The late Indigenous land rights campaigner Eddie Mabo has been remembered on his birthday with a Google Doodle.
The image on Google’s Australian homepage shows Mabo as a young man and redirects to a search for “Eddie Mabo”.
Born Eddie Koiki Sambo, Mabo was born on the island of Mer in the Torres Strait in 1936. Wednesday would have been his 80th birthday.
He was a key plaintiff in a land rights case in the high court of Australia – seeking legal claim for ownership of lands on the island of Mer – that began in 1982.
The high court decided in his favour and upheld his native title claim 10 years later, after Mabo’s death from cancer at the age of 56 on 21 January 1992.
The landmark decision prompted Paul Keating’s Labor government to pass native title legislation in 1993, paving the way for further claims of traditional rights to land and compensation.
In 1996, the high court decided in the Wik case that pastoral leases did not necessarily extinguish native title rights, and the two could co-exist.
However, native title laws subsequently introduced by John Howard’s Coalition government in 1998 extinguished native title on pastoral leases.
