First Australians

In the final episode of this landmark series on the changing rights and freedoms of Indigenous Ausrtalias, losing control of the land has the most devastating impact on the first Australians. The struggle for land rights continues to this day and one of its heroes is Eddie Koiki Mabo.

A mass political movement helped win constitutional rights in 1967, but it was built on successive, strategic campaigns conducted by the first Australians from the 1930s. Yorta Yorta man William Cooper forms the Australian Aborigines League in 1933 to continue his life-long campaign for equality. His nephew also becomes a political animal; Doug Nichols is a Church of Christ pastor who becomes a champion for those affected by the Maralinga nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s.

Many first Australians are being born into hybrid lives, strictly controlled by white society. It is hard for them to find their feet in the new world or the old, but their spirits endure. Jandamurra is born on a cattle station in the Kimberley in the 1870s. His hybrid life takes a bloody turn when he trades in his status as a police tracker for his own people.