ABSTRACT
Legal recognition of their rights should be accorded to the Meriam people by the Commonwealth of Australia, and any extinguishment of said rights by the State of Queensland was grounds for payment of compensation. Aboriginal rights and interests were not stripped away by operation of the common law on first settlement by British colonists, but by the exercise of a sovereign authority over land exercised recurrently by governments. To treat the dispossession of the Australian Aboriginals as the working out of the Crown’s acquisition of ownership of all land on first settlement is contrary to history. Eddie Mabo was a member of the three-hundred-odd Meriam people of Murray Island in the Torres Strait of Australia. In the minimal public opposition expressed to constitutional change, a more prominent theme than the necessity to protect states’ rights was the imperative to shield Australia from racial discrimination and upheaval.
