In 1901 the new nation wrote Aboriginal people out of its own Constitution. Over the next century, a movement of warriors, churches, unions and communities wrote them back in — and changed the law of the land.
01
Not citizens in their own land
The Constitution of 1901 excluded Aboriginal people from the census and barred the Commonwealth from making laws for them — most were subjects without a vote in their own country. 'Protection' acts on every state controlled where they could live and work, whom they could marry, and took their children.
Those removals created the Stolen Generations — generations of children removed from family and Country, documented in the 1997 Bringing Them Home report as a violation of human rights whose consequences are still being carried.
02
The movement that changed the map
Organising became resistance's new weapon. The Australian Aborigines' League and the Aborigines Progressive Association held the Day of Mourning in 1938; Charles Perkins led the Freedom Rides through NSW country towns in 1965, exposing segregation on film.
Faith Bandler and a generation of campaigners then did the slow, patient work: a decade of petitions and public argument for constitutional change. On 27 May 1967, 90.77% of Australians voted yes — the largest 'yes' in the nation's referendum history — to count Aboriginal people in the census and let the Commonwealth make laws for them.
03
Land, law and the end of terra nullius
In 1966 Vincent Lingiari led the Gurindji off Wave Hill station, turning a wages dispute into the modern land rights movement. The Aboriginal Tent Embassy, planted in 1972, made sovereignty impossible to ignore. In 1992, after ten years of litigation, the High Court's Mabo decision finally overturned terra nullius — the legal lie at the heart of the continent — and native title entered Australian law.
The 2000 Bridge Walks and the 2008 National Apology to the Stolen Generations brought the movement into the centre of national life. In 2017 the Uluru Statement from the Heart called for Voice, Treaty and Truth: 'In 1967 we were counted, in 2017 we seek to be heard.'
Politics rendered in pattern — country, kinship and the law
“It was we who did the discriminating. It was we who took the children from their mothers.”
— Prime Minister Paul Keating, Redfern Speech, 1992
Key moments
Faces of the era
Next — Chapter IV