Jewish lawyer’s win
"Many of the people who started the claim have passed away, so the decision is bitter-sweet. The recognition is the end of a long journey home," says Jewish lawyer Eddy Neumann.
Jewish lawyer Eddy Neumann said he could “instantly relate” to the Wongkumara people after a decades-long legal battle resulted in Justice Bernard Murphy of the Federal Court making orders recognising Wongkumara people as native title holders over 48,000 sq km of land and water.
The remote area covers both Queensland and New South Wales and includes Camerons Corner, through which the Cooper Creek flows, parts of the Strzelecki Desert, and Sturt Stony desert, with Tibooburra as its only settlement.
Wongkumara lawyer Neumann said the Wongkumara people have been continuously lobbying and struggling for decades to receive native title recognition, “starting with their first native title claim which we lodged under the Commonwealth Native Title Act in 1996”.
“Many of the people who started the claim have passed away, so the decision is bitter-sweet. The recognition is the end of a long journey home.”
Neumann told The AJN that the Wongkumara People, “were completely dispossessed from their traditional country, but battled on because they had never lost their connection to their land”.
“As their lawyer and a Jew and child of survivors of the Holocaust, I could instantly relate to them and their situation and became committed to helping them in their struggle for rightful recognition.”
In determining that Wongkumara native title exists, Justice Murphy reflected on the harsh experiences inflicted on the Wongkumara people.
“In 1938 the NSW government forcibly carted Wongkumara people in trucks from their camp on the outskirts of Tibooburra to an Aboriginal settlement at Brewarrina and settlements further afield,” said Justice Murphy.
“Many Wongkumara people were pastoral workers on remote cattle stations and they did not know that their families had been taken away until they returned to the camp, or where their families had been taken.”
Wongkumara people struggled for years to return to their traditional lands which includes many sacred and ceremonial sites including bora rings rock carvings, stone arrangements as well as tool making and ochre sites.
The decision is the first occasion native title has been recognised across the Queensland/NSW border and the resolution of the native title claim by consent of all parties includes a compensation package negotiated with the State of NSW.
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