BIG TALK: The Mabo Case PART ONE

This episode is brought to you by Verve Super. There's $4.2 trillion sitting in Super right now. And for many of us, it's being invested into stuff we'd never consciously back. Verve Super doesn't play by these rules. They put your money where your values are. Visit VerveSuper.com.au to learn more. Info provided is general. Read the PDS and TMD issued by ETSL at VerveSuper.com.au and consider if right for you. Before we begin today's episode, we would like to start by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we're recording today, the Gadigal people, and pay our respect to Elders past and present. Hi, I'm Hannah. And I'm Sarah. Welcome to Big Talk. Big Talk deep dives into the news stories that you've heard of, but you don't know what the series and salacious details about. We revisit the most shocking headlines of the past that have shaped the world we know today. And in this episode, we're looking at the Marbo case. I am the anyone who's done legal studies in year 11 and 12. I mean, it was a lot of like year nine history in Australia. If you've been to like any humanities course in uni or law school, you know about Marbo, but top layer, I think, you know, top layer. And also I didn't my school didn't even offer legal studies. So I actually never studied Marbo at school. Oh, that's amazing. I feel like it's something that you kind of know about. It's the perfect Big Talk, but don't know every detail of. And we obviously should get into the pitch more about this, but I'm the known in me loves this topic. Yes. So last week was NADOC week. This did feel fitting, but actually we had planned this for this month three months ago, not even making that correlation at the time, because it was something we've had on our list of ideas for Big Talk since its inception. This was such a pivotal moment in Australia's history and it's a fascinating legal case and a man, Eddie Marbo, whose story we should all know. Really, what's so important about the Marbo decision is that it challenged one of the biggest lies at the heart of Australia's foundation, which was the land was empty when the British arrived. So today in part one of this Big Talk, you want to look at who Eddie Marbo was, how his case came to be and the journey of him taking it all the way to the High Court of Australia, which forced our country to formally recognise that our Indigenous people had rich culture, laws and land ownership long before British invasion. But also, and probably not till part two, I really want to reflect on what the media's reaction to this was, how this plays into a still very relevant conversation about the voice, treaty and truth and how effective these laws have been in closing the gap targets. As Australia grapples currently with how to move forward on reconciliation and justice for First Nations people, revisiting Marbo's story helps ground those big ideas in a real person's fight. A fight that reshaped the nation's legal landscape and left a powerful legacy that still matters today. OK, so before we get into this, we do need to do a little bit of a history refresher, particularly on the concept of terra nullius. So as we know, long before European settlers even set foot on Australian soil, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples had already shaped the land, but they didn't see the land as something to own. To them, the country was alive. It was treated the same as a grandparent or a teacher or a storybook. It's full of lessons. It wasn't theirs to possess, but it was theirs to protect. That's really a great place to start, I think, because that immediately hearing that makes me think about how capitalist where since everything is a commodity and it's a resource, not something to be enjoyed and to make community on. No, I think it's a really interesting point to start with it, because like this whole big talk is about this concept of ownership, but it's so against at the same time what indigenous people believe, which is like we don't own this land, we work with this land. We enjoy the land. The idea of ownership fundamentally is steeped in fighting. And I also think it's like this understanding. I mean, this is very simplistic explanation of everything, but like every clan had its place. Like it's like a patch of land that was given to them. It's passed down generation to generation, along with dreaming stories that held its meaning. And obviously, we know that these weren't just stories, these were laws, these were maps, these were memories. It guided how to live with the land, not on it, as we were saying. And a very good example off that is like, you know, looking at even how they utilized fire. We would now call it fire stick farming, but they would do like slow burns that cleared the undergrowth and encourage new plants to grow that kept dangerous wildfires at bay. Like everything that they did to care for the land was rooted in both a science, but also a respect. Also, these boundaries between one group's land and like another's, and like who cared for what, obviously weren't marked with lines or fences, but they were still known. But as we know, this made zero sense to Captain Cook or Europeans on their violent arrival. And Captain Cook, you know, because he couldn't see any settlements that resembled European development. He declared indigenous people uncivilized and therefore the land Terranullius, which is the Latin term for that means land belonging to no one. And we know that this was a very convenient fiction for him because by declaring Terranullius, it meant that the British freed themselves from the need to ask permission to sign treaties to offer compensation to indigenous people. And as such, they were then treated as strangers on their own land and their rights were erased. Like families were forced off ancestral lands, sacred sites were destroyed, ancient ecosystems were upended, and because the land was central to spiritual beliefs like identity