Edward Koiki Mabo was an Indigenous Australian from the Torres Strait island Mer, also known as Murray Island. He was born on June 29, 1936 and passed away January 21, 1992. He is most well known for his activism and involvement in the land rights case, Mabo v Queensland. The case resulted in the acknowledgement that the Torres Strait Islanders had ownership over the Murray Islands, and the overturning of the doctrine Terra Nullius, which was instrumental to the future of Aboriginal land rights.

In 1956, Koiki Mabo was caught drinking and was ordered to leave Murray Island for twelve months. He had gotten into an argument with Paddy Killoran, the Deputy Director of the islands. Killoran threatened to put Koiki on his “green truck” which would mean working for no wages (Loos and Mabo, 2013:39). Instead he worked a job on a pearling boat. Mabo worked a few different jobs during this time. “From 1953 to 1957 he worked out of Murray on luggers, or pearling boats. In 1957 he moved to the mainland and until 1960 worked at first on luggers, then as a canecutter, a railroad worker, and as a laborer at the Townsville Harbour Board from 1962 to 1967 (Loos and Mabo, 2013:XXIII). In 1967, Koiki Mabo began working as a groundsman and gardener for James Cook University.

Koiki Mabo met his soon to be wife, Bonita Nehow, in 1958 while cane cutting in North Queensland. They were married in 1959, and had seven children together, and adopted three more.

The Black Community School was founded by Koiki Mabo and Burnum Burnum, another Aboriginal Australian activist. The school’s purpose was to teach Indigenous Australian children of the culture and language that they would otherwise be missing out on. The school was able to do this for twelve years, even though it dealt with funding issues, opposition from officers, and a hostile press campaign. Parental and community involvement were very important for the school. Koiki Mabo’s wife Bonita was involved in the school as a teacher’s aide, and Koiki himself had many roles in the school, such as Director of the school, President of the Parents’ Council, and worked as the executive officer.

Koiki Mabo was also invited to be a member of the National Aboriginal Education Committee, but he believed that he was there as a token for the Torres Strait Islanders. “Like many other Islanders, Mabo believed that Torres Strait Islander issues were being swamped by the sheer weight of numbers and political clout of his Aboriginal colleagues who, without malice, simply focused on their own issues” (Loos and Mabo, 2013:13).

Terra Nullius was the biggest obstacle in most land rights cases in Australia. Terra Nullius is a term used in public international law to refer to land that is not legally recognized to have ownership. Often, the land is inhabited by a group of people, usually some minority group, but Terra Nullius is used to legitimize state ownership (Coleman, 2018). In most land rights cases prior to Mabo v Queensland, the Australian government justified the taking of land by arguing that Aboriginal people had no claim to the land; that they belonged to the land as opposed to the land belonging to them. Mabo was confident in his case being different though. The people of Murray Island followed Malo’s Law. This was a set of rules, told through the stories of the original people of the island, passed down through generations of Mer Islanders. Mabo’s confidence came from Malo’s Laws showing divisions of land on Murray Island. There are buildings that are owned by individuals, farms owned by individuals, and the divided land was passed down from father to son. This claim to land was more in line with a European view of land ownership, where individual ownership of land is valued as opposed to the communal land rights that many other indigenous cultures have. This made the Mabo Case much more effective than other land right’s cases.

By 1990, two of the original claimants to the case had passed away, those who remained were Koiki Mabo, David Passi, and James Rice. There were complications moving forward in the case. Justice Moynihan saw that there was real land ownership by the people of Mer, but Mabo’s adoption was not lawfully recognized by the Queensland government, and therefore, was not the heir to his father’s land (Perkins and Cole, 2008). Although Mabo’s adoption was recognized by Meriam customs, to not distract from the other claimants’ case, Mabo chose not to appeal the ruling on his adoption, and decided to take separate legal representation (Perkins and Cole, 2008). This split the case in two: Mabo’s claims, and the other claimants, Passi and Rice’s claims.

By late 1991, Koiki Mabo was diagnosed with cancer of the throat, and spine. He only had months to live, and in January of 1992, Mabo passed away. Just months later, on 3 June 1992, the High Court ruled six to one in favor of Mabo that “the Meriam people are entitled as against the whole world, to possession, occupation, use and enjoyment of the lands of the Murray Islands” (Broome, 2019:330).

Some of Malo's Law with Translation

(Laade, 1973:160)