Edward Koiki Mabo: The Journey to Native Title - [API] Network

Eddie Mabo
woman, in October 1959. They saved enough to begin buying a house and had
settled into a comfortable suburban existence when Koiki’s increasing involvement
in black and white politics again brought him into conflict with forces of reaction in
Queensland that identified black activism with white political radicalism.
While working between 1954 and 1957 on luggers that visited the mainland, he
had realised how exploited Torres Strait Islanders were in comparison with white
workers. Islanders were given, he estimated, about one quarter of the wages of an
equivalent white worker and even this income was controlled by a paternalistic
administration. He realised islander initiative was being stifled because the islander
owners of company boats had to sell their shell to the Queensland government at a
much lower price than the owners of master boats received. He also realised that the
Queensland government was subsidising its administration through its involvement
in the Torres Strait Island fisheries. Although the Queensland department of native
affairs practised a policy of soft, personalised control with regard to Torres Strait
Islanders, Mabo realised that his people were just as effectively ‘kept in their place’
as an inferior caste as were Queensland’s Aboriginal people. He was later to entitle
one of his notices in the native title campaign: ‘Qld Govt is our Friendly Enemy’. 5
In 1960, at Hughenden in western Queensland, Mabo had become involved with
the trade union movement when he became a spokesman and union representative
for Torres Strait Islanders working on the Townsville-Mount Isa rail-reconstruction
project. This involvement was to deepen when he moved back to Townsville. In the
west, he had personally encountered racism in the workplace, brushing it aside with
a quite dignity that reflected his assessment that this was what you had to expect
from white Australia. When it affected his young wife and their two small children,
he found it much harder to tolerate:
Several times we brought our kids in to Hughenden when they were sick and the
doctor would see them — Eddie and Maria for instance, when they were babies,
when we were out west. And we couldn’t get a lift. We didn’t have a vehicle at that
time ... And there was no way of getting back so we had to go to the nearest pub, or
whatever, and ask for a room. And for all the times that we used to come in, all of
the pubs didn’t take us. They wouldn’t accept black money, or probably they thought
we’d leave our skins on the sheets. 6
Such discrimination also helped to politicise his wife, Bonita, whose religious
upbringing had initially made her hostile to black activism, trade unions and leftwing
politics, even the labor party.
While working as a labourer at the Townsville harbour board, Koiki soon found
that the whites most supportive of black advancement were radical trade union leaders,
especially the members of the communist party which had supported the Aboriginal
cause since the 1930s. 7 At the time, Mabo did not know what the communist party
was, nor indeed care. It was the only political party whose members were willing to
work with the black advancement movement in a non-paternalistic way. Two black
representatives were invited to attend Townsville’s trades and labour council meetings,
generally Mabo and another executive member of the Aboriginal advancement league,
Dick Hoolihan. They were encouraged to bring up black issues, but not to expect the
white unionists to speak for them. At the TLC meetings and at associated conferences,
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