and law, its loss was so deeply traumatic. And the imposition of colonial property systems introduced a worldview that contradicted and in most cases, criminalized traditional land use practices. Ah, again, you don't think of this at the heart of what we're talking about. How was Captain Cook able to declare this? Like, how did this become our status quo really? What's really interesting about this is that he was actually under very strict instructions to report back if there were people living there. And only if no one was there could he declare it for the crown. Cook obviously didn't give a fuck when he got there. And he completely disregarded that because it clashed with his own imperial goals of colonialization. But again, to him, how Indigenous people lived and thrived and their systems didn't make sense to him and his journals directly reflect that as well. He called them savages and as we know, was routinely violent. A prime example of that being, like when he arrived in Botany Bay, Indigenous warrior leaders approached his crew, obviously having no way to find out who they were, and he immediately fired a musket at them and then went and stole from the camps. Because what Indigenous people who have been living on this land for more than 60,000 years, the oldest continuous culture on Earth, that presented a problem to his declaration. Oh, yeah. It also just annoys me so much because can you just imagine the bewilderment of, like, they've never seen a musket or, like, that kind of warfare before? Anyway, it would be a whole thing in itself to begin explaining the horridness of Captain Cook. But I think that's important groundwork to understand what that relationship was with the land and what Terranalius was. But let's jump forward to Eddie Marlborough. So Eddie was born in 1936 in a small village called Las on Mer, which is Murray Island. Interesting. In the Torres Strait. Sadly, his mother actually passed away after he was born, so he was adopted by his aunt and uncle and he called them, like, mom and dad. And that was, like, the custom of the time. Yeah, completely. And growing up, he was, like, very much immersed in the culture. He spoke the language, he learned traditional Malau Law, and he understood the deep connection that his people had with the land. Also, as was the reality of Indigenous Australians at the time, he was also deprived of mainstream education and denied access to whites-only buses, cinemas, even toilets. Yeah, this is segregation in action. Yeah. Then in 1959, Eddie moved to mainland Queensland for work and he was picking up drugs on purling boats as a cane cutter and doing maintenance on railways. And that same year, he married Benita Nihao, who was a South Sea islander and his teenage sweetheart. And together, they had ten kids. Seven of theirs, three adopted, I think. Hell yeah. Big family. And it's also just really beautiful. Like, obviously, this is jumping forward a bit, but how much his wife and his children and his extended family have carried on his story and legacy. Also, did you know he's related to Patty Mills? The basketball player. The NBA player? Fucking incredible. I think it's his nephew. Really? Yeah. That's an awesome story of sorts. Wait, let me double-check. Yep. That is sick. Yep. And Eddie continued his advocacy work. He actually was involved in the 1967 referendum campaign. He advocated for it and sort of referenced it later in his land rights advocacy. But of course, that was to have Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples included in the census to allow the Australian government rather than the state or territory governments to make laws that affect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Then, in 1972, Eddie was told his father, Benny, was sick with tuberculosis. And shockingly, the Queensland authorities denied Eddie and his family permission to travel back to Mer Island, citing Eddie's political activism as a threat to public order. That sounds very similar to Trump, sort of kind of levels of decision-making, where someone's political viewpoint is going to be a point of denying them access or entry. I was shocked when I read about that. And six weeks later, they were informed that his father had passed away. And Gail, his daughter, this was at a TV interview, said, "My father cried we never had the chance to meet our grandfather." Oh, I have to have a shiver. And also, knowing how these communities came together and how they celebrated relatives and how those traditions and customs that we don't have much of an understanding of, that denial would be just so harmful in so many ways. It's like not only was he unable to then inherit the land that his father intended, but he was then essentially exiled then. And I do want to talk about this, because I found this so interesting. But in 1973, Eddie then co-founded a black community school in Townsville. And he wanted Indigenous kids to have an education that still honoured their culture. This is so unheard of at the time. And speaking on a podcast, actually, there was a former student called Noel Zaro. And he attended the black community school and he said the day would be sort of taught like Western subjects like English and maths in the morning and then the afternoon would be about culture, about traditional language, traditional dancing. And when I was reading more about it, the school obviously wasn't sanctioned by the Queensland Education Board. So Eddie served as the principal and the cultural instructor and the school bus driver. Wow, I just love this. And what's so sad is this got so much pushback at the time from other locals in Townsville, but also from politicians. And then the state minister of education denounced sort of the motives of the student's parents declaring their attitudes as racist and the school as an apartheid and reverse. Knowing all of this, I can kind of see, but like how did the Marba case then come about? Obviously, this is an amazing person who's