Little wonder the report labelled these injustices a “genocide”, and certainly the testimonies show how the gap in living standards between white and indigenous Australians was forged. And, even now, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations die far younger than their white compatriots, while they struggle more with unemployment and workplace discrimination. These problems, repeated right across Australia, feel intractable — and in the end, they’re all based on the continent’s dusty red soil. For centuries, indigenous Australians have had their land snatched from beneath their feet, pushed metaphorically and literally to the outer limits of their ancestral homelands. This physical expulsion continues to have disastrous consequences, not just socially but also culturally, with communities struggling to preserve their traditions or determine their futures. Money matters here too: landlessness among many indigenous Australians means that they’ve long been shut out from the profits of the country’s vast mineral wealth.

Now, though, things may finally be changing. The Truth Commission’s final report is likely to transform life for Victoria’s First Nations peoples, with land reform just one result among many. Victoria is far from alone. It is part of a broader trend increasingly repeated from coast to coast. Taken together, Aboriginals now have rights or ownership to over half of Australia’s territory, and are increasingly being treated as partners in resource management — even if their fight for land, and the wider struggle for equality and fair treatment, is very far from done.

Indigenous dispossession has a long history in Australia. Britain started settling the continent in the late 1700s, establishing a penal colony at Botany Bay in 1788. A mix of settlers and convicts soon arrived — and what they found were some of the oldest cultures on earth. Most Aboriginal Australians were hunter-gatherers, and their ties to the land were intimate and complex. Consider the Kulin clans of central Victoria state, where tribal members traditionally inherited land access and use rights through the male line, but could also hunt and gather in other selected areas, and had additional access via their mother.

Soon enough, though, British settlers had displaced Aboriginals en masse, even as European diseases ravaged their populations. The government largely justified land seizures on the basis of racial superiority — and the fact that Aboriginal cultures didn’t have a centralized sovereign state to speak on their behalf. That native Australians lacked Western conceptions of property rights didn’t help either, with an 1837 House of Commons report summarizing Aboriginals as “barbarous” and “entirely destitute of the rudest forms of civil polity.”

Beyond official grants, meanwhile, some whites simply squatted on Aboriginal land. Ranchers claimed huge areas of the continent’s interior, setting up what became known as “stations”. Their sheep and cattle often destroyed the local ecosystems that Aboriginals relied on for food. With no good alternatives, many Aboriginals formed encampments at the headquarters of stations and worked for settlers, sometimes in slave-like conditions. Others migrated to towns or Christians missions, or else crowded into insalubrious “reserves” separate from whites.

“Protection” policies appeared from the 1860s. They quickly devolved into an ugly form of quasi-feudal control, with the mixed children of Aboriginal parents snatched away and given to white families. Segregation endured well into the Fifties and Sixties, at which point there was a shift toward assimilation. The Australian government increasingly started treating Aboriginals like other Australians before the law. But though that bolstered their individual rights, it ignored their unique ties to the land.

The Yolngu are a powerful example of a community that helped drive Australia’s transformation in its treatment of First Nations people. When the government created the “exclusively Aboriginal” Arnhem Land Aboriginal Reserve in the Northern Territory, in 1931, the Yolngu thought that their land would be safe from outside incursions. But they were wrong. The Australian government intervened in the area several decades later, with the aim of handing a piece of the Yolngu reserve over to a bauxite mining firm.

The Yolngu were not consulted in the land seizure, and in response crafted a now-famous set of petitions to the House of Representatives. Fashioned out of tree bark, their 1963 argument was simple. They’d used the land in question for hunting and food gathering “from time immemorial: we were all born here”. Even so, the government denied the Yolngu petition, while a 1969 court case they launched also failed. Over subsequent years, the mining company, “came and they destroyed the land” one Yolngu leader, Djawa Yunupingu, told me. That loss of resources put pressure on the Yolngu, while the fight to get it back strained clan relations too.

Though the Yolngu lost the case, the episode marked a turning point for Aboriginals. Native activism spread from the mid-Sixties, and episodes like the Gurindji “walk-off” at the Wave Hill cattle station brought national attention. The 1972 election swept Labor to power, with the party vowing to advance Aboriginal land rights. That culminated in a landmark 1976 bill, known as the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act.

