On This Day in History: August 16

Wave Hill Walk Off

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The Gurindji people are Aboriginal Australians living in the north part of the continent. And like with so many Indigenous groups around the world, European colonizers showed up, stole their land, and got down to the genocide. In 1966, a group of Gurindji said fuck this and went on strike to get some of their land back. And they succeeded. 

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: August 16, 1975--

Known as the Wave Hill walk-off, the strike was led by Gurindji man Vincent Lingiari. Lingiari was a stockman at the Wave Hill cattle station, where the Aboriginal “workers” were “paid” with food, clothing, and tobacco. And that’s it. That’s not work, that sounds more like slavery. Beginning in August of 1966, Lingiari led 200 stockmen, servants, and their families in a strike that would last six years. 

It wasn’t just working and living conditions that prompted the strike. The main impetus to the walk-off was a demand to have some of their traditional lands—lands their ancestors first inhabited 48,000 years ago—returned to them, which covered 1,250 square miles of the northern territory before all those easily sunburned sacks of slug snot showed up and stole it. 

Late in the 19th century the colonists granted pastoralist Nathan Buchanan the region to set up his station with a thousand cattle. A decade later there were 15,000 cattle and 8,000 oxen. The Gurindji found their watering holes fenced off and fouled by all the quadrupeds. Not only that, the animals trampled the shit out of a lot of the food these hunter-gatherer people relied on to survive. If the Gurindji dared to eat the cattle, they were massacred. On the verge of extinction, many had no choice but to work for the cattle station for bare subsistence living. In the 1930s the government investigated conditions at the station and determined the owners were “quite ruthless in denying their Aboriginal labour proper access to basic human rights.” 

Because of the 1966 strike, the “owners” made some concessions, but Vincent and the Gurindji said get fucked we want our land back and they relocated themselves to Daguragu in a technically illegal occupation, according to Australian law. And they stayed there for seven years. Meanwhile, public support for the Gurindji grew. 

In 1972 the Labor Party came to power under Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. Aboriginal land rights were part of his agenda, and he began negotiations. The Vestey Group owned Wave Creek, and Whitlam got them to give back a small portion of the land they occupied to the Gurindji on August 16, 1975, in a symbolic handover ceremony. The action became a pivotal moment in the history of Aboriginal land rights in Australia, leading to legislation that allowed Indigenous Australians to apply for native title to their traditional lands. Forty-five years later, 1,900 square miles of Wave Hill Station land was granted as native title to traditional owners. 

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