Malo

Wilfred:
We're going to perform one of our main dance. It's a shark dance.

It's about our former god, Malo Bomai. He came to Murray Island shores here, three hundred years ago and he settled down and made eight tribes on Murray Island here where we still keep our traditional tribes, eight tribes.

This dance that we do here is one of the shark clan. We're going to perform it for the judges and the lawyers here, today.


Narrator:
Malo, a Murray Island god, is believed to have arrived on Mer in the form of an octopus, to unite the island's eight clans, which previously worshipped different gods.

Islanders say that Malo gave them laws and religious leaders to govern their lives. They claim that land ownership and cultivation were regulated by Malo's laws and that his teachings continue to influence their relationship to the land. It's this claim which has made Malo worship a central issue in the Murray Island case.

Queensland's lawyers argue that no such system of land law or government can be proved, and that Malo worship ceased to exist when the London Missionary Society converted islanders to Christianity at the end of the nineteenth century.

• Time Immemorial
• The Plaintiffs
• Terra Nullius
• Murray Island Annexation
• Great Northern Expedition
• Land Boundaries
• Meriam Land
• Hearsay & Oral Tradition
• Sea Rights
• Yirrkala & Gove
• Malo
• Malo & Christianity
• Malo's Laws
• Meriam Land Disputes
• The Hearings Conclude
• Moynihan's Findings
• The High Court Decision
• Tragedy & Victory
• The Political Response
• The Legacy Of A Tiny Island
• 
  Entire Land Bilong Islanders online film (75mb)