# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
La colonna sonora del film australiano One Night the Moon.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Indigenous Australian Land Rights & Mabo Day - Behind the News

# data[].attributes.body
Rights pre the 1967 referendum

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
1965 FREEDOM RIDE AWOKE NATION TO RACIAL SEGREGATION OF ABORIGINAL PEOPLE

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Aboriginal families of Condah have fought in every war since World War I despite their own lands being stolen and being denied soldier benefits.

Landry suspicious of Bell's relationship with Molan

A bad season was coming. Drought was slinking from the north when the boys from Condah began trooping off to the recruiting office up the road in Hamilton. Farmers looked to the sky, willing it to rain. The grazing land on volcanic soil around here was once known as The Green Hills. As the winter of 1914 turned to spring, the grasslands turned brittle and soon, the smoke of bushfires drifted on the air.

Down on the weird volcanic lava flow known as the stone country, Lake Condah shrank to a puddle. Eel and fish traps, some of them constructed by Indigenous residents on the lakeshore 1000 years before the first of the pyramids were built, were left high and dry.

It would be remembered as the great drought of 1914-15. It would be remembered for something worse. The start of the Great War.

Long after the drought was done, the war would leave lasting scars upon Condah, just as it did on every other district, town and city in Australia.

Condah, however, was not quite the same as every other Australian district.

Of the 42 men who marched away from little Condah, 14 of them - a third of the total - were known in the vernacular of the time as blackfellas.

In a time of White Australia, they had to fight just to get the right to fight. Five of them, the Lovetts, were brothers. Four of those brothers would re-enlist for World War II, and their descendants - 23 altogether - have fought in every Australian war, right up to Afghanistan.

Not one of them or their Indigenous mates got a patch of soldier settlement land on which they had been born, and which had been stolen from their ancestors.

They and the white men of Condah were descended only a generation or two back from another war in which their people had fought each other across the grasslands, forests and swamps of the district.

Yet they would go to battle side by side in Gallipoli, Palestine and the Western Front, and some of them would die together. The remembering is long in this remote district in a corner of far south-west Victoria.

With the centenary of Anzac approaching, Maryanne Martin, a descendant of several Great War soldiers and the great niece of one of the men who never came back, Norman (Scotty) McLeod, organised a "facilitated community conversation" that brought together numerous descendants of World War I soldiers from Condah.

The story of Scotty McLeod underlines the wretched and random nature of what war does to soldiers. A sportsman, poet and a bit of a larrikin, McLeod made it through Gallipoli and the battles of the Western Front only to be killed by an artillery shell while he slept in a barn behind the lines on May 31, 1918, with the war's end less than six months away.

But the "conversation" unearthed a deeper history that vests Condah with a significance far beyond its size in the wider Australian story.

Another Condah-born man, Tim Gurry, of Ryebuck Media, found it so gripping he made a film of it: In the Footsteps of Condah's Anzacs.

British and Irish-descended settlers came to the Condah area in the mid-19th century, some carrying gold dust under their shirts hard-won from the goldfields of Ballarat and Bendigo. They built farms, began draining swamps and established a village.

Condah - like many little rural places around Australia - barely exists now beyond a pub and a public hall, a lonely cemetery and a scattering of dwellings and farmsteads. In 1915 there was a general store, a bank, post office, three functioning churches - Catholic, Anglican and Presbyterian - a state school, a cheese and butter factory and the old Green Hills Hotel.

Down the track a few kilometres and encircled by forest was another village entirely: the Lake Condah Aboriginal Mission. Here, the lava flow from nearby Mt Eccles - Budj Bim, or Little Head to the original inhabitants - and the wetlands within and around the stones had supported one of Australia's most remarkable Indigenous peoples for thousands of years.

Their sophisticated fish and eel trapping and smoking system - as old as 6700 years according to recent archaeological evidence - was so successful these people, known as the Gunditjmara, had no need of the roaming life: they settled in large villages of houses with stone walls.

During the 1840s and beyond, however, they were forced to use the lava flow as a citadel to wage battle against squatters who had come to the flatlands beyond to appropriate their hunting land and to send out shepherds - a lot of them brutalised former convicts with a taste for blood and Aboriginal women.

