Their island homes

As SBS unveils its groundbreaking indigenoushistory series, Rosemary Neill finds thelands rights story didn't end with Eddie Mabo.

As SBS unveils its groundbreaking indigenoushistory series, Rosemary Neill finds thelands rights story didn't end with Eddie Mabo.

ON a speck of an island closer to Papua New Guinea than the Australian mainland, Dave Passi points to the terns diving for sardines. Suddenly, hundreds of tiny, panicky fish leap from the water in a silvery rash. In his white shirt and green sarong (or lava-lava) edged with orange crochet, Passi watches the drama unfold from his front yard, a strip of almost silky sand that changed the course of Australian history.

A retired Anglican priest, Passi presides over his family’s land with a vaguely regal rather than proprietorial air. The plot reaches down to the translucent waters off Murray Island, the most remote of the Torres Strait Islands, about 300km off the tip of Cape York.

At Passi’s place, an upturned turtle shell the size of a laundry basket sits on top of an old tin shed. A small fishing dinghy rests nearby; Murray Islanders are keen fisherfolk and their waters, now the subject of a sea rights claim, teem with sardines, marlin, sharks and trochus shell.

Women sit beneath a grove of coconut palms hammering on shellfish to extract the meat for dinner. A gaggle of children weave in and out, playing tip and clambering up the leathery tree branches.

It’s an idyllic scene of traditional extended family life and Passi has a deep and abiding sense of belonging here. (Indeed, the graves of two family members are just metres from his house, an elevated white bungalow facing the sea.) ‘‘I was born here,’’ Passi says. ‘‘The only thing that will take me away from here will be my death, when He calls me home to Him.’’ Now 76, Passi, known as Father Dave, is the only living plaintiff of the original five claimants in the revolutionary Mabo High Court case.

‘‘I could challenge Muhammad Ali,’’ he says with a knowing grin as he walks gingerly across the sand.

In a little-known twist, it was Passi’s claim to his family’s plot that helped clear the way for the High Court’s momentous decision in June 1992, which ended the legal fiction of terra nullius, the idea that Australia had belonged to no one when the first white settlers arrived.

Passi appears as an unlikely fist-clenching activist in the final episode of First Australians, a $4.7 million, seven-part documentary series that airs on SBS from October 12. The multicultural broadcaster describes First Australians as the most important program it will screen this year.

The first indigenous-made series to tell the nation’s history from an indigenous perspective, it is directed by Aboriginal filmmaker Rachel Perkins, a slight woman with an outsized personality and an intensely collaborative way of working.

On a hot, windy day in August, Perkins and her sidekick and executive producer, Darren Dale, an Aboriginal man with a playful wit and 1000-watt smile, charter a ridiculously small plane to visit Murray Island, birthplace of Eddie Koiki Mabo, the father of native title.

With a population of just 450, the island, known locally as Mer, is so isolated and small, it’s all but invisible on many maps.

Dale and Perkins are visiting Murray, home to the Meriam people, to show community leaders, including Passi, an almost finished cut of the final episode of First Australians . Because she has promised to consult her indigenous interviewees at more or less every stage of production, Perkins can only hope, as the broadcast deadline bears down, that the Murray Islanders will like what they see. She admits to being ‘‘horribly nervous’’ about the screening.

On this four-day trip, Perkins and Dale will take 10 flights, two ferry rides and three hire cars in order to screen the same episode to Mabo’s family near Mackay, to other interviewees in Cairns and to Murray Islanders.

The episode uses Mabo’s epic struggle for native title rights — his case ground through the courts for 10 years — to tell the broader story of indigenous land rights.

Described in the documentary as a man who could see ‘‘far into the future and even further into the past’’, Mabo’s story has the elemental force of an ancient myth. An ordinary man, exiled from his island home at the age of 16 by conservative tribal elders and an outrageously paternalistic Queensland government, is shocked to learn in middle age that land his ancestors have lived on for hundreds — maybe thousands — of years belongs to the crown. The man takes on an entire government in the country’s highest court, and wins. Tragically, he dies of cancer in his wife’s arms less than five months before the High Court brings down its decision.

First Australians explores complications in the case. For instance, some Murray Islanders sided with the Queensland government in trying to shoot down the Mabo case. And in 1990 the case suffered a devastating blow when Mabo’s claims to land on Murray Island were found to lack credibility in the Queensland Supreme Court.

The case then pivoted on the land claims made by Passi, a cousin and childhood friend of Mabo’s, and the now dead claimant James Rice.

(However, Mabo remained a plaintiff and party to the Murray Islanders’ collective land claim in the High Court. Such was his influence on the case, his name is today synonymous with indigenous land rights.)
 
