Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' rights and interests in land are formally recognised over around 50 per cent of Australia's land mass. Connection to land is of central importance to First Nations Australians.
Proportion of all land that is Indigenous owned or controlled. Nationally as at June 2022, 16.1 per cent of Australia's land area was owned or controlled by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. This is unchanged from the same time in the previous two years (June 2020 and 2021) (figure SE15a. 1).
The Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 (see above) provides the basis upon which Aboriginal Australian people in the Northern Territory can claim rights to land based on traditional occupation. The freehold land cannot be sold or transferred, but it can be leased.
Aboriginal Australians are split into two groups: Aboriginal peoples, who are related to those who already inhabited Australia when Britain began colonizing the island in 1788, and Torres Strait Islander peoples, who descend from residents of the Torres Strait Islands, a group of islands that is part of modern-day ...
“Land is very important to Aboriginal people with the common belief of 'we don't own the land, the land owns us'. Aboriginal people have always had a spiritual connection to their land, and because of this connection many Aboriginal people will not leave their country.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' rights and interests in land are formally recognised over around 50 per cent of Australia's land mass. Connection to land is of central importance to First Nations Australians.
The first thing that needs to be acknowledged is that Aboriginal people were the first people to live in Australia. This is fairly obvious. It is backed by science and is widely accepted by people from all around the world.
The islands were settled by different seafaring Melanesian cultures such as the Torres Strait Islanders over 2500 years ago, and cultural interactions continued via this route with the Aboriginal people of northeast Australia.
It is true that there has been, historically, a small number of claims that there were people in Australia before Australian Aborigines, but these claims have all been refuted and are no longer widely debated. The overwhelming weight of evidence supports the idea that Aboriginal people were the first Australians.
There is no one Aboriginal word that all Aborigines use for Australia; however, today they call Australia, ""Australia"" because that is what it is called today. There are more than 250 aboriginal tribes in Australia. Most of them didn't have a word for ""Australia""; they just named places around them.
Under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1983, if land owned by an Aboriginal Land Council falls within a certain category, it is automatically exempt from rates and charges that may be levied by a Local Government Area or Water Authority.
The figures for land ownership by country were split into leasehold and freehold land for the first time this year, with interests from the Netherlands owning the most freehold land at 1.65 million ha. China topped the leasehold table with 8.31 million ha, pulling ahead of the UK.
Taking into account the $300 million allocated for Indigenous housing and the $177 million underspend in 2021–22, the October 2022–23 Budget provides $1.1 billion more than the March 2022–23 Budget for Indigenous Australians-related matters, averaging $4.2 billion per year over the forward estimates.
Currently, 14.1 per cent of Australia's agricultural land is foreign owned, and China is the largest foreign owner (2.3 per cent). China is also the third-largest stakeholder of Australian water behind Canada and the US, owning 604 gigalitres or 1.5 per cent of the total Australian water entitlement.
The land is a link between all aspects of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people's existence - spirituality, culture, language, family, law and identity. Each person is entrusted with the cultural knowledge and responsibility to care for the land they identify with through kinship systems.
There are 10's of thousands of “full blood” aboriginals, in Arnhem Land you will rarely meet an aboriginal who has white ancestry. How are indigenous/aboriginal people treated in Australia?
The oldest human remains in Australia were found at Lake Mungo in south-west New South Wales, part of the Willandra Lakes system. This site has been occupied by Aboriginal people from at least 47,000 years ago to the present.
Aboriginal Australians have lived in the Northern Territory for more than 65,000 years. It is the oldest continuous culture on earth.
The researchers found that Aboriginal Australians diverged from Papuans some 37,000 years ago, before the Australian land mass separated from New Guinea roughly 10,000 years ago. The groups traveled into Australia from mainland Asia, becoming the ancestors to a large population of modern-day Australians.
Analysis of maternal genetic lineages revealed that Aboriginal populations moved into Australia around 50,000 years ago. They rapidly swept around the west and east coasts in parallel movements - meeting around the Nullarbor just west of modern-day Adelaide.
Co-lead researcher Shimona Kealy said these people probably travelled through Indonesia's northern islands, into New Guinea and then Australia, which were part of a single continent between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, when sea levels were 25-50 metres below the current level.
Wave Hill walk-off
Lingiari insisted that the land they were working on was the land of his people and demanded that it be returned. In 1975 Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam poured earth into the hands of Vincent Lingiari in a symbolic gesture of returning lands back to the Gurindji people.
There are 37,000 unresolved Aboriginal land claims in New South Wales awaiting determination by the government, including the first claim lodged under the land rights act in 1984. The backlog has been described as “a national disgrace” and a form of institutional racism.
It is generally held that Australian Aboriginal peoples originally came from Asia via insular Southeast Asia (now Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, East Timor, Indonesia, and the Philippines) and have been in Australia for at least 45,000–50,000 years.