Land Rights Stalled

The Ranger agreement and the Noonkanbah dispute showed the limitations of modern land rights policies. For despite the 1967 referendum, the power of the states over land remained essentially unchanged.

Fortunately, enough native reserves survived from the nineteenth century to allow some Australian governments to transfer large tracts of land to indigenous owners during the 1970's and eighties.

Government land purchases during these decades also helped reunite other aboriginal Australians with their land, although the results were uneven.

However, by the mid 1980s, the momentum for land rights reform had stalled. And in the complacent and increasingly fearful political atmosphere of the 1990's, the Mabo and Wik High Court judgments came as bombshells.