Bonita Mabo’s wish was for a national public holiday – Mabo Day

We should honour the dying wish of the remarkable Bonita Mabo, wife of native title champion Eddie Mabo, with a national public holiday, Mabo Day, writes Peter Michael.

B ONITA Mabo had a dying wish.

It’s the same wish she’d make upon the stars of the Beizam (Shark) constellation in the night sky.

Gentle, frail, softly-spoken, Dr Mabo – matriarch, activist, trailblazer – wasn’t one to beat her own drum.

“Mabo Day,” she’d say.

“It should be for everyone. I could go to my grave happy to know that it is a day for all Australians.”

It was her late husband Eddie Koiki Mabo’s dying wish too. “Eddie said on his death bed he would like a national holiday for all Australians,” Bonita told The Courier-Mail in 2012 during an interview marking the 20th anniversary of the High Court Mabo decision.

“And so I thought we should do away with the Queen’s Birthday holiday – it’s not even held on her birthday – and replace it with Mabo Day.”

Bonita Mabo in 2012, for the 20th anniversary of the Mabo case.

It is almost impossible to think that June 3 – the date of the Mabo judgment – could one day become a national public holiday.

Few can forget our collective racist shame when vandals desecrated Eddie’s grave in Townsville with Nazi swastikas and racial slurs.

Mabo’s body was moved to Murray (Mer) Island, and buried in a traditional ceremony reserved for Meriam Kings, which had not been performed for over 80 years.

E ddie Koiki Mabo was a song man. His guiding light lives on in the stars known by white man as the Great Bear or the Big Dipper.

His clan was Beizam, named after that shark constellation, seen in skies above his coral-atoll island home, on the edge of the continental shelf off the tip of Cape York.

Mer is a stunning volcanic peak island – red soil, white beaches, waters teeming with fish, jutting into the Coral Sea. It is most eastwards in the string of islands between Australia and Papua New Guinea.

His song, or the story of Malo, tells how stars follow their own paths across the sky.

It’s a timeless tale told from father to child. It is one of birthright and destiny.

Mabo is today a name that echoes throughout Australia and beyond.

Eddie ‘Kioki’ Mabo’s name echoes throughout Australia and beyond

His fight for land rights led to the landmark 1992 High Court decision that quashed the fiction of “terra nullius”, the legal principle that the continent was uninhabited before white settlers arrived.

The prime minister at the time, Paul Keating, applauded the decision, saying it removed the greatest barrier to reconciliation.

“By doing away with the bizarre conceit that this continent had no owners prior to the settlement of Europeans, Mabo establishes a fundamental truth and lays the basis for justice,” Keating said in his historic speech at Sydney’s Redfern Park.

“There is nothing to fear or to lose in the recognition of historical truth, or the extension of social justice, or the deepening of Australian social democracy to include indigenous Australians.”

“He (Eddie) is a hero,” Dr Bonita Mabo told this writer, also on the 20th anniversary of that historic day. “I’m proud of him. He stood up to the lot of them. He’s my star.”

She’s now joined him in that hallowed place as a champion of indigenous human rights in Australia.

Former prime minister Paul Keating surrounded by people at Redfern Park in Sydney, December 10, 1992

B onita Mabo, 75, died in Brisbane on Monday. She’d been living in her hometown of Townsville until she succumbed to illness in a long battle with a heart condition and diabetes.

A mother of 10, she will be farewelled at a state funeral in Townsville this month.

She died just days after being awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters from James Cook University in recognition of her work which included
co-founding Australia’s first indigenous community school, the Black Community School in Townsville.

“Bonita Mabo was a remarkable woman who possessed a deep, quiet strength,” Prime Minister Scott Morrison said, in paying tribute.

“One of the great First Nations women of our time,” federal Labor MP Linda Burney posted to Twitter. “Fighting ’til the very end for the great truth of this nation.”

Eddie Mabo’s grave on Mer. Photo: Life of an Island Man.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has said the state funeral is a chance to honour Bonita Mabo and reflect on her “outstanding life and legacy”.

Jackie Trad, Queensland’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Partnerships Minister, hailed Bonita Mabo as an “incredibly important and enduring voice for change” for First Nations and South Sea Islander peoples: “A matriarch, an activist and a trailblazer, she will be greatly missed.”

Aboriginal activist Professor Marcia Langton says Dr Mabo, a traditional owner of the former strife-torn mission of Palm Island and descendant of the blackbirding days of slavery, was a heroine.

“Respect for her spirit,” says Professor Marcia Langton.

“She quietly supported her late husband’s long struggle for native title, while raising their children,” Langton says, adding she had maintained her dignity and the dignity of indigenous Australians in the face of great hardship.

“She was a victim of the terrible state-enforced racism and later the vicious racism in Townsville after Koiki Mabo’s passing.

“Respect to her spirit as she joins Koiki on the other side.”

All that’s left now is to honour the dying wish of the matriarch – and celebrate how far we’ve come as a nation – with Mabo Day.

Email Peter Michael