Australian
Screen

Clip description

Father Frank Brennan, Eddie’s daughter Gail Mabo of the Meriam and Manbarra Nations and Donald Whaleboat of the Meriam Nation, talk about Eddie ‘Koiki’ Mabo and the outcomes of the trial. Narrator Rachel Perkins and historian Professor Marcia Langton of the Yiman-Bidjara Nation, accompanied by archival footage, describe the negative public reaction to the High Court decision.

Curator’s notes

After the High Court of Australia ruled that the first Australians were owners of the land prior to European occupation, it seems white Australia went into a panic that their values would be eradicated and their properties taken away from them. If only they could have seen that this is what the first Australians felt when the British arrived.

In the footage from A Current Affair (1988–current), Mike Munro asks ‘How safe is your home?’ in response to Aboriginal land claims which were supposedly expected to be made on suburban property. These sensationalist programs, even today, foster hate, ignorance and intolerance in pursuit of audience numbers. As part of what Marcia Langton calls a ‘campaign of fear’, the media encouraged hate towards Aboriginal people who were seen to be threatening the status quo.

With the empirical evidence stacked against the colonisers, it’s disheartening both that those involved in the discrediting of Aboriginal land claims could deny the centuries of Aboriginal suffering at the hands of British invaders, and that the public would believe them.