My dad, Eddie Mabo, a man who changed history

GAIL Mabo was a teenager when her father Eddie, a proud Torres Strait Islander, sat her down and made a promise.

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GAIL Mabo was a teenager when her father Eddie, a proud Torres Strait Islander, sat her down and promised her: "One day, my girl, all of Australia is going to know my name."

It was 1985. Three years earlier, the man from remote Mer Island at the top of Australia launched a bold land rights claim in the High Court, and his middle daughter was sceptical of the outcome. "Being 15, you think, 'Yeah, whatever, Dad'," Ms Mabo told The Australian yesterday.

"But on the day of the High Court judgment in 1992, it came down and it was fact. I cried and said, 'Dad, you were right'."

It was 20 years ago this Sunday that the court delivered its landmark ruling, forcing the recognition of indigenous native title.

With that, the fiction of terra nullius - that Australia belonged to no one when first claimed by the British - was overturned.

The course of Australian history and law was changed. Since then, there have been 141 native title declarations, covering at least 16 per cent of the nation.

But Eddie - or Koiki, as he preferred to be called - Mabo did not live to see justice done. He had died of cancer four months earlier, and for his daughter, the loss is still raw.

"Twenty years isn't but a dot," she said last night from Canberra, before opening a celebration of the judgment's anniversary.

Memories of Mabo are vivid for historian Henry Reynolds, who met the young activist in Townsville in the 1960s.

Their friendship was about a decade old when the pair and academic Noel Loos met for a regular lunch in 1974 in the grounds of James Cook University, where Mabo was working as a gardener.

One lunch is burned into Professor Reynolds's mind - it was when Mabo found he did not own his beloved traditional land in the Torres Strait: "I said to him one day, 'You haven't been there for 10 years, how do you know your land will still be there for you when you go back?'

"He said, 'Everybody knows it's Mabo land, it's been Mabo land for generations - no one would dream of trying to move in on it'." Professor Reynolds realised Mabo did not know his traditional ownership was not recognised by law, and that his home islands were crown land. As Professor Reynolds remembers, that conversation "struck the spark".

In 1981, at a native title conference in Townsville organised by Professor Loos, Mabo met solicitor Greg McIntyre and other legal people at the forefront of the debate. There, the decision was made to take Mabo's case as a test to the High Court. Proceedings were filed in 1992, with Mabo as one of the plaintiffs and Mr McIntyre as one of his lawyers.

The legal battle was long and hard, taking a toll on Mabo's wife, Bonita, and his family.

For Gail Mabo, her father's tireless fight has left her with a fierce pride. "With what Dad's done for indigenous Australia, they've now found their voice."