The work of the 1978 Inquiry and its two Reports revolutionised the NSW Government’s approach to consultation with Aboriginal people. This was from the outset a clear goal of its chair, Keane, who explained:

I had looked at previous committees that inquired into Aboriginal matters, and there had been many … those Committees composed of Parliamentarians rarely consulted the Aboriginal people in their deliberations. They seemed to concentrate on going to the councils in rural areas and suburban areas, meeting Aldermans, asking their opinion of Aboriginal situations but never asking the Aboriginal people and I was determined that I wouldn’t have a Committee that went down that path, so the first thing I did was ask the Premier’s Department for funds to employ Aboriginal people to assist the Committee (Keane, 2008).

Keane argued that the appointment of Aboriginal Liaison Officers was imperative ‘to assist mutual understanding and knowledge between the committee and the [A]boriginal communities’ and that ‘achieving the full co-operation of the Aboriginal community should be the highest priority to the Committee’ (Keane, c1978, p 4).  With the support of a paid Aboriginal Taskforce that included researchers and liaison officers, the Committee consulted widely, circulated a newsletter (Koori-Murri: Liaison News and Views) that extensively documented and reported back to Aboriginal communities, and made its hearings as accessible as possible to the public.

The formidable line-up of Aboriginal ‘researchers’ on the Taskforce provides some insight into the power and authenticity of the land rights movement and the engagement by leading Aboriginal intellectuals with the Government’s land rights response. Taskforce researchers included acclaimed poet Kevin Gilbert, Marcia Langton who was at the time midway through her undergraduate studies and was already identified and cultivated by the left as a future political apparatchik and later Pat O’Shane, practising solicitor and similarly schooled political operator, as coordinator.  The Taskforce – in addition to the members identified here – included a stellar line-up of leading Aboriginal intellectuals and advocates.  Each brought personal dynamics and interests that were in part forged under the oppressive social and political practices of the past. O’Shane and Langton for example, had both lived under the notoriously oppressive Queensland Government’s Aboriginals Regulations of 1945 overseen by the Director of Native Affairs. 

The Committee that made up the 1978 Inquiry actively sought to engage Aboriginal people in its processes in unprecedented ways. For example, the Committee met at various places throughout 1979 and early 1980, including reserves, community halls and open-air gatherings. The Committee members on visited camps with no sewerage, electricity or running water, where they perched on old car seats around a campfire.  In the interests of wide and genuine consultation, the Committee moved outside the confines of Parliament House and into very unfamiliar, and uncontrolled, environments and saw with their own the full extent of the discrimination and poverty many Aboriginal endured and they heard of the dreams, desires and passions for achieving a better future.

The Committee encouraged direct representations from community members and informally consulted throughout the state. It invited by letter 886 both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal individuals, 76 local Government bodies and 306 other organisations. One hundred and forty five witnesses appeared before it, and submissions were received from 55 individuals, five local Government organisations and 57 other organisations over a period of more than three years (NSW Government, First Report, 1980).

The land demand at this time was coherent and united and was pursued with new activism, strategies and organising skills and within a shifted political context. The fact that Aboriginal people were being listened to and taken seriously meant that expectations were rising.  The primacy of the achievement of land rights was echoed by many and persistently and persuasively made by South Coast elders from Wallaga Lake and Orient Point, prominent among them Gaboo Thomas, Percy Mumbler and Jack Campbell. Their correspondence with the Committee, a four-page document entitled ‘Statement of Concern’, outlined the land rights demand and importance of the Committee’s land rights focus:

The fact is, there is only one real problem facing N.S.W. Aborigines – and that is Land Rights. All these other things can be sorted out in time once we have our land. We want to be given back enough of our land with the guarantee that white people can never again take it from us. And we want enough compensation for the rest of our land, and for all the other criminal acts committed against our people, so that we can live independent of government (Campbell, Mumbler & Thomas, ‘Statement of concern…’, 1978, p 1).

The statement further outlined, ‘we can never have any pride and dignity until we are free and independent’ of the interference and control of Government.

The elders argued that: ‘True Land Rights and Self-determination mean that each Aboriginal community must be given the best possible guarantee within the white man’s system that it will possess its land in perpetuity’ (ibid, p 2). They were concerned to ensure some guarantee of security over land, as their land, not subject to Government control. They emphasised their abhorrence of Government control over their lives — through land they could be free of Government control and could reassert some level of sovereignty, perhaps much like the ways in which white Australians exercised freedom on their freehold land.  At this early stage, land justice equated autonomy from Government control; but it was an autonomy imagined in unrealistic terms. 

They also explained that the granting of land rights, of enough inalienable freehold land, would allow, ‘[us] to live the way that suits us best’ (ibid, p 3).  The South Coast elders, who were so instrumental at key times throughout the land rights movement, made a case for independence from Government authority that allowed for culturally informed modes of living and being on the security of one’s own land. The land demand as they expressed it was a cultural claim to land. 

This reflected the experience and present circumstances of the Wallaga Lake and Yuin people. The revocation of parts of the Wallaga Lake reserve in 1949, land that included a burial ground and which was later subdivided for white residences, loomed large in the landscape and the minds of the community, and served to underline the emphasis on security of title.  But it was mostly based on the Yuin people’s desire to ensure security of their land from Government plans to seize, relocate, sell and then subdivide what the Yuin viewed as their land.