Eddie Mabo

Edward Koiki Sambo was born on Mer, or Murray Island, in the Torres Strait, and was raised by his uncle Benny Mabo under island custom after his mother died. At sixteen the island council banished him for a year for a drinking offence, and he went to the mainland, working on pearling luggers, cutting cane and laying railway track before settling in Townsville. He married Bonita Neehow, raised ten children, and became active in unions and Aboriginal and Islander organisations, helping to found a community school for Black children in 1973.

For eight years he worked as a groundsman at James Cook University, and took to sitting in on lectures. Over lunch one day two historians, Henry Reynolds and Noel Loos, explained that in Australian law his family's land on Mer, which had been passed down for generations by clear rules that everyone on the island understood, belonged to the Crown. He was astonished, and angry. Australia had been settled on the doctrine of terra nullius, land belonging to no one.

In 1982 he and four other Meriam people filed a claim in the High Court. Queensland passed a law to extinguish their rights retrospectively; the court struck it down. The case then went back to the Queensland Supreme Court for years of evidence, during which the judge questioned Mabo's own standing, since he had been adopted, and had spent most of his life away.

He died of cancer in January 1992. On 3 June the High Court ruled six to one that native title existed and had survived. In 1995 his grave in Townsville was vandalised with swastikas, and his family reburied him on Mer.