Eddie Mabo

Residence 1

📍Las village, Mer (Murray Island), Torres Strait, QLD 4875, Australia

“I was born Koiki Mabo in the village of Las, on Mer — Murray Island — in the eastern Torres Strait, and raised in Meriam law after my mother died and my uncle took me in by Islander custom. As a boy I fished and gardened on land that had been my family's for countless generations; I was taught, above all, to respect whose land was whose. We knew exactly where our boundaries lay. That certainty — that this ground was ours, by a law older than any British one — never left me. Years later, when a man told me my people had no rights to Mer, I knew in my bones he was wrong. And I set out to prove it.”

Sources: Wikipedia: Eddie Mabo

Residence 2

📍Townsville, QLD 4810, Australia

“In 1959 I came to Townsville, on the North Queensland coast, and made my life there — working the railways and the docks, raising my children, sweeping floors at the university where I was not allowed to enrol. It was in Townsville, talking with academics, that I learned the law called my island terra nullius — no one's land. I was astonished, then furious. From this mainland city I launched the case that would carry my name to the High Court and, in 1992, overturn that lie for the whole country. I did not live to hear the verdict. But Townsville is where a fisherman from Mer became Mabo.”

Sources: Wikipedia: Eddie Mabo