Back on Murray, Passi attends the First Australians screening in the community guesthouse barefoot. After a lunch of diet cordial, sandwiches and brightly coloured cake, the retired priest tells Review he always knew the Mabo case would succeed, despite the setbacks.

‘‘I never doubted it,’’ he says. ‘‘I knew we were going to win. We are talking about our land. We were here for thousands of years.

‘‘I always believed that this land was ours and that the Queensland government was only making a fool of itself, to make the claim that this land was theirs.’’ Yet Melbourne-based lawyer Bryan Keon- Cohen, who is writing a book about the Mabo case, and who appears in Perkins’s series, objects.

‘‘Let’s not rewrite history,’’ he says sternly. He points out that Passi and his brother Sam, another original claimant, at one point pulled out of the case without telling the legal team. ‘‘We were very alarmed because it weakened the whole claim,’’ the QC says.

The brothers eventually rejoined the case. It’s likely government and family pressure played a role in their temporary withdrawal, as a third Passi brother, George, a public servant, fiercely opposed Mabo’s claims and testified on behalf of the Queensland government.

Clearly, beneath the triumphal story told in First Australians is a bubbling cauldron of family and clan politics: a maelstrom of claims and counter-claims that continues to shape local allegiances. Despite Mabo’s achievement, some of those who live on Murray — a stunning, largely undeveloped island of eight tribes, one shop and no public transport—have always been ambivalent about him.

Keon-Cohen recalls how, in 1995, Mabo’s body was relocated to Las, his home village on Murray, after his Townsville grave was desecrated by neo- Nazis. Many dignitaries attended the ceremony, but Keon-Cohen says ‘‘there were some people on Murray Island who didn’t want Eddie’s widow (Bonita) to attend that ceremony . . . so figure that out.’’ Bonita Mabo tells Review that her son, Malcolm, who has inherited his father’s land on Murray, recently tried setting up a business there, but didn’t feel welcome. ‘‘Malcolm said: ‘Mum, they’re doing to me what they did to Dad,’ ’’ she says.

Such opposition to Mabo is easier to understand when we consider that after decades living on the mainland, the land rights activist made 36 land claims on Murray, some of them encroaching on land or traditional fishing traps claimed by others.

But it’s also true that land feuds on the island go back generations. Indeed, lawyers for Mabo argued in the High Court that such discord proved the existence of a system of formal land ownership among the Meriam people.

Murray Island community council chairman Ron Day says Mabo’s legacy continues through the collective Torres Strait Islander sea rights claim now before the courts (Mabo included such rights in his original claim). ‘‘He went to the highest court in the country with full confidence, because he knew what he was talking about,’’ says Day, an imposing figure who, like Passi, wears a lava-lava, a sign of of the island’s enduring Melanesian traditions.

Nevertheless, the era of native title has unintentionally provoked a rash of contested land claims on Murray, many resulting from tribal intermarriage. According to Day, 45 claims have been referred to a local land dispute tribunal; only three or four cases have been agreed through mediation. While the evidence suggests otherwise, Day insists: ‘‘There is no division.’’ Passi agrees Mabo was a stirrer ‘‘but in a good way’’. He still feels acutely the injustice of his friend Koiki having to seek permission to return home when his father was seriously ill in the mid- 1970s. Mabo, a born agitator, was asked to promise he would remain apolitical while on Murray. He objected, and didn’t make it home before his father passed away. ‘‘I was hurt by that,’’ Passi says. ‘‘That was his right to come back. His father was dying.’’ BONITA Mabo sits alone on a large corduroy couch. Two of her adult children, her sister Alison and neighbours give her space as she watches, for the first time, Perkins’s documentary about her husband’s eventful life and cruelly premature death. From time to time Bonita, wearing a purple lace top, tracksuit pants and gold hoop earrings, silently wipes her eyes with a hand towel.

In the documentary, we see her, considerably younger yet frailer in the rawness of her grief, talking about returning her husband’s body to Murray Island, where it now lies, surrounded by pink silk flowers and a thick curtain of forest.

‘‘I just found it too hard to do that. I didn’t want to part,’’ she says in a small, unsteady voice.

The screening at her daughter Celuia’s home at Armstrong Beach near Mackay is clearly exposing for Bonita, still statuesque and slender in her 70s. It’s exposing, too, for Perkins, who sits on the floor, seemingly chilled out, in a T-shirt and jeans. As the documentary ends, a long, grave silence engulfs the living room. Bonita’s son, Eddie Jr, a middle-aged man with a bone-dry sense of humour, breaks the ice. ‘‘Go on, Mum, pick it to pieces,’’ he jokes.

