11/06/2026
South Australia took a national lead in land rights legislation with the passage of the Aboriginal Lands Trust Act in 1966, which consolidated all existing Aboriginal reserve lands and placed them under the control of a board made up of Aboriginal representatives.
In allied developments, reserves formerly under the control of government-appointed superintendents who were given to Aboriginal community councils.
As the land rights movement gathered pace in the 1970s, South Australia continued to be in the vanguard. The Pitjantjatjara Land Rights Act initiated by the Dunstan government was passed in 1981 in modified form by the Liberal government of David Tonkin, and the Maralinga-Tjarutja Land Rights Act was passed in 1984.
None of these acts, however, constituted a recognition of native title, which came in 1992 with the High Court’s decision in Mabo. How far that recognition will go, and all that it entails, remain to be seen.
The Mabo decision came about, in part, through a historical re‑examination of nineteenth-century British attitudes toward Indigenous rights to land, and arguments concerning Aboriginal rights to land in South Australia in the 1830s constituted an important part of that process.