Led by warriors bearing fabulous English-language names like Cocknose, Jupiter, Bumbletoe, Hissing Swan, Cold Morning, Jacky and The Doctor, the Gunditjmara fought back, raiding the squatters' homesteads and driving flocks of their sheep back into the stone country, where horsemen could not pursue them.

It became known as the Eumeralla War, named for a stream that flows out of the Lake Condah stones. The end of this asymmetrical series of battles began when the superintendent of the Port Phillip District (and later governor of Victoria), Charles La Trobe, sent Mounted Troopers and Native Police from Melbourne.

Slaughter ensued, the war raged and stuttered for a decade and more, and ended in starvation among Indigenous survivors.

The remnants of the Gunditjmara and their side of the Eumeralla War found a form of sanctuary in the stone country when the Lake Condah Aboriginal Mission was established in 1868.

By the outbreak of the First World War 46 years later, about 60 Indigenous people lived at the mission. They ran their own farm and attended a handsome stone church they had built themselves ... and were denied the right, on pain of punishment, the withholding of rations or outright expulsion, of speaking their own language or practising their old Indigenous crafts. They required written permission from the manager to venture beyond the mission's boundaries, and they were defined by their blood.

The official report to Parliament by the board of the Aboriginal Protection Board stated baldly in 1912 that 34 "blacks" and 27 "half castes" resided at Lake Condah.

Here then, were two Condahs. Close by, but as separate as Jupiter and Mars.

And then came the new war on the other side of the world.

As British-Australian farm boys, men of the village and labourers went off to Hamilton about 40 kilometres to the north to sign up for a grand adventure that would turn to horror and tragedy on Gallipoli, in Palestine and the mud and blood of the Western Front in France and Belgium, the Gunditjmara men of Lake Condah decided they wished to join up with those who represented the invaders who had stolen their land.

They had no citizenship, no right to vote; no rights even to become soldiers.

On March 16, 1916, 11 men from Lake Condah Mission marched through the streets of Hamilton demanding to be recruited. Eight were accepted "and the men were heartily congratulated on their patriotism". They had been judged to have "sufficient white blood".

Two weeks later, the Portland Guardian reported "great indignation" that the military authorities had turned around and refused "the acceptance of a batch of men from Condah mission after they had passed the medical examination and made final arrangements to go into camp".

As recruiting got harder, more of these men were found to have sufficient white blood and were accepted, though Chris Saunders, the father of Reg Saunders, who would later become Australia's first Indigenous military officer, was knocked back because he was "too black".

The men of Lake Condah clearly recognised the chance to gain some form of equality in uniform, a means of escaping the boundaries of their confined existence and the promise of a pay packet with which to assist their struggling families.

Australian soldiers were the best paid of World War I. A private got five shillings a day and another shilling deferred until he was discharged. The wry called them "six bob a day tourists", and the throwaway line would come to annoy the soldiers.

My great-uncle George Moore, a farmhand from Heywood, 22 kilometres south of Condah, wrote of it to his parents shortly after landing on Gallipoli.

"Just a note to let you know that I am in the land of the living. It has been a hard fight up till now. Ten days since we landed. Our column is on shore, taking ammunition up the hills to the guns by hand. It has been awfully hard work ... Our boys have suffered terribly.

"The infantry bore the brunt of it. Poor Len Papley has gone under, I heard to-night. I hope it is not true. Our losses up-to-date are rather heavy. What about the 6s a day tourists now?"

The truth of what war meant, whatever it paid, established itself early and continued to do so, proving that all blood was red.

One in four men who left Condah, including those from Lake Condah, were killed. A third of the remainder were wounded. Almost all, from family anecdote, were psychologically injured.

None of them could have predicted their fate. The first of the Condah boys to go to Gallipoli was Charles Wesley Adamson, 26, who lived on his family's farm at Myamyn, halfway between Condah village and the Lake Condah Mission.

He wrote to his mother as he sailed from Australia in July, 1915: "I suppose it will be a while before I get home to Australia again. I think that I will be home in about six months' time. I don't think the war will last any more than six months myself ... I can tell you that I would not cry if when we got over there to hear that the war was stopped."

Wes Adamson was not to come home in six months. Or ever. He was killed on Gallipoli's hills on December 6, 1915. Two days later, the British cabinet announced its decision to evacuate the Anzac sector.

The very first of the Condah men to sign up was a farm labourer named David Millard, though his fate was not to be in Gallipoli.