Aboriginals could now claim ownership over land in the Northern Territory — where most of them lived — if they could prove traditional association to it through songs, stories or rituals. The Yolngu took full advantage of this. After finding the head of a crocodile in an illegal fishing camp, likely severed by an intruder, in 1996 they started painting a series of tree bark images of their stories and philosophies, and how that linked to their sandy coastal home. Those paintings became key documents in a landmark court case that granted them sea rights in the Blue Mud Bay from 2008.

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The Aboriginal Land Rights Act ultimately helped transfer 50% of the Northern Territory to Aboriginal ownership, more than initially envisioned. All the same, the 1976 Act had limits. The biggest was that it applied only to the Northern Territory, which was administered by the federal government. Most of the Aboriginal population living in other Australian states, with a few exceptions, still lacked recourse for traditional land claims.

That changed in 1992, with a historic High Court decision that upended policy dating back to the British: it ruled that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people could hold “native title” to land based on traditional laws and customs, and that this would be recognized under Australian common law. In Mabo v. Queensland, the court held that while the British crown, and subsequently the Australian government, could extinguish native title — it could nonetheless survive in places where the state didn’t explicitly dispose of it. Follow-up laws established a legal basis for lodging claims to recuperate land, and strengthened native title by allowing it to operate alongside pastoral or mining leases.

Some of the wins for land protections for First Nations peoples of the early and mid-Nineties were subsequently rowed back. In some places, especially in areas settled by whites, rights tended toward protecting heritage and access to sacred sites — rather than gaining full control over land. Yet, despite setbacks in parliament and in court, the return of land to First Nations people has advanced in ways that can’t easily be undone, putting Australia on a new trajectory in its relations with Aboriginal communities. First Nations people now have native title over about 40% of Australia, and that figure is only growing.

In 2019, on behalf of the Gumatj clan, the Yolngu filed a claim for native land title in Arnhem Land, and also lodged an application for compensation for the government’s decades-old land seizure in the area. The government argued that it had the authority to overturn native title — and that it didn’t have to provide compensation for property it repurposed in that corner of Australia. Ultimately, though, the Federal Court rejected all of these arguments, and allowed the case to proceed. In May 2023, in a decision with potentially wide-ranging repercussions, the Federal Court ruled that the Gumatj clan was eligible for compensation over the government land grab. In mid-March this year, the High Court upheld the decision.

Even so, the case highlights how the nature of Aboriginal land rights varies across Australia’s states and territories. First Nations people own more land and have stronger rights in the western half of the country. The Northern Territory stands out as the high point of Aboriginal land rights, notwithstanding remaining contestation over claims.

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But land rights are now expanding across prized eastern areas too. In 2021, for instance, the Queensland government returned four nature reserves, including the iconic Daintree National Park, to the Eastern Kukuu Yalanji people. Spanning nearly half a million acres, it’s only one of several local parks now owned by Aboriginals. Marking the handover, Queensland’s environment minister said the move “rights the wrongs of the past” and marks “a step forward in that path to reconciliation.” In 2023, meanwhile, the state of Victoria recognized the Eastern Maar people as owners of a considerable tract of coastal land, including part of a national park.

Despite the progress for First Nations people, however, restitution is incomplete. There remain hard and controversial limits to land returns in Australia. Most of the land recognized as belonging to Aboriginals sits in remote areas of the country, far from cities or sources of wealth. At the same time, the Australian government retains the power to limit native title to grant mining or pastoral leases. Using this power, the Queensland government squashed native title over 1,385 hectares of Wangan and Jagalingou country in 2019. For all the fanfare, Victoria’s truth commission may yet run into problems too, with the state government reluctant to reform the state’s criminal justice system, and its national counterpart under pressure to go further, faster.

History has a long shadow — and for Aboriginal Australians, that shadow is dark. Two centuries of dispossession, cultural erasure, segregation and assimilation can’t be remedied in a generation or two. Even so, the growing recognition of Aboriginal land rights can serve as a foundation for closing the gap with whites, whether in Yirrkala or anywhere else.

***

Adapted from Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn’t, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies (Basic Books)

Driving through the town’s little streets at night, it wasn’t unusual to see people staggering across the roads in a drunken stupor. One night I saw a woman, completely naked, crawling along the side of the road. Day in and day out, binge drinkers stumbled through the doors of the liquor store, some smelling as if they hadn’t washed for weeks. A few even relieved themselves in the store. Theft was almost an hourly event, and fights over alcohol were common; stores were prone to being ransacked by mobs of up to 15 people, forcing staff and security against walls or bailed up by flying bottles of bourbon, while their comrades made away with cartons of wine.