Clearly not given to big emotional gestures or extravagant praise, Bonita eventually declares the program is ‘‘all right’’ and goes to the kitchen to finish preparing lunch: an islander feast of damper, chicken and noodles, and sop-sop, or vegetables in coconut milk.

After lunch, she gives the documentary her seal of approval, telling Review it is ‘‘long overdue’’; that it annoys her that a celebrity such as Steve Irwin became a national hero when he died. She feels her husband has largely been denied this status.

A grandmother of 38 (including triplets) and survivor of triple bypass surgery, she switches, in the blink of an eye, from almost stony reticence to a sparky humour. When she married Eddie, she was a fresh-faced 17-year-old; did she know she was marrying a man who would provoke radical reform? ‘‘All we knew, he had a loud mouth,’’ she laughs. ‘‘He was outspoken, he wouldn’t kowtow to anyone.’’ Perkins’s documentary says that Mabo at one point received death threats. Given this, did Bonita ever think his quest for native title wasn’t worth it? She did suggest this to him once. ‘‘If looks could kill, I’d be dead meat,’’ she says with a chuckle. ‘‘It wasn’t on to say ‘just forget it’.’’ Since the High Court’s Mabo decision and the advent of native title legislation, Bonita, of South Sea Islander and Aboriginal heritage, has been busy unearthing her own family’s roots. Through a grandmother, she has been recognised as a traditional land owner on Palm Island, off the coast of Townsville. Malcolm, the son who inherited Eddie’s land on Murray Island, is living and working there, and she is as pleased as punch.

‘‘Eddie didn’t know anything about that (the Palm Island) connection,’’ she says.

She has also been to Vanuatu and lights up as she describes meeting other relatives for the first time: ‘‘We met our family there. Oh it was lovely.’’ Australia, she says, has yet to fully acknowledge the injustices done to South Sea Islanders who were used as slave or indentured labourers in Queensland cane fields in the 19th century. ‘‘They were stolen, taken by force,’’ she says with sudden ferocity.

A generation on, Eddie Jr suggests much of the prejudice his forebears — including his father — struggled against has been overcome.

‘‘Prejudice for me went right over my head,’’ he says, gesturing above his hair.

‘‘I haven’t had to face much of that in my life.

By the same token I have seen brothers who’ve had a worse time.’’ He downplays the resentment of some Murray Islanders towards his family as ‘‘just island politics’’. Noting how several of his siblings are active in indigenous land rights, dance and justice groups, he says with graceful economy: ‘‘Dad’s legacy lives on.’’ FOR someone so outwardly confident, Rachel Perkins is a bundle of nerves. She is anxious about the Murray Island and Mabo family screenings; about revealing the budget of First Australians ; about confirming she has narrated as well as directed and produced the series. She is so nervous about having this journalist tag along on the Murray Island trip, she banned me just before the departure date, before relenting.

Yet this daughter of civil rights activist Charles Perkins greeted the Mabos (and they her) like long-lost relatives. As she kicked off her thongs, offered to help in the kitchen, caught up on local gossip, you’d never have guessed this youthful 39-year-old was on edge.

But then, Perkins has taken on this daunting project and invested far too much in it, not to feel nervous. First Australians has taken six years to complete rather than the 21/2 years Perkins and Dale anticipated initially.

It spans two centuries, 70 interviews, several states, territories and funding bodies and tens of thousands of air and road miles.

On the advice of US documentary maker Ken Burns (of The Civil War repute), Perkins and Dale use specific characters and incidents to navigate an often bloodstained path through indigenous-white settler relations, from first contact to squatter land grabs, the Stolen Generations, the 1967 referendum and, finally, the Mabo decision. Some of the violence, particularly in early 19th-century Tasmania, was ‘‘so vile and incomprehensible’’ it depressed and angered Perkins, and left her at a loss about how to translate it into television.

In the end, Dale says drily, ‘‘we deliberately decided not to throttle people with horror.

People will just tune out.’’ The series also highlights positive relationships between whites and blacks. ‘‘I think it’s important to show the complexity of relationships,’’ Perkins says. ‘‘People assume it was all death and destruction, but there were acts of heroism on the white side and acts of, you know, very progressive people who spent their lives living with indigenous people.’’ Perkins hopes the series will cast the challenges indigenous people face today in a fresh light: ‘‘A lot of people don’t understand what land rights is about. They don’t understand why Aboriginal people don’t just go out and buy land.

Why people from the Stolen Generations feel the way they do. What this series is about, I suppose, is giving Australians context for those sorts of aspirations and conflicts.’’

Rosemary Neill travelled to Murray Island as a guest of SBS.