- SYDNEY (Reuters) - An Australian
state has agreed to hand back a slice of desert more than four times the
size of Belgium to its traditional Aboriginal owners 50 years after they
were driven out.
-
- The sprawling state of Western Australia expected a court
to ratify this week a deal to return 53,000 square miles of land to the
2,000-strong Martu people, a spokesman for deputy state premier Eric Ripper
said on Wednesday.
-
- "They have demonstrated that they are the traditional
owners of the area and have maintained those ties since the colonization
of Western Australia in 1829," Ripper told the state parliament.
-
- The mainly arid sand dunes and scrubland is the biggest
piece of land ever to be returned to native inhabitants by Australia.
-
- Some areas of traditional importance have been returned
in recent years to Aborigines, such as the tourism icon Uluru, or Ayer's
Rock, but claims covering cities such as Darwin in the north are still
outstanding.
-
- The Martu people continue to follow a traditional lifestyle,
hunting kangaroos and bush turkeys and speaking up to 12 distinct Aboriginal
languages within their small group.
-
- They were driven off their land in the 1950s because
the British government wanted to use it to test intercontinental ballistic
missiles, Australian media reported. The Martu returned to their ancestral
homes in the 1980s.
-
- They have been fighting for six years in a bid to regain
ownership over their homeland in the Gibson and Great Sandy deserts, where
they had traditional custodianship over sites considered important in ancient
"dream time" rituals.
-
- Mining and petroleum rights have been left out of the
Martu deal, as has the Rudall River National Park, because courts have
previously ruled that mining concessions, grazing leases and nature reserves
extinguish native title rights.
-
- Despite winning back some land, Australia's 400,000 Aborigines,
out of a population of 20 million, remain stuck at the bottom of all social
indicators. They die 20 years younger on average than other Australians
and are 15 times as likely to be jailed.
-
- Academics say part of the cause was a policy that ran
for most of last century under which indigenous children were taken from
their parents and placed with white families.
-
- Prime Minister John Howard has resisted calls to apologize
for the so-called "stolen generation," despite a government inquiry
ruling in 1997 that the policy was a form of genocide.
-
-
-
-
- Copyright © 2002 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited
without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable
for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance
thereon.
|