Brought up among farm animals at Wallacedale on the drained bed of the great Condah Swamp, Millard, 33, was assigned to the 4th Mobile Veterinary Section of the Australian Imperial Force.

His job, both in Egypt and on the Western Front, was to shoe and care for the mounts of the Australian Light Horse and the beasts of burden of the artillery and ammunition columns.

He sailed away in December 1914 and returned to Australia in April, 1918, a destroyed man. The most insidious of war weapons, mustard gas, had crept upon him on the Western Front, he told his family. His war record shows "chronic bronchitis due to active service, exposure and strain". It killed him within six months of his return to Australia. At least he managed to be buried in the Condah cemetery.

The first of the Indigenous men to enlist from Lake Condah were two brothers, Allan, 27, and Joe McDonald, age unknown, who both joined the Light Horse, somehow slipping through White Australia's Defence Act.

Allan used his bush skills as a scout on Gallipoli before suffering a fractured leg. He was to suffer further after the war - he and his wife Maisie had eight children, but when Maisie died, seven of those children were taken against Allan McDonald's will and placed in the Geelong Orphanage.

Joe got all the way through to the Western Front before being wounded in France and having his leg amputated. Another McDonald from Lake Condah Mission, George, 24, joined the 5th Battalion, survived and went on to enlist again when World War II came around.

Enlisting in World War I proved a trial for not only the Indigenous men. My grandfather, John Wallace Malseed, from a farm right across the road from Wes Adamson in Myamyn, was initially ruled unfit because he had suffered a bone disease in his leg as a child. His humiliation became unbearable when a woman handed him a white feather - the silent damnation denoting cowardice - in the streets of Hamilton.

Pressure to sign up was immense. Patriotism rallies were held at the Condah hall from late 1914. In July 1915 a Member of the Legislative Council, J. L. White, declared at a recruiting campaign meeting at the hall that "every shot fired at Gallipoli ... would be to the security of our nation".

Mothers should consider that "the terrible sacrifice of giving up their sons" was a prouder thing than "to have them skulk behind".

If Germany won through, he predicted, "there would be an occupation of Australia in 12 months". A war of words broke out in the letters page of the Hamilton Spectator after a woman from the Condah Swamp was accused of abusing young men - even those declared unfit for enlistment - "as shirkers and cowards". Her son, Hervey Morton, 20, would have his foot blown off in France in May1916, leading to gangrene and the amputation of his leg.

Back in Condah, my grandfather, desperate to join up, found a doctor in faraway Bendigo who knew nothing of his medical history and got the go-ahead to enlist.

At 21, he sailed to England and went to the Western Front as part of the 14th Battalion. He was wounded by gunshot in the Battle of Polygon Wood near Ypres, Belgium in September 1917, and again near Villers-Bretonneux in France in late March 1918, leaving him to carry shrapnel in his back for the rest of his long life. Recovering in a hospital in Birmingham, England, he fell in love with his nurse, Cecilia Wilks. They married, and she became my grandmother.

They discovered after the war there was a line drawn through Condah that didn't limit itself to colour. My grandfather was Presbyterian; Cecilia was Irish Catholic. Sectarianism ran deep, even in close families. My grandfather's family was shocked to find a Catholic in it.

When it came time for J. W. Malseed to inherit his father's farm, the will went mysteriously "missing", and the property was put up for intestate auction. It was prime land, but no neighbour - many of them my grandfather's war mates who had no taste left for unfairness - took his hands out of his pockets at the auction. My grandfather got the farm without another bid coming forth.

The Indigenous men of Lake Condah, though, were never to get land for themselves.

Country set aside for the mission was split up for soldier settlement after the First World War and again after the Second, and the mission was closed. Many of its residents, having no other home, stayed there until the 1950s, when the authorities and the Anglican Church employed a contractor to put 13 sticks of gelignite into the bluestone church built by Indigenous hands in the 1880s and blew it to hell.

Herbert Lovett, a machine-gunner in France who played organ in church, was met by official silence when he asked to be considered for a settlement block under the Discharged Soldiers Settlement Act of 1917.

His brothers, Light Horsemen Edward and Frederick, 12th Battalion soldier Alfred, and Leonard,wounded in 1917 when fighting with the 39th Battalion, got the same treatment, just like all the other soldiers from the mission.