In 2022 the problem reached its zenith, when the small Outback town of 25,000 accumulated 2,653 reported assaults. There was a 53% rise in alcohol-related assaults: shopkeepers installed metal barricades to prevent burglaries and concrete bollards were put up on roads to stop stolen cars. “We’ve already filled the jails,” warned the state’s police commissioner.

In January last year, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese arrived for an emergency meeting, keen to resolve the local disorder ahead of his divisive “Voice” referendum on indigenous representation to the Australian Parliament. The meeting ended on a controversial note, with the re-imposition of a ban on the sale of alcohol to indigenous Australians in some communities, who make up a fifth of the population. Since its reintroduction, there has been a substantial drop in domestic violence and other antisocial behaviour. However, recent months has seen a rise in crime by indigenous youths in Alice Springs and the imposition of a temporary 6pm curfew.

Many white Australians believe that Aboriginal people cannot be trusted with alcohol, a view echoed by some authorities on drug addiction. Psychiatrist and former White House drug czar, Robert DuPont, captures this sentiment in his 1997 book, The Selfish Brain: Learning from Addiction. He bemoans that: “To see Native Americans suffer from the use of alcohol and other drugs, and even cigarettes, or to see similar suffering among Australian Aborigines, is to face the painful reality that traditional cultures are not prepared to withstand exposure to modern drugs and to tolerant values governing drug-taking behaviour.” His book suggests that non-indigenous culture is superior in regulating social standards surrounding dangerous drugs such as alcohol, while tough pressure is required from an external source — white governments — to prevent their use in indigenous cultures.

What DuPont doesn’t seem to grasp is that Aboriginal culture does not exist in an a-historical vacuum. Stripping a culture of its regulatory mechanisms for discordant social behaviour and then declaring that culture to be inherently inferior in regulating substances intertwined with that behaviour leaves much to be desired in DuPont’s diagnosis of the problem. And in any case, if proximity to traditional Aboriginal culture could explain addiction, then the indigenous children of the “Stolen Generations” — taken from their parents and raised as white people as part of Australia’s Assimilation Policy — should have fared relatively well. Instead, they descended into a spiral of substance abuse. Christina Green, who as a child was taken by the government and raised in Parramatta Girls Home, recalled: “Most girls became depressed, suicidal and addicted to drugs and alcohol later in life.”

These children suffered horrific psychological scars — and some were abused and raped in the institutions that tried to assimilate them. In his book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction,Canadian physician Gabor Maté explains how trauma in Australian indigenous communities has been passed from one generation to another through violence, sexual abuse, and child neglect that originally emanated from the trauma of colonialism. “If you look at why addicts are soothing themselves through chemicals… you will see that they have all experienced childhood adversity — the pain and distress that they needed to escape.” This explanation is not without its critics, such as those who would point to extreme levels of violence in indigenous communities prior to white contact. Moreover, confining the explanation to psychopathology derived from the childhood period seems to miss far broader determinants of addiction.

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That is because trauma is not the only cause of addiction: boredom is another trigger. In his book, Maté draws from a well-known case study. During the Vietnam War, many American soldiers became addicted to opiates, causing an alarmed American public to prepare for an avalanche of returning addicted soldiers — who instead spontaneously quit drugs once back in the United States. This story is often told to highlight the causal role of the stress and boredom of war on drug addiction. Bruce Alexander’s now infamous Rat Park experiments in the Seventies came to a similar conclusion: taking fun activities away from rats induced them to drink a morphine solution that they otherwise couldn’t stand while living a normal rat life.

I’ve met my fair share of indigenous people who drink or use drugs for no other reason than stress or boredom. During the pandemic, I took up a position as a case manager in a drug rehabilitation service for indigenous people in the minute town of Katherine, to the north of Alice Springs. It was the only such centre in a 300-kilometre radius. One afternoon, I was in my office when a support worker reported a client missing who had that day tested positive for THC and had broken his parole conditions. Pushing through the long grass that extends into the bushland around the facility, I found the young Aboriginal man sitting in the bushes, wondering whether to make a dash for it. “Why did you decide to use ganja?” I asked him. It was a response I became used to hearing: “Rehabilitation is boring.”

