Widow Tackles Unfinished Business Of Eddie Mabo
The Age
Tuesday April 30, 2002
Bonita Mabo wasn't in the High Court the day her late husband achieved one of the biggest victories in Australian legal history, but it wasn't for lack of trying.
She was at home in Townsville when word came that the decision was imminent. When all else failed, she rang her son, Mal, in Cairns.
"Jump in your car," she said. ``We're driving to Canberra!" Mal Mabo had recently serviced his Volvo station wagon and had $50 cash. He didn't hesitate.
Mrs Mabo and one daughter, Bethel, were picked up several hours later. Two more daughters, Celuia and Jessie, joined them outside Mackay, and another son, Mario, came on board in Rockhampton.
Finally, Eddie junior squeezed in in Brisbane. Their combined kitty was $150, barely enough to pay for the petrol.
They were on the outskirts of Sydney when Mrs Mabo stopped at a pay phone to ring home for news, only to be told by daughter Maleta they were too late. Eddie Mabo had won.
``We all had a cry and went into Sydney, had some sandwiches and a cup of tea to celebrate. Then we drove back again," Mrs Mabo recalled yesterday. But not before they affixed a sign to the side windows saying ``Mabo won". All the way home, Mrs Mabo says, those who saw the sign would beep their horns and wave.
When the 10th anniversary of the Mabo decision is commemorated with a dinner and memorial lecture in Melbourne on June 3, Mrs Mabo will be among the invited guests. So, too, will her 10 children and ``the bigger ones" of the couple's 37 grandchildren.
The title of the two-day Unfinished Business Conference on June 4 and 5 is recognition of a task incomplete, but Mrs Mabo remains cautiously optimistic that the court's decision can be a catalyst for lasting reconciliation.
``Everyone wants to make a difference overnight, but you just have to take it one day at a time," she told The Age.
The key, she says, is for indigenous people to first reconcile with each other and for non-indigenous Australians to listen to the stories of Aboriginal Australia.
Eddie Mabo was Bonita's first boyfriend and, after their marriage, they were turned away from several Queensland hotels because of their colour.
``We would catch the train into town to do shopping or go to the doctor, and have to shelter with the children in the railway station toilets where they had seats out of the wind until the train the next day."
Eddie Mabo worked as fisherman, a cane cutter, a fettler on the railways, a labourer, a gardener, the headmaster of the Black Community School in Townsville and a union official. But his lifetime occupation was as an agitator for change.
This brought him enemies in the indigenous, as well as the non-indigenous, communities and some of his lowest moments came after his ideas were rejected at community meetings on his Mer island home and in Townsville.
``He never said anything about the way he was treated by our own black people. He took it to the grave with him, but I'm certainly not taking it to the grave with me," Mrs Mabo said.
She intends to write the story of her husband's struggle and to campaign for recognition of South Sea Islanders within the Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander community. But her greatest ambition is for June 3 to be declared a national holiday in honour of ``a man who changed history".
THE MABO STORY
• Eddie Koiki Mabo, right, was born on Mer, one of the Murray Islands, in the Torres Strait on June 29, 1936.
• At a land rights conference at James Cook University in January, 1981, a group of Murray Islanders, with Mabo as the leading litigant, decided to take their claim for native title to court.
• The case began in May, 1982 and was heard in the High Court 10 years later.
• Mabo died of cancer on January 21, 1992.
• On June 3, 1992, by a majority of six to one, the High Court recognised the traditional rights of indigenous people to ownership of their land, ending the legal fiction of terra nullius, that Australian land was without legal owners before white settlement.
© 2002 The Age
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