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Sharing common ground: the Ngarinyin people's desire for equal engagement with European law has some way to travel writes.

Article Excerpt
On 8 December last year, Ross Sundberg, a Federal court judge, with his host of office bearers and seventy-odd Aboriginal witnesses and their families--having travelled together by road, plane and helicopter, for several weeks at a time, across the length and breadth of Ngarinyin country; having listened to stories and songs about the country; having dined on bush foods on shady river banks and trudged into sandstone gorges; having been ritually cleansed by smoking ceremonies at ancestral Wanjina cave-painting sites; and sitting through many weeks of detailed and difficult evidence in hot community halls and sheds--at last determined that the Ngarinyin, Worrorra and Wunambal people's native title to the northern Kimberley area of Western Australia had indeed survived the process of colonisation.

The claimants were able to prove the particulars of their request for exclusive use, occupation and enjoyment of the entire claim area, Australia's largest to date 'as against the rest of the world'. Sometime in the middle of 2004, these people celebrated this step forward, as the final determination of Native Title was signed off, at a ceremony...

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