Voice Of The First Nations

Indigenous inequality is still embedded into Australia’s judicial system. One man has spent his whole life attempting to right those wrongs.  

Do First Nations people in Australia have equal rights? It seems the answer is, remarkably, still no, with this group continuing to face socioeconomic disadvantages from the legacies of colonialism. 

Last year a referendum brought by senator prime minister Anthony Albanese to enshrine a First Nations voice (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples) in the country’s constitution was unsuccessful. Senator Lidia Thorpe’s response was: [the government] “can’t support the minimum standards of our rights being adhered to in this country.” According to Human Rights Watch, a non-profit, “it is a blight on Australia’s history that successive governments have failed to uphold the rights of First Nations people”.  

Statistically, First Nations people struggle, with a life expectancy about 20 years less than non-Indigenous Australians, while their languages are disappearing, and their cultural practices are being eroded. According to Curtin University, Indigenous Australians are still paid less than their non-Indigenous peers and are more likely to be unemployed and incarcerated.  

At the forefront of the fight for equal rights in the country is activist ‘Ghillar’ Michael Anderson, who has been called “Australia’s Martin Luther King.” Now age 73, a Euahlayi Elder, Anderson has been campaigning since he was 20 years old and says he will do so until the day he dies. 

Growing up in a small town near Goodooga in New South Wales. He describes it as “completely segregated with no rights, not even a toilet, living in tin shanties without running water, we grew up living off the land. Yet I never thought of myself as in poverty”. 

In his 20s he moved to Sydney to study. It was there he became aware of the barriers of racial segregation and injustice in the community. In the 1970s the McMahon government pushed through a policy relating to Aboriginal land use, where Indigenous people would be granted 50-year leases of their land, while reserving for the Crown, “rights to minerals and forestry”. Australia did not gain complete independence from Britain until March 1986.  

 “We thought, this is our land, you are just occupying it, that’s not on,” says Anderson. “We have a right to self-determination, and a right to question the illegal occupancy of the British.”  

So began a David and Goliath story for the ages. In 1972 he and three other young Aboriginal men, Billy Craigie, Tony Coorey and Bertie Williams travelled from Sydney to Canberra to stage a protest. They called it the “Aboriginal Embassy” and with nothing but a few signs and a beach umbrella, they planted themselves on the lawn in front of Parliament House. 

The tent embassy had not happened in a vacuum. For several years there had been rumbles of change — the Freedom Rides, the bark petition to Parliament House from the Yolngu people and their legal case against mining company Nabalco.  

The small protest was soon joined by other tents and activists, presenting a list of demands to Parliament, including legal and mining rights for Aboriginal peoples, compensation for lost land and preservation of sacred sites. While the demands were rejected, the protest succeeded in uniting Aboriginal people throughout Australia, as well as mobilising a groundswell of non-Indigenous support from the rest of the world, after the embassy was covered by The New York Times and the BBC.  

When Labour party leader Gough Whitlam came into power as the 21st prime minister it marked a turning point, says Anderson. “They came and visited us in the Aboriginal Embassy and were in opposition to the way Aboriginal people were forced to live. He listened to us young ones and when he came into power, he made all those things a reality; he began to work with us, introducing the Northern Territory land rights legislation. He set about developing Aboriginal organisations, legal services, the loan commission, enabled better medical and housing, and brought in the National Aboriginal Consultative Committee. It set us on a path to determination. We got into universities and encouraged more young Aboriginal people to do the same.” 

Anderson was hired by Whitlam and spent some time in politics, working alongside some of the leaders of Black civil rights movement in the US.  

Unfortunately, Whitlam was ousted in 1975 and the leadership returned to the Conservative party. Some of his changes outlived his term, however, such as the Norhtern Territory land rights laws, which has seen some A$3.2 billion collected into the Aboriginal Benefits Account managed by the federal government. 

Anderson, now professor of astronomy at the University of Southern Queensland, with a son who has just finished a doctorate, is still fighting in the High Court for the rights of his people. “There are parts where the gap has closed but parts where it has got wider. We still have an apartheid regime in respect to land and economic development. There is only partial legal aid for Aborigines,” he says. He refers to recent rays of hope with the National Agreement on Closing the Gap where the government has made historic commitments to shared decision-making with Indigenous peoples.  

In 2022 the Aboriginal Embassy turned 50, becoming the longest continuous protest for Indigenous land rights in the world. Organisers said the anniversary is a chance for First Nations people to “honour and mourn our past, celebrate our survival and strategize for the next 50 years”.  

This article originally appeared in Billionaire's Longevity Issue, Summer 2024. To subscribe click here.