Briefing · Sixtieth anniversary, 23 August 2026

The Wave Hill Walk-off, Sixty Years On

Marchers in a Sydney street carry a painted banner reading Gurindji and Vesteys past Wynyard Station, with uniformed police walking alongside them. — Sydney, 1970 Four years into the strike, supporters marched through the city behind a banner naming Vesteys, the company that held the Wave Hill lease. Boycott committees in the southern capitals kept the Gurindji claim in front of the public through the years when governments would not move. *Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales and Courtesy SEARCH Foundation. CC BY 4.0. Cropped from the original.*

Nine years at Daguragu The Gurindji walked off in August 1966 and waited until August 1975. Theirs was the longest strike in Australian history, and it changed the law that followed it.

On the morning of 23 August 1966, Vincent Lingiari, a Gurindji stockman, led about two hundred Aboriginal workers and their families off Wave Hill cattle station in the Northern Territory. The station belonged to Vestey Brothers, a British pastoral company that had held the lease since 1914. Aboriginal workers there received rations, tobacco and clothing in place of proper wages, and lived in conditions that an inquiry had criticised as far back as the 1930s.

What began as a stand over pay became, within months, a demand for the return of Gurindji land. The strike lasted nine years. On 16 August 1975, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam poured a handful of red soil into Lingiari's hands and returned leasehold title over part of Wave Hill to its Traditional Owners, the first time an Australian government handed land back to an Aboriginal community.

Vincent Lingiari holds documents in one hand and reaches out the other as Gough Whitlam pours soil into it, with Gurindji people standing behind them. — Daguragu, 16 August 1975 Vincent Lingiari holds the lease documents while Gough Whitlam pours the soil. Nine years separate this moment from the morning the Gurindji walked off, and every one of those years was spent waiting on Country. *Photograph by A.K. Hanna. CC BY-SA 4.0.*

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Vincent Lingiari and the Wave Hill Walk-off

ABC Behind the News. A short, plain-language account made for a general audience.

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Why it matters, in six points

Wages were the beginning, never the whole of it. Unionists who supported the strike understood it as an industrial dispute. The Gurindji understood it as a claim on their own Country, and said so plainly once the walk-off was under way.
Nine years, not nine days. The Gurindji held their position across nine years, from 1966 until 1975. They moved camp to Daguragu in 1967 to sit closer to their sacred sites, petitioned the Governor-General, and were refused. They stayed anyway.
The land came back. Whitlam's handful of soil in August 1975 transferred leasehold title to the Gurindji people. Mervyn Bishop photographed the moment, and the image became one of the most recognised in Australian public life.
The law changed because of it. The Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 followed directly from Wave Hill, the first Australian legislation allowing First Nations people to claim title on proof of traditional connection to Country.
A song did the teaching that schools did not. Paul Kelly and Kev Carmody wrote "From Little Things Big Things Grow" in 1991, and it took the Wave Hill story to Australians who had never met it in a classroom.
Native title followed, decades later. The Gurindji were granted native title over Wave Hill Station in September 2020, fifty-four years after the walk-off began. The Gurindji Freedom Day Festival marks the anniversary at Kalkarindji each August, this year on the sixtieth anniversary itself.

Dexter Daniels speaks into a microphone at an outdoor rally, with placards and a crowd of listeners around him. — Roselands, 25 July 1970 Dexter Daniels speaks at a shopping centre rally supporting the boycott of Vestey products. Daniels organised for the North Australian Workers Union, and his conversations with Vestey stockmen helped set the walk-off in motion four years before this photograph. *Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales and Courtesy SEARCH Foundation. CC BY 4.0.*

“We just want our land back.”Vincent Lingiari, Gurindji Elder, 1966

The common ground, in Uncle Bill's words

Uncle Bill opens the Yarning Circle by naming this connection himself, before he introduces Remah. He does not say the two histories are the same. He says they share a shape, and these are the four points he draws.

Dispossession arrived on paper. Gurindji Country passed to a pastoral lease in 1883 without the consent of anyone who lived on it. The instrument was a document, not a battle, and Uncle Bill points to how often that is true on both sides of the parallel.
The claim outlasts the attention. Nine years of Gurindji persistence met long stretches of public silence. Uncle Bill sees the same endurance in a Palestinian claim that has now run through several generations.
The plainest sentence does the work. Lingiari said he wanted his land back. Remah Naji, standing with the Hayes family over the land occupied by Pine Gap, said she would be guided by First Nations people because she would also like her land back. Uncle Bill puts those two sentences beside one another deliberately.
Neither claim requires another people to disappear. The Gurindji sought their own return, not anyone else's removal. Uncle Bill is careful on this point, and extends Remah the same care when he introduces her.

A note on this page. The parallel above is Uncle Bill's own, offered here so that Remah has it in advance rather than meeting it for the first time in the room. Australians hold a wide range of views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and this briefing does not attempt to settle any of them. What it offers is the Australian half of the parallel, so that the introduction makes sense the moment Uncle Bill speaks it.

The companion piece to this one runs the other way. Nakba and Naksa sets out the two displacements that made Remah's parents refugees, as background for the Australians who will be sitting in the Darnell Room.

Sources

National Museum of Australia, Wave Hill Walk-Off, Defining Moments in Australian History.
National Archives of Australia, The Wave Hill walk-off.
SBS NITV, Explainer: what was the Gurindji land handback?
Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, Wave Hill Walk-Off Route, National Heritage listing.
Amnesty International Australia, The Wave Hill walk-off: how it sparked a land rights movement.
Gurindji Aboriginal Corporation, Gurindji Freedom Day Festival, Kalkarindji, 21 to 23 August 2026.

Back to Remah Naji's Yarning Circle page