NEWS Billion-buck compo bid

A LANDMARK native title compensation case to be launched by the Territory’s Gumatj clan could cost the Commonwealth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Gumatj leader Galarrwuy Yunupingu announced he would launch the claim over the destruction of his people’s land by mining companies against their wishes with the permission of the Commonwealth Government.

“That’s what I’m going to be claiming and I’m going to be telling that these mining companies, Nabalco number one and Rio Tinto, have ripped some land unmercifully,” he said.

“They have damaged our country without seeking advice to us and they have damaged all of the dreamings, dreamings that were important to Aboriginal people.”

The claim will be made against the Commonwealth, which allowed the mining companies to move in.

Legal sources last night told the Sunday Territorian the case could run to the hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars.

It follows an historic decision by the High Court earlier this year to uphold a Federal Court decision to award $2.5 million in compensation to traditional owners from Timber Creek.

That payment was not just for the physical damage to land, but also for the spiritual and emotional harm suffered by Aboriginal people over the destruction of sacred sites.

One of the traditional owners in that case had told the court of the “gut-wrenching” pain suffered watching the sites be destroyed.

Yesterday Dr Yunupingu spoke of his own pain watching mining companies destroy sacred rocks and trees in northeast Arnhem Land.

“They fired the rocks and took the rocks away,” he said.

While the Timber Creek case covered a parcel of land of just over one square kilometre, the Gumatj claim involves a far greater amount of land and far more serious destruction.