so involved heavily in their community. It really started around the time that Eddie picked up a job working mostly late shifts because he was still running the school as a gardener for James Cook University. And this was in 1974. So while on the grounds working, he began building relationships with two historians there called Noel Luz and Henry Reynolds. And he was chatting to them one day about his dream of returning to and ending his days on Moor Island. You know, it was ancestral land that had been handed down through his family for 15 generations. And that's where he wanted to go back to. And according to accounts of the conversation, these two scholars looked at each other and then very delicately had to tell Marbo that he didn't own the land, it was crown land. And so they first introduced him to this concept of Terranolius and the legal doctrine of that. And he had no idea. He just, I mean, in their recount of it, Marbo just had this disbelief and then just kind of shook his head and was saying, "No way, it's not theirs, it's ours." He was wrong. Obviously, the crown does own, did own that land. Legally at the time. Yeah, yeah. And so this like growing sense of injustice then led Eddie straight to the James Cook University Library where he dove into research about the history of Terranolius and its impact on its people. And the more he learned, the more his passion for land rights grew. And so really like being affronted with this whole concept of Terranolius like lit this fire in him. And it became like an epiphany that this is what he wanted to dedicate his energy towards. Wow. And since that moment, like he studied, he worked, he continued to advocate for native land rights. And he began to work closely with advocacy groups and also the Communist Party, which I was surprised at. But then when I read about it, they were the only white political party to support Aboriginal campaigns at that time. In a way, it doesn't surprise me. I mean, yeah. Not the country party. Talk to me the answer. But speaking more broadly, protests for Indigenous land rights grew across Australia. But Eddie largely rejected the more militant direct action tactics of the land rights movement, but was mostly focused on destroying the legal justification for what he regarded, obviously, as land theft. To be fair, this whole thing, the whole land rights movement in Australia was predominantly illegal battle and predominantly peaceful over the decade. Like there were a few isolated instances of like property damage, but for the most part, very peaceful. And if anything, it was the police who were aggressive, like Aboriginal activists were regularly subjected to arrest, surveillance, intimidation, physical harm. Back to Marbeau. In 1981, he then delivered a very powerful speech titled, "Land rights are human rights," where he passionately argued that the land was crucial to the identity of the Indigenous Australians and that the denial of land ownership was the denial of their basic human rights. It is such a good speech. I could actually find it in full, but I read the transcript of it and to basically, like, summarize it. And it was to a largely white student audience as well. He actually starts off by saying, "Thank you for..." He actually, he starts it by like saying, "It's so lovely to see so many white friends here who are interested in care." And again, I think this is something that even in present day we see where unfortunately, and I do say this unfortunately, often people from different minority groups, not just First Nations Australians, not just Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, need to kind of be so constantly welcoming and thankful for the bare minimum. As a white woman with a lot of privilege, you can see this conversation, how we play a role in it. There is a level of like, to bring people into community, they need to feel welcome to enter. And it needs to feel inclusive, but it's also sad that Eddie had to sort of like be so kind to people that should have been. And he really took the time, and I think this was what was so important about the speech, but he explained exactly how land ownership worked in the Torres Strait. And he said like, "I'm summarizing massively." But like he said, it was passed down through the mail line, and then the chosen son became the landholder. But he was expected to, was very much expected that he would share that access to the land with his siblings. Sometimes daughters were given land too, but usually if there was no sons or it was a wedding gift, it was very distinct and very organized. So it was not like this lawless, landless image that had been painted. He then also used a really clever comparison to help outsiders understand this land ownership. He said, "Think about how Scotland is divided with land belonging to different clans, like the Fraser or the McLeods and even family castles being passed down through generations. That's basically how things work on Mer Island too, the difference only being that with our relationship to the land, we would never sell it for cash." He then called for like real self-determination for the Torres Strait Islanders and not colonial-style control from Queensland. Like he wanted the islands to be transferred to the Commonwealth so the Torres Strait could become an autonomous region like Norfolk Island. That meant islanders could elect their own leaders, write their own constitution and manage their own affairs. Luckily for Eddie, a lawyer named Greg McIntyre happened to be in the audience and was witnessing this speech and realized he might actually have a case. 