ABSTRACT

The Gurindji people living in the Victoria River region of the Northern Territory are recognized as important pioneers of the ‘modern’ Aboriginal land rights movement in Australia. After walking off cattle stations where they were employed as stockmen and domestic workers over issues related to pay and working conditions in 1966, they squatted ‘illegally’ at a place long known to them as Daguragu, and known to white settlers as Wattie Creek. They sustained that occupation for nine years before winning some legal right to the land they claimed, and their action paved the way for new laws recognizing traditional Aboriginal rights to land in areas under the jurisdiction of the federal government. Their campsite at Daguragu was adjacent to a gorge where the bones of the dead had been stowed in caves for countless generations – where those killed by white vigilantes, pursuing Walbiri refugees of the infamous Coniston massacre of 1928, were also laid to rest. Central leaders of the walk-off had been born at Daguragu before it was annexed by a cattle station leased, in 1966, by the British food mogul Lord Vestey. Yet, when the land rights laws were enacted in 1976, the Gurindji still had to come up with some ‘proof’ that they had a traditional association with the land they claimed. Two white anthropologists – Patrick McConvell and Rod Hagen – were dispatched by the government-funded Northern (Aboriginal) Land Council to help the Gurindji prepare their case.