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Gurindji People Demand A Better Deal
200 workers walked off the Wave Hill cattle station in the Nothern Territory. They wanted better wages and conditions, and their traditional lands back. The Gurinjdi eventually gained ownership of the area in 1985. -
Freedom Riders Demand Equal Treatment
A group led by Aboriginal activist Charles Perkins made a bus tour through New South Wales. They protested about discrimination in shops, theatres, bars, clubs and swimming pools. -
White Voters Demand A Better Deal For The First Australians
After a 90% "yes" vote the government gave Indigenous Australians the right to vote and be counted in censuses, and ended the protection policies. -
Aboriginal Tent Embassy Set Up In Canberra
The Embassy said that blacks were now going to get up and fight back on the issues of education, health, police victimisation, locking people up. Bobby Skyes, aboriginal activist. -
Land Rights To Be Granted To First Australians
A government commission recommended that Aboriginals should get back the land where they now lived and had traditionally lived. -
First Aboriginal Land Rights Act
However this Nothern Territory law only gave the indigenous people some areas of arid and and largely useless land. Other land claims were often thrown out by the courts. -
The Government Denies That A 'Stolen Generation' Exists
In a Senate inquiry submission on compensation for forcibly removed children, it stated: "The government questions the reliability of claims about the 'stolen generation,' suggesting that, at most, up to 10% of children were separated for various reasons, some forcibly, some not. It argues the term is rhetorical." -
'Unfinished Business: Indigenous Stolen Wages' Report
This event received "compelling evidence that governments systematically withheld and mismanaged Indigenous wages and entitlements over decades". It also found that these practices "were still in place in the 1980s".