THE CONNECTION OF THE POSSUM NATIVE TITLE GROUP TO THE DETERMINATION AREA
32 In his 2017 report and supplementary report, Mr Wood (and Dr Thompson, who prepared a chapter within Mr Wood's 2017 report) presents connection material in relation to the areas he was briefed to report on. In preparing the reports, Mr Wood states that he relies on existing anthropological and linguistic research as well as his own research, including extensive site-mapping by four-wheel drive, boat, and foot.
33 Mr Wood describes how the ancestors of the native title group members occupied the determination area prior to effective sovereignty. He describes at [84] of his 2017 report how "all clans and language divisions of the Report Area are interlocked by a common body of customary law and depend on that for a reasonably stable jural and social order". He also describes the importance of family connections and stories, and how:
The Stories, their sites, and the presence on an estate of its 'Old People' - the spirits of both its recent and ancestral dead - together comprise the repository of clan identity and owner status, and provide both with transcendent authority. That is, these things serve to elevate estate tenures above the merely human level, by embedding them in the origins of the cosmos and the spiritual power of myth and ancestors.
34 In his conclusions as to pre-sovereignty society and law and customs, Mr Wood describes connection in the following terms:
persons and landed groups are seen as related to their country in a way that is similar to the flesh and blood way they are related to kin. This is what connection to land in part means in Peninsula thought: a literal, organic connection, always implicating the notion of source, and of an order in which the boundaries are weak between the living person and their place, and between the country and its ancestral dead. A person and the places he or she was intimately associated with during their life become mutually identified, not just in the memory of the living, but in the sense of entering into each other's constitution. They cannot be separated in quite the way that is possible in western thought, with its fuller distinction between what westerners understand as animate subjects and inanimate objects. In Aboriginal thought the boundaries of the person are not co-terminus with their body, nor so clearly drawn off from their environment.
Given such a cosmology, a belief in direct, immediate communication between people and the country and its spirits is unsurprising, and all older and many younger people with whom I have spoken have personal experiences of this to relate. When in country that is not one's own, such communication is expected to be in the nature of hostility from the resident Old People and site beings toward oneself as a trespasser, and is associated with anxiety, sleeplessness, frightening apparitions of old men or women, difficulty in finding food and water, and often accident or illness. But in their own country a person is expected to feel at ease, and may receive intuitions and messages from the Old People, who will be pleased with (and revitalized by?) their presence in the country, by their smell, and by the smoke of their fires. They will "give them" (assist them to find) food and water from the country, and will appear to them in the guise of animals that approach the camp to peer at them, signal, or otherwise behave in unusual ways.
35 Mr Wood explains that this connection continues today, concluding that:
the character of Aboriginal society within and around the Report Area retains the same essential ordering by lateral kinship and vertical descent grouping, and the lives of the claimants are lived within a cultural and kinship world strongly diverging from that of their European neighbours.
(Emphasis omitted.)
36 He also concludes that the traditional owners of the area are actively involved with their traditional country, through their daily lives, employment projects in the region, and the customary activities of camping, swimming, fishing, hunting and gathering resources of the region for cultural purposes.
37 The applicant submits that the connection material establishes a credible basis for the proposition that the Kuku Warra, Thaypan, Possum and Wik and Wik Way native title groups have maintained their connection to their respective determination areas under their respective traditional laws and customs since prior to sovereignty. The State supports that submission, and I accept it.
38 The evidence supporting the Possum group descriptions, and the identification of apical ancestors, is found throughout the reports prepared by Mr Wood and Ms Waters. Ms Waters' work concentrates on the correct identification of apical ancestors, and is, like her work for other determinations in this proceeding, thorough and careful. The State accepts this material, and there is no objection from the other parties to the present determinations.
39 As I explained in the 2021 determinations, it is the group members who "live and understand their law and custom, and how it connects them to their country" (Kuuku Ya'u determination at [68]; Uutaalnganu determination at [59]), so it is appropriate to refer to some of the group member material before the Court.
40 Palmer Lee Cheu is a member of the Possum group. In his evidence, Mr Lee Cheu describes going out on to country for fishing, hunting and other activities, and how when he was younger he would go out onto country with his father to get didgeridoos from the juvenile messmate tree. He describes fishing for barra, jewfish, catties and spotties, and how he can find Cheribin and freshwater crayfish. He also describes hunting pigs, kangaroos, goanna, porcupine, and plain turkeys. Mr Lee Cheu also describes his rights to use the resources of his country, including taking rich soil from the creeks and rivers after a flood to use it for gardening.
41 Bruce Clem Meldrum, whose evidence I have referred to in the Thaypan determination reasons, also identifies as a Possum man. He describes his own knowledge of country, and the importance of passing that knowledge on to his children:
I pass on knowledge to my children, and extended family when they are old enough to understand.
42 Mr Meldrum describes rules around using resources from the land. He says:
I have rights to take resources without permission in my traditional areas. Like fishing, and turtle, camping, cutting trees, take animals etc.
And people ask me permission for them to enter my country and take resources.
I can take things like wood for any purpose. The old people traded with neighbours.
There are strict rules that you don't take too much.
43 There is a credible basis in the connection material before the Court to support recognition of the native title of the Possum People.