Two years later, I found myself working in the largest drug and alcohol detox and rehabilitation facility in Darwin, the capital city of the Northern Territory of Australia. One indigenous woman, Patricia (not her real name), was a former heroin-turned-methamphetamine addict. Over a period of six months, she’d tell me about the often highly embarrassing misadventures she had in trying to support her meth habit. It seemed that she held nothing back in these discussions — the people she’d slept with for money, diseases she had picked up, thefts she had carried out.  As a former secretary for a prosecutor, she was also incredibly bright; we discussed Charles Darwin and our shared love of psychology. With her intellectual curiosity and openness to discussing anything in her life no matter how raw and embarrassing, you would think that our conversation would have uncovered some form of childhood trauma. But there was nothing. She insisted that she had enjoyed a happy childhood, received all the love and support she could have asked for, wanted for nothing, and didn’t suffer any trauma that she could put a finger on. Her introduction to drugs was simply a response to the boredom of her early adulthood.

One night, Patricia turned up at the rehabilitation facility in a meth-induced psychosis, claiming that she hadn’t slept in a week. It was obvious that she required urgent medical care, but due to Darwin’s overstretched ambulance service and limited staff in the night-time hours, there was no one. I sat alone with her for hours, as she twisted, gyrated, and cursed. It was the last I saw of her.

If we are to get to the root of indigenous alcohol abuse, we have to take this apathy seriously. Much of it comes down to extreme levels of unemployment, which a series of Australian governments has tried to tackle to no avail. Stripped of the traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle, a purgatory of chronic boredom now afflicts their communities. But there’s another problem: as in the case of Patricia, indigenous people often start taking drugs after gaining employment, especially in menial, repetitive jobs, such as in an abattoir or factory. Some have implied to me that their substance abuse is a product of the boredom and monotony of white man’s work. But there’s another way in which employment gives rise to stress in Aboriginal culture.

I would often sit with Aboriginal clients while they talked with government welfare officers. One question that was routinely asked was: “On a score of one to ten, how confident are you that you will look for work?” I never heard a client give any response other than one. In Alice Springs, I worked with an Aboriginal man, an extraordinarily bright and dedicated member of staff. But he had a problem with his family members coming into the store and asking for his pay check every week. One day, he finally decided to take the advice offered to him by so many non-indigenous people: he told his family that he wouldn’t slavishly hand over all the money he earned at his job. He was subsequently thrown out of a car and reversed over, losing both legs. Given the resentment in communal Aboriginal culture towards anyone who hoards resources individually, it’s no wonder that the usual refrain that Aboriginals should “go out and get a job” so often falls upon deaf ears. This deepens the mystery as how to integrate communal hunter-gatherer cultures into an industrial economy.

It’s also worth noting that when it comes to indigenous alcohol abuse, addiction is not the only problem. Aboriginals are less likely than white Australians to use alcohol according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and — according to a study published in Drug and Alcohol Review last year — are no more likely to be physiologically dependent on alcohol than white Australians. The problem, in many cases, is the occasional binge.

This is what claimed the life of Jimmy, my kindly, middle-aged Aboriginal neighbour whom I befriended in Alice Springs. In the months I knew him — and we spent a lot of time sitting on the porch discussing Egyptian archaeology — I didn’t see Jimmy drink once, until one day when he started drinking and didn’t stop. That night, my partner and I briefly attended his birthday party, and she sang a karaoke duet with him. The following day I woke to find police extracting his dead body from his apartment. He was last seen drinking himself silly. As I would later discover, indigenous people are more likely to go on dangerous alcohol binges, punctuated by periods of abstinence, than go through long periods of constant drinking that we associate with addiction.

Some surmise that the historical bans on alcohol consumption by indigenous people meant that they would be more likely to drink alcohol rapidly should they chance to acquire it. But what needs explanation is not only the rapidity of drinking, but the continuance. And this could be blamed on the loss of daily structure concomitant with having traditional lifeways and responsibilities washed away. Humans are good at blaming people. I suspect that many people reading this are readying themselves to blame someone for the plight of Aboriginals — the colonialists, contemporary non-indigenous people, Aboriginals themselves — in order to tie a complicated psycho-social problem into a neat little package. But these narratives over-simplify matters and offer only a low-resolution narrative as to how we got here.