Quick questions on The Mabo decision and terra nullius in HSC Aboriginal Studies

The deepest significance of Mabo is that it overturned terra nullius, the legal fiction that the continent had belonged to no one. For more than two centuries this fiction had been the foundation of dispossession, justifying the taking of land without treaty, consent or compensation. By rejecting it, the High Court recognised in law what Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples had always known: that they held the land under their own law before colonisation. This was a profound symbolic and moral shift, not only a legal one.

A genuine evaluation must weigh the limits. Native title can only be recognised where claimants prove a continuing connection under traditional law, a demanding test that disadvantages the very communities whose connection was forcibly broken by removal and dislocation. Native title can be extinguished by prior grants of freehold and other dealings, so on much of the most valuable land it simply does not exist. And the rights recognised are often partial.

A response that only describes what Mabo recognised, without testing that recognition against the connection test, extinguishment and the Wik/10 point plan narrowing, cannot reach the top band on an evaluate question.

The strongest responses do not stop at 1992: naming the Native Title Act 1993, the 1996 Wik decision, and the 1998 "10 point plan" shows the decision's aftermath, not just the moment, which is exactly what an evaluation of significance requires.

Native title is a common-law recognition of pre-existing rights subject to a connection test; land rights are a parliamentary grant. Mixing the two up in an answer signals a shaky understanding of the dot point's core distinction.