from their myths and their culture.
LIZ JACKSON:
That had not been acknowledged by the Australian law before?
ANTHONY MASON:
No, it hadn't.
Shot of the interior of the High Court, which cuts to a shot of Bill Hassell speaking to Liz Jackson. On-screen text read, 'Bill Hassell, Liberal Party President WA 1992-1994'.
BILL HASSELL:
It was a sense of outrage that 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 in an area where the public, politically, had already rejected that law, as they did in the 1980s. It was lost in the Western Australian Parliament and the Labor Government had run away from its commitment to Aboriginal land rights because it knew the public wouldn't accept it.