FIFTY years ago this week, the Northern Territory’s Gurindji, Mudburra and Warlpiri people made national news when Indigenous stockman and Gurindji man Vincent Lingiari led 200 workers and their families away from Wave Hill Station in what became known as the Wave Hill ‘walk-off’.
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Protesting against appalling working and living conditions, their actions became the birth of Aboriginal land rights in Australia.
Their strike – the longest in Australian history – eventually led to a ‘handback’ ceremony in 1975 during which the then prime minister Gough Whitlam gave them a pastoral lease over their traditional country and, in an act of symbolism, poured a handful of the red sand through Mr Lingiari’s hand.
Last Friday, thousands of people gathered at the Freedom Day Festival in the remote Indigenous community of Kalkaringi to commemorate the historic walk-off, with hundreds following the path of the walk themselves.
Indigenous Affairs minister Nigel Scullion, who attended the festival, acknowledged the walk-off as a “watershed moment in the journey to the recognition of land rights in Australia”.
"The Gurindji were pioneers of the Aboriginal land rights movement. I salute the courage of their convictions and the actions they took that made the rest of Australia stop and take notice,” he said.
