AD 1950-2000 Modern

During this period Indigenous Australians achieved great advances towards equality and recognition in Australian society. In the 1960s they gained voting and citizenship rights, and through the 1970s their unequal treatment under the law was successfully challenged in many areas such as employment rights and welfare. Of great importance was the increasing world-wide recognition of Indigenous Australians as members of valuable and vibrant cultures with a long tradition of creativity in philosophy, art, music and poetry – the equal of anything produced by European cultures.

One of the most significant changes for Indigenous Australian populations was the rejection by Australian courts, in the 1992 Mabo judgement, of the legal notion of terra nullius – under which European colonists had claimed traditional Indigenous Australian lands for themselves, as uninhabited. This opened the way for a reassessment of the relative claims to land of Indigenous and non-indigenous Australians.

Australian society came to recognise the importance of beginning a process of reconciliation as a result of the 'Report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody' in 1991. Reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians has been declared a key national objective by the Australian Parliament, and an independent Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation was established in 1997.