Eddie mabo who is he

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. 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 , 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 , at the age of In , a library at James Cook University was named after him.

Other forms of recognition have been added. Concerned that his children were losing their language and cultural traditions, with Harry Penrith later known as Burnum Burnum he set up the Black Community School in Townsville in and served as its director until A talented performer of Torres Strait Islander music and dance, Mabo was a member of the Australia Council for the Arts for four years from He was president of the Yumba Meta Housing Association Ltd —80 , an organisation that acquired houses in Townsville using Commonwealth funds and rented them to Indigenous tenants, and was employed by the Commonwealth Employment Service as an assistant vocational officer — Informed by Henry Reynolds and Loos that he and other Murray Islanders were not the legal owners of land inherited under Meriam custom and tradition, and that instead it was crown land, Mabo was shocked.

The conference attracted lawyers and others familiar with questions of Indigenous rights in both domestic and international contexts. Meanwhile, the Queensland government introduced legislation designed to retrospectively cancel any native title that might exist. This judgment became known as Mabo v. Queensland [No. In the High Court had passed the original land claim case to the Supreme Court of Queensland to determine the facts. The Supreme Court handed its findings to the High Court in Two lawyers were recruited to represent Mabo.

It took ten years, but the final decision was that the concept of Terra Nullius land belonging to no one did not apply to the land which indigenous people had owned before the first British and white Australian settlers arrived in The courts ruled that the indigenous people did have ownership of their land and that any questions of ownership of the title should be decided by the Aboriginal or Islander people.

Mabo died of cancer January 21, in Brisbane, Australia, five months before the landmark decision was reached. In , after the traditional three years of mourning, the family replaced the simple wooden cross grave marker with a marble headstone.

His family reburied Mabo on Murray Island, performing a traditional ceremony which buried Eddie Koiki Mabo as a leader. He described how his grandfather had told him that after the missionaries arrived, the men continued to participate in Malo initiation ceremonies in secret. That when Mabo himself was nine or ten years old, he was taken with other boys to learn dances and songs such as that of Gelam, who formed the isle of Mer in the shape of a dugong, and the history of Malo.

Koiki quickly involved himself in politics and community organisations, becoming a prominent leader for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Queensland. He was also involved in the Referendum campaign to have Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples included in the census and to allow the national Australian Government, rather than the state and territory governments, to make laws that affect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. His village Las would always remain his home.

Sadly, he would later be denied the right to return to his homelands because of his active campaigning. My father had hoped to visit his father, Benny Mabo, who was suffering from tuberculosis. Tuberculosis was a major killer of Torres Strait Islanders at the time. Our family travelled to Thursday Island but we were refused permission to travel to Mer. They thought he was too political and would stir up trouble. Six weeks later my father received a telegram saying that his father had died.

My father cried.