Aboriginal legend says that when human beings needed a place to live the god Beiral sent his messenger Yendingie and the goddess Kgari to create the land and mountains, river and sea. Kgari fell in love with its beauty and wanted to stay so Yendingie turned her into the island. Kgari (meaning Paradise) also known as Fraser Island (its colonial name), the worlds largest sand island, was occupied for 5,000 years by Aboriginal peoples until Europeans arrived in 1840s. 70 years later Aboriginals had either been wiped out or relocated off Kgari to Missions in Queensland. So it is an absolute breakthrough to announce that only this week, the Federal court granted Native Title * rights to Kgari back to the Butchulla people, recognising their original custodianship of that land and its resources. * The Native Title Act 1993 is recognition by the Australian government that Indigenous peoples have rights and interest to their land that come from their traditional laws and customs. In Maori culture we call this manawhenua. Pakeha author James Ritchie (in Becoming Bicultural) writes: No land is peopleless or story less and if, for a time, we forgot those stories and ignored those people, now it is a time to remember whose land it was, to whom the manawhenua had always belonged, even if the ownership rests, for now, in other hands.
Posted on: Thu, 30 Oct 2014 19:44:24 +0000
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