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Imagine going to the highest legal jurisdiction in the country. We want to overturn the fundamental genocide and racism this country was built on. Yeah, and what they had, like it's such a tall order, but what they had to prove was since before British invasion, which is, no, we did have land rights. It just wasn't evident to you guys. That doesn't mean they didn't exist. And really the argument here, and we're going to get into this, is exactly what you said. You brought a system here and imposed it on us and told us that we weren't relevant, present, didn't exist. Because there wasn't a fence. Yes, it is so undermining because you didn't have the musket. And so when they sought to challenge this assumption, they weren't asking for compensation. They weren't asking for what you described as like a land handout, which is a lot of the sort of fear mongering that we see in even the current political landscape. What was being asked was that the court would recognise their ongoing rights to the land. But this ended up splitting into two separate legal decisions known as Marbo One and Marbo Two. And this is thanks to the Queensland government, who in 1985 decided to pass a law, the Queensland Coast Islands Declaratory Act. The goal of this law, it's blunt, right? It's designed to wipe out any chance of Torres Strait Islanders claiming native title over their traditional land. So as we know, Eddie Marbo was already challenging with others the idea that Australia was Terran alias. The government clearly saw this and tried to get ahead of it. Now this comes back to like a fundamental concept in legal studies when you go to law school, between like common law and statute law. And so when a case is decided, it sets a new precedent for common law, but statute is what governments pass. So here they're trying to pass a statute that tries to override and kind of wipe out the ability for common law to challenge it. Yeah. So the 1985 law was an attempt to block it before it could even succeed, before it even existed. So basically the Queensland, and actually, not to cast my mind to pretend I'm back here, but they must have thought it had merit and it had legs to do something like this, right? Yeah. If you think a government is passing through sweeping legislation to try and block something that hasn't even happened yet, they must have seen that it was going to happen. Yeah. So the Queensland government wanted to legally declare that even if native title ever did exist in the Torres Strait, it was now extinguished, it was completely gone. But I think what's important here is that this move seriously backfired for the government, because the plaintiffs took it to the high court and argued it was unconstitutional and unfair, which it of course was. And it's what led to the Marbeau and Queensland number one case, which challenged the validity of the 1985 act and eventually cleared the path to landmark Marbeau and Queensland, the number two case. So it's quite ironic that the law meant to shut the door on land rights ended up helping to open and pave the way for that change, which is amazing. But that would have been so hard to go up against. Like, can you explain how his team successfully argued that it was unconstitutional? Really clever, their primary point. And when I say clever, I mean like fundamentally human and right. But it was a great way of arguing the point. Their main point was the 1985 decision, the legislation broke the Racial Discrimination Act of 1975. So they just, the argument was that's racist. Yeah, so their main point was that native title is a type of property and this law wiped it out without compensation. And that's something that would never happen to non-indigenous landowners. They would never just extinguish the rights of a group of white people, basically is what they said. So it's a racially discriminatory decision to pass that law. And because that discrimination piece of legislation existed 10 years prior, they were able to use that to argue against the '85 decision. And so they backed it up with expert legal opinions and constitutional arguments. And they showed that federal law, like the Racial Discrimination Act, overrules state law when there's a conflict. So that's how a system works. Commonwealth law, federal law, is able to kind of bop state law on the head when they conflict, when they collide. So that federal law wiped out the Queensland law and said, well, no, you're breaching this and therefore this has got a problem. So they also used parliamentary records to prove the Queensland government introduced the act specifically to block the marble claim. So what we talked about before where they clearly saw it coming and tried to, nope, we're going to get in first. This is a suspicious timeline that you've decided to pass this. Exactly. They used that as a model to say, you've done this to avoid the court outcome, you've done this on purpose at this time. And so it showed that the intent behind that decision was discriminatory. So yes, in 1988, the High Court ruled in favour of marble, which was huge. They needed that to open up the second case. But also the ruling was so close. For three. So close. Such a close call. But essentially then the win meant that the court said you can't take away property rights just because of someone's race. Seems like a basic thing to understand. It feels, and again, it feels so far away, but I think we only need to look at the headlines of the current weeks to realise that much of Australian law still exists in this kind of a reality too. We are a nation still very much grappling with racism and white supremacy. But essentially, so to recap, it was important though because it proved that federal law will always override state law. Well, I guess it's like yes, but that always was the case. But it was really kind of a proof point of like federal legislation is saying state legislation is wrong here. And then most importantly, it kind of kept the Marbeau case alive a bit. Although obviously this was before native title, but it kind of then just cleared the legal framework to be able to push for Marbeau number two. Absolutely. And it's almost like, you know, I was saying before it ironically helped, it did make it much harder. Like it meant the legal battles were more