Central Land Council

The Land is Always Alive

The Yamba Mob

In June 1989 five Arrernte families set up a protest camp alongside the Stuart Highway forty-five kilometres north of Alice Springs. The families, who were known as the Yambah mob, had been fighting for fourteen years for title to their traditional land, and they resolved to stay put until they got justice.

The CLC began negotiations on behalf of the Lynch, McMillan, Palmer, Rice and Turner families in 1975 and in the early 1980s lodged land claims on nearby stock routes and reserves. The families formed the Mpweringe-Arnpipe Council in 1984 and moved out of Alice Springs to set up camps on a stock route and reserve near Yambah Station and demonstrate their commitment to their traditional country. Because they had no 'legal' land title, government departments refused to provide even the most basic services, and even drinking water had to be carted by truck from Alice Springs and stored in recycled forty-four-gallon fuel drums. They resisted intimidation and gunshots, but after five years of patience they decided it was time to increase the pressure with a visible protest camp.

Over forty people moved into the roadside camp, living in canvas tents and donated tin sheds with an old minibus serving as a classroom for the children. The story of the Yambah mob and their fight for living areas and excisions helped to focus national attention on 'the people that land rights forgot' – the people who were forced off their country by the pastoral industry.

We have done everything asked of us under whitefella law to try to get a small part of our land back,' said Magdalene Lynch. 'Our fathers, mothers, grandmothers and grandfathers built up these cattle stations. But the greed of the pastoralists, the pigheadedness of the Northern Territory Government, and the failure of the Federal Government to provide for us as directed by white Australia in the 1967 referendum, has led us to despair and now to direct action.'

The Yambah protest camp built political pressure for the Memorandum of Agreement between the Federal and Territory Governments and as part of that agreement the families were promised title to forty-three square kilometers at Black Tank Bore on the Sandover Stock Route and three small areas on the North-South Stock Route at Yambah.