Shortly after the Great War, the five brothers walked in their uniforms to Condah's Greenvale Hotel and asked, as soldiers, to be given a drink. They were refused because they were Aboriginal. It was an indignity too far. They locked the barman out, shot every bottle on the shelves and walked home singing. If they could not have a drink that day, nor could any others, and their white mates from the war made sure police did not become involved.

When the matter of land was raised again after the Lovetts and others had served during World War II, the Portland Shire Council in July 1944 resolved unanimously to demand that the government should not take further land from the Indigenous people, and that it be set aside, not for white soldier settlers, but "for use by the Aboriginal people and their descendants". This fell on deaf ears, as did the call from the nearby Heywood branch of the RSL, whose members had fought alongside the men of the mission.

Herbert Lovett eventually hitched horses to a timber house at the mission and dragged it 12 kilometres through the bush to a little block by the Sunday Creek outside Heywood. His brother, Frederick, who had been living with his family in a tent at the mission, was given another house by the Hamilton Uplift Society, and it sat alongside Herbert's. The families, with no power and a long walk to town, called the place Greenvale. The two brothers and their wives, Mary and Emma, raised 15 children in those houses, and later embraced the families of their grown children.

One of Herbert's sons, elder John Lovett, a country singer, has spent years and exhausted lawyers trying to fight for compensation for the farm his father never got. He calls his quest by a military term, "repatriation", and has expert advice that the foregone benefit and worth of the land from 1918 till now would be, in today's dollars, $5.385 million.

In 1988, a century and a half after the outbreak of the Eumeralla war and after new battles, the state and federal governments finally got around to returning the Lake Condah Mission site to the Gunditjmara community.

In 2007, the Federal Court ruled that the Gunditjmara had native title to 133,000 hectares of vacant Crown land, national parks, reserves, rivers and the sea, and a new generation is discovering its history.

One of Frederick Lovett's daughters, elder Laura Bell, helped rescue the World War I honour board from the destroyed mission church. It hangs now in Heywood's Anglican church, inscribed with the names of all the boys who left the mission to fight in the Great War.

"We're still here," she says. The Gunditjmara always knew how to fight.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The lost souls of Condah who joined the Anzacs

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Aboriginal families of Condah have fought in every war since World War I despite their own lands being stolen and being denied soldier benefits. A bad season was coming. Drought was slinking from the north when the boys from Condah began trooping off to the recruiting office up the road in Hamilton.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Look Inside the Heartbreaking Story of Australia's "Stolen Generation."

# data[].attributes.body
Land Rights after WW2

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The son of an Aboriginal veteran who was denied Soldier Settlement after serving in both world wars is taking his fight for compensation to Canberra. John Lovett says he will protest at Lovett Tower, a building named in the family's honour.

The Lovett family is renowned for its military service.

So much so that a Department of Veterans Affairs building has been named 'Lovett Tower' in its honour.

Despite this, Gunditjmara elder John Lovett says the Minister of Veterans Affairs, Warren Snowdon, has ignored requests to discuss compensation for his father, a veteran of both world wars.

Herbert Stahle Lovett served as a machine gunner on the Western Front during the First World War and then signed up again for the Second World War.

John Lovett says after returning from service his father was denied land under a Soldier Settlement Scheme administered by the Victorian Government, despite meeting all of the selection criteria.

He watched on as his traditional homeland around Lake Condah was divided and distributed to white soldiers.

"There's been two world wars. I'm prepared to fight the third one, however I have to fight it to get what I think is morally right for my father," Mr Lovett says.

"I will lobby in Canberra, if [Mr Snowdon] still refuses to grant me an interview, then I will ask for the removal of the name 'Lovett' from the Lovett Tower due to the disrespect that I feel I will be shown if he says no," Mr Lovett says.

A spokesperson for the minister said while the Soldier Settlement Scheme was financed via Commonwealth Government loans, State Governments were responsible for processing applications.

Mr Snowdon declined to be interviewed but a statement from his office said a meeting with Mr Lovett has now been arranged.

Canberra footage courtesy of Jim Trail.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Aboriginal digger's son prepared to take justice fight to Canberra

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The son of an Aboriginal veteran who was denied Soldier Settlement after serving in both world wars is taking his fight for compensation to Canberra. John Lovett says he will protest at Lovett Tower, a building named in the family's honour.