Australia United

Before European settlement, Aboriginal people had been living in all parts of Australia in different language groups in different areas, respecting the land of other groups and observing appropriate laws and "protocols" when travelling into neighbouring country.

Despite the obvious presence of Aboriginals, the Australian continent was regarded by the colonisers as terra nullius - an empty, uninhabited land - and was progressively taken without any negotiation with the Aboriginal inhabitants.

This false doctrine was the gulf that divided the country. There could be no true peace as long as terra nullius was the country's constitutional foundation.

As the settlement grew, more and more land was given to the settlers. The dispossession of Aboriginal land in the last century was accompanied by policies of forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families since the very first days of European occupation of Australia. This policy lasted until the 1970s. The Stolen Generations Report of the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission (1997), found that the policy met the United Nations definition of genocide.

As a result of their dispossession Australia's indigenous people have a life expectancy some 20 years below the rest of the population. It was only in 1967 that a referendum was passed allowing the Aboriginal people to be counted in the census, effectively to be regarded as citizens of the land in which they had lived for over 50,000 years.

In 1992, an historic High Court decision - in the Mabo case - challenged many of the historic assumptions of land holding and land rights. First, it established that Aboriginal people originally owned the country under their own laws and that this ownership was recognised by English law; second, it recognised that many millions of land grants and purchases had taken place over the past 200 years and non-Aboriginal people now owned these lands. This meant that whatever rights Aboriginal people would have to land title - other Australians could not lose the rights they have gained over the past 200 years.

The Mabo decision acknowledged, for the first time, that the laws and customs of Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander people, which it called "native title", were recognised as part of the common law in Australia. The government has the task of helping all Australians work out how to apply the High Court's decision in practice. However, the government proposes to increase the rights of pastoralists by broadening their use of leased lands at the expense of the common-law rights of the Aboriginal people to have access to their land. Aboriginal people are set to be further dispossessed.

Aboriginal people want what other people in a democratic society want: access to their rights as human beings. Their social, cultural and spiritual existence is bound up in the land. Aboriginal people need continued access to their traditional lands if they are to survive as a people. The native-title debate in Australia is about much more than rights to property. It is ultimately about the survival of the custodians of the world's oldest living culture.

The Aboriginal people have proposed that problems which might exist can be resolved by negotiation and that a solution that takes away the rights of any group is no solution at all. For 200 years, Aboriginal people have lost their lands and have had their children taken away. The current generation of Australians have a decision to make - to repeat the sins of the past or to sit down and talk out a just resolution that will enable the survival of Australia's Aboriginal people. We have the possibility of an historic compromise. This is the important role that can be played by young people both here in Australia and in other places. It is important for young Australians to be fully included in the national debate, not just because it will effect their future, but because it affects their present. They have an important role to be involved in decisions that impact on their lives and the life of the country - and onhow Australia is seen in the eyes of our Asia-Pacific region and the rest of the world.

Noel Pearson is director of the Cape York Land Council in northern Queensland, Australia. He will speak at the Let's Talk conference in Birmingham in September and will visit Ireland along with a group of young Australians.

Let's Talk Oz project will commence in October and run for two years, to peak around the time of the Sydney Olympics in September 2000. Over this period, Let's Talk will provide an opportunity for thousands of young people from Australia and outside to have a say in issues such as the quest for reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians and the idea of an Australian Republic. All sectors of Australia's multicultural community will be represented.

The co-ordinating group for Let's Talk Australia is Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation (ANTaR), a coalition of community groups, unions, churches and nongovernment agencies and more than 100,000 ordinary Australians committed to coexistence and reconciliation.