Mabo has become the shorthand popular term used todescribe Indigenous rights, activism and nativetitle. The name (only the family name, rarely thefull name) itself stands in as leitmotif for thetension between so-called settlers and Australia'sFirst Peoples. Even though the ‘Mabo’ phenomenon ofthe 1990s has a long and complex history, it is moreoften perceived as the origin point for land rightsand claims of sovereignty. In this chapter, wesituate Mabo within a longer history of rightsactivism through an examination of Indigenous peoplein Victoria, in the southeast of Australia. Whilethe Mabo action was brought by the Meriam people ofthe Murray Islands against the state of Queenslandand the Commonwealth of Australia, we want to drawattention to important antecedents, and contemporaryparallels, of this activism in Victoria.

Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial contexts aroundthe world have struggled to protect their individualand collective rights, and to signal to coloniststheir own understandings of their rights as FirstPeoples. On the global stage, Indigenous people havehelped shape a move towards the recognition of grouprights and away from the prominence of state ornational rights, particularly with the adoption ofthe United Nations Declaration on the Rights ofIndigenous Peoples in 2007 (United Nations 2007). InAustralia, Indigenous rights activism is thought tohave culminated in the Mabo decision of 1992, whichchallenged the colonial state's assumption ofterra nullius andintroduced the doctrine of ‘native title’ intoAustralian law. As a twentieth-century development,the Mabo case could be said to have emerged from theanti-assimilationist Indigenous civil rightsmovements of the 1960s and 1970s, following earlierstruggles for land rights in this period, especiallyin Australia's Northern Territory. Yet, as Ravi deCosta reminds us, while the Indigenous movement mayhave become rapidly globalised in the last quarterof the twentieth century, it follows a far longerhistory of Indigenous protest and the fight forequality and rights within internationalisedpolitical contexts: