Country Always

Caring for Country

A Corner of the Empire

The Garden Palace

The Holding Pen

The Agricultural Hall

Regional Networks

Across New South Wales

A Museum of Doing

Technological Museum

Expanding Stories

Evolution of the Castle Hill site from botanical research station to Museum Discovery Centre

Transforming the Tramsheds

Powerhouse Stage 1 and the Harwood Building

A Symbol in Time

Sydney Observatory

Ongoing Transformations

Powerhouse Ultimo

Applied Arts and Sciences

Defining the terms in the 21st century

Gail Mabo

Deed of Deposit

Powerhouse Renewal

A transformative renewal program across four sites

We Rise

Blak Powerhouse

Powerhouse-1 Mission Launch to the ISS

An initiative of the Powerhouse: Future Space program

2024

Exoskeleton

Powerhouse Parramatta

Parramatta

2023

Stories

Gail Mabo

Deed of Deposit

A woman’s brown hands on top and in between the opening of a blue shirt with a white vertical pattern.

Stories

Gail Mabo

First Nations communities are respectfully advised this story contains images and names of deceased persons.

Coinciding with the 30th anniversary of Mabo Day, the First Nations Directorate at Powerhouse was honoured to have worked with Gail Mabo to accept the care of two iconic shirts belonging to her father, the late Eddie Koiki Mabo.

A middle aged Meriam woman looking at a flat lay shirt. The shirt is blue with a white vertical pattern on it. The woman is wearing a turquoise jumper.

This shirt was worn by Eddie during the 1980s. He was frequently photographed wearing it when the High Court of Australia was sitting on Mer (Murray Island) to consider the land rights claim by the Meriam people.

Three men sit on a rug in vegetation just above a beach. They are looking at documents. There is a pack of cigarettes and a lighter on the rug and an audio boom above.

During the 1970s Eddie Koiki Mabo, a Torres Strait man from the island of Mer (Murray Island), was working as a gardener at James Cook University in Townsville, Queensland. He became friends with historians Henry Reynolds and Noel Loos, and in conversation with them discovered the land he thought he’d owned on Mer belonged to the Crown. Britain had claimed sovereignty of the continent under terra nullius, a doctrine mandating that unoccupied land belonged to no one and could be acquired through occupation, which the British had done since their arrival in 1770.

On 20 May 1982, Eddie and his fellow Meriam (Murray Islanders) brought their case claiming legal ownership of their traditional lands to the High Court of Australia. Eddie drew maps indicating how the land on Mer was distributed among the local families under a system of law-based traditional ownership, which predated the arrival of Captain Cook. When the High Court went to Mer, he showed them the boundary markers of his land.

Ten years later, on 3 June 1992, the High Court ruled in favour of the Meriam, officially recognising them as the legal owners of their traditional homelands. Sadly, Eddie had passed away only months before. It was with the help of his hand-drawn map demonstrating native possession of Mer that Eddie challenged the concept of . The Mabo Case, as it came to be known, paved the way for land rights legislation for Indigenous Australians.