Documentary Tells of Battle for Native Land Rights

High Court case proved a turning point in Australian race relations

The screening of the award-winning documentary Mabo -- Life of an Island Man on Saturday night at the Film Archive provided a unique opportunity to introduce a Harvard audience to the current controversy in Australia concerning native land title, an issue relevant to indigenous communities throughout the world.

The screening, which drew an audience of about 150, was part of an Australian film series, "Imagining The Aborigine," curated by John Rickard, visiting professor of Australian studies. The documentary tells the story of the life of Eddie Mabo, a native of the Murray Islands who fought the High Court case which found, for the first time, that native land title is valid in Australia. The name 'Mabo' now symbolizes a crucial turning point in Australian race relations.

"We were fortunate that in screening Mabo, which was only released last year, we were able to bring to Harvard the director of the movie, Trevor Graham, and Eddie Mabo Jr.," said Rickard. Eddie Koiki Mabo, the subject of the movie, died in 1992, five months before the High Court handed down its historic decision.

In a discussion after the screening, Larissa Behrendt, an Aboriginal scholar completing a Ph.D. at the Law School on native land title, explained that, before Mabo, the legal view had been that Australia at the time of European settlement had, unlike North America, been terra nullius, that is, an empty, uninhabited land. The Mabo judgment not only found that Eddie Mabo's people, the Murray Islanders, retained their own system of land tenure, but declared that, with the overturning of terra nullius, mainland Aborigines were similarly in a position to argue claims for native land title.

Trevor Graham described his long involvement with the Mabo family, which goes back to an earlier documentary made in 1989. Later he filmed the ceremonial unveiling of the headstone over Mabo's grave in Townsville -- where Mabo had spent much of his adult life -- as well as the terrible discovery the next morning that the grave had been vandalized overnight. The film concludes with the poignant decision to return Mabo's body to his original Murray Island home.

One member of the audience expressed surprise at the frankness of the movie concerning Mabo's faults as well as his virtues, and wondered how the family had felt about this. Graham explained that he thought a 'warts-and-all' portrait was ultimately more effective in conveying the film's message.

Eddie Mabo Jr. described how the family, which had been consulted throughout, had weighed these issues and reached a consensus. The important thing for them, he said, was that they had wanted the story told of the life of the man behind the name "Mabo," the man about whom so little was known by the public, and who had dedicated much of his life, sometimes at the expense of his own family, to fighting for the cause of native land title.

Mabo -- Life of an Island Man won the Australian Film Institute Award for Best Documentary for 1997 and the New South Wales Premier's Literary Award for Best Script.

The film series, "Imagining the Aborigine," which comprised six programs in all, included one minor oddity, a 1940s short documentary, Walkabout, which was found in the vaults of the Peabody Museum. The Department of Anthropology and the Peabody Museum joined with the Committee on Australian Studies in sponsoring the series.