extensive, what they had to pay, what they had to do in order to achieve that would have been so much more. But I think what's important is they actually were able to bat away a secondary claim and prove another point with their own. It was actually just it made the whole thing more meaningful, even though they must have had to suffer so much harm to go through that. So I think then before we get into Marbeau two, we need to talk about what the general public was like at the time. What was the reaction to Marbeau one and then at the start of Marbeau two as well. I think unsurprisingly, there's of course a lot of fear and pushback for native title. And that's because, you know, big industry players like mining and farming were especially worried about what it meant for their land. They feared that native title would complicate their existing claims and their existing perception of ownership. And so this fear and paranoia would have come from a place of believing that traditional ownership then would interfere with their leases and would disrupt access to valuable land. And again, this has always been the lens and frame through which we see that. Hugh Morgan, who was a director at Western Mining, warned that Marbeau could shake up land ownership so badly it would scare off investors. Essentially, they didn't want the uncertainty or the legal headaches that might come with recognizing Indigenous land rights. I mean, that's not at all surprising. But like we hear like even when and we'll make probably go into these similarities with the voice and stuff like that in part two. But like, I remember even genuinely hearing that like people's dads would be like, yeah, but you know, they want to take Balmoral Beach. Yeah. And it's like, what? Where did you get that? The one of the strongest parts of what Advance Australia, one of the sort of far right lobby groups ran around the voice referendum was this, you're going to have to pay to go to the beach. Yeah, they're going to be taking your backyard. And you know, what I also think empowers and emboldens those kinds of views is the fact that in Australia, like I remember spending time at school learning about, you know, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture and about their values and about their communities. But I think the lack of education and the lack of cultural immersion and curiosity that a lot of Australians have has led to this kind of rhetoric being able to win so easily because we do know so little. And we've been taught to kind of ignore or see it as other or something we're excluded from. We've never really been kind of encouraged to celebrate more than acknowledgments or welcomes to country. And I think that that's an inherent part of this is like, how do we bring Indigenous culture as like a proud thing we celebrate constantly because that wouldn't allow for these sorts of lies to win. Then we have others dismissing native title on cultural grounds saying it wasn't real in inverted quotations ownership because it couldn't be sold or transferred like Western property. And this comes back to exactly what you were talking about at the start of the episode. They argued that Indigenous land traditions were too spiritual or communal to fit within the legal system. And what does that mean in Western culture? That it's not valid. And that is horrendous. But this is how we need to understand this battle. Because I also read that that's also why a lot of judges were against it as well because it also didn't fit within their understanding of legal property. You're literally asking judges to make decisions outside of the very system they're employed within. Like that actually is quite a tough ask. But it proves the point of how limiting the legal system is for our perception of community and humanity too in many ways. And like justice can't be achieved formally within sort of like with a gavel, you know. No, I know. Also, before we get into the thick of Barbo too, a quick timeline recap. So, 1972 is when inheritance was denied to Marbo and he was told he couldn't legally inherit his father's land under Queensland law. That was his big turning point. 1974 to 1981 was his research and advocacy while working at James Cook. He learned about land rights from the historians. 1981, he delivered the land rights a human rights speech. 1982, the legal case begins. 1985, Queensland tries to block it, which leads us now to 1986, where Eddie Marbo testifies and gives key evidence. Yeah, so this case, Marbo too, really hinged on showing that the Merriam people had a deep continuous connection to their land. Not just emotionally, but legally and culturally. So when we look at how they were able to prove that, some of the evidence was elders sharing oral histories, explaining how land was passed down through families, how different areas had specific meanings like burial grounds or ceremonial sites, how their laws and customs had guided land use for generations. And this is what we still see to this day. Anthropologists back this up as well. They showed that Merriam land ownership followed a clear and structured system. It wasn't random, it wasn't vague, it was deeply rooted in culture, in law, in tradition, just not our laws. Do you know what I mean? Like when we actually think about this, just because it's not your legal system doesn't mean it's not valid and real and tangible. But also this explains why this took like a decade to prove, because all of this would have been so hard to prove. Yes. But I think that we're not there yet, but that's the beauty in this story, is that they were able to so vividly express their culture. And it was a moment where these two worlds collided. It's so important. When I was reading about it as well, I saw that they would bring in, like they brought in maps and all these family trees and like hand drawn by the community on Merra Island and that showed like how they looked after different parts of the island and that these weren't just stories. This was evidence of like a well-organized system of ownership and inheritance. Yes. And I think finally as well, the legal team argued that native title didn't disappear just because Britain claimed sovereignty. You know, other countries like Canada and the US had recognized indigenous land rights, so why didn't we? And they made the case that Merriam law wasn't in conflict with common law. This is so interesting, right? It's not something that's in a battle for one to prevail. It's actually fits within it. And so this kind of cultural and historical evidence was critical. So while Marbeau number one focus on legal technicality and this battle between legislation and common law and federal separation of powers, the division of powers. Marbeau number two had to prove the reality on the ground that the Merriam people had always had a functioning lawful relationship with their land and that it deserved legal recognition finally. And it was just, it's pretty incredible. Like the community contributions to this case, like 33 Merriam community members contributed to the legal case across the decade and they provided oral histories, cultural documentation, personal testimonies. Like their efforts generated more than 4,000 pages of evidence. I think the next part, you know, I think we need to like sit with that and understand the power and the community, which is just proving the point about the kind of culture and history and coming together that was always evident. But then when we think about that community support, we know that so many indigenous people saw this fight as a huge turning point, a pivotal moment in the land rights movement. And this is in places like the Northern Territory and Western Australia, who were already gaining momentum in the 70s and 80s. And Marbeau had this immense support. But as we saw in the voice referendum and in other cases, I guess the next thing to consider is whether there was mixed responses within the indigenous community. So I think what's a crucial sort of division point here is that we don't see a lot of disagreement necessarily because there were points of difference. So Marbeau was speaking to the Torres Strait as a Torres Strait islander, whereas some Aboriginal people on mainland were concerned it wouldn't translate into wins for them also. Yeah, because Torres Strait had a different system slightly. Yeah, so there's going to be potentially different outcomes and different legal arguments and also there's different countries and cultural practices within those. So it's just so many points of difference that it's not really that there was a disagreement, it was how does this apply to me then. And others were worried that the case would trigger political backlash, which it actually did. So which actually it more so did happen after the WIC decision in 1996. That's part two, part two guys. That is part two. So we'll come back and that's really about, you know, the crux of the WIC case, which is different to Marbeau, is whether native title and pastoral farm leases coexist. And so that will be a next episode. And I think it's also important to mention that there are also notes that there would have also been a cases of philosophical differences between leaders regarding if land rights should be fought for in court and political systems of ownership, which is similar to the progressive no vote for the voice when we think about this idea that like, why would we try to find representation and reform within a system that was built on our oppression? Why would we want to enter this establishment which has failed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people for so long? And so that is completely understandable. And it's a clear division line for so many. Yeah. Just as a final point on this, and we have a lot still to cover in the second part, but the fight for the High Court, as we said, went on for 10 years. And the most tragic twist in all of it is that Eddie Marbeau died six months before the High Court ruled in favour of his case. He died in January of 1992 and historic ruling happened in June. It's so devastating. He won and he didn't even get to see it. Like talk about bittersweet. Oh, my God. But also it's like devastating. But I think it also says something to like the feeling I have of his whole life is that he was just fighting for the future in the sense that like being the principal and the bus driver and that, you know, for the next generation at a school just because they're doing the right thing by community. And ultimately, I wish he got to see what his life's work and his massive advocacy had done. But like, it also feels in line with the kind of person he was that it was always for the next, you know. Yeah. I mean, his death obviously was very heavy on the indigenous community. He was a leader. He was a hero. But for the wider group of Australians, his death, I think really brought the case into sharper focus for many because it then became more than just the legalities. It was then really about life and culture and history. Like he provided such a human aspect to this story and to the struggle. And in the following months, like Australians really began to pay attention to the case. And so ultimately, Eddie Mabo did prevail and he was the person at the heart of overturning Theranolius and establishing native title. And that's part one of Big Talk. Yeah. In part two, I want to get into like actually the nitty-gritty of what the court ruling meant and how native title versus like land rights. Occur. Occur and how they are slightly different, what the significance of WIC was, and also about how effective it's been in current day. Yeah. And tying in the voice and treaty and truth, there is a lot more to it that I think we have the benefit of hindsight with now as well. Absolutely. And it's really important to look at how this case still is a thread through so many current decisions and how that's grown and evolved